Christopher Lewis > Recent Status Updates

"There's a world of difference between having a faith of our own and making up our own faith. The former is living into the story of God that's been ongoing since Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. The latter is a heresy-reinventing the faith for our own desires today."

"A religion that needs state power to enforce obedience to its beliefs is a religion that has lost confidence in the power of its Deity."

"Personal piety ought to alert us to questions of systemic injustice, but we cannot pretend that it does so."

"The culture of the kingdom is not a projection of our lives now onto eternity, but instead the reverse: a vision of a new creation that breaks us and prepares us for our inheritance by patterning us, now, after the life of creation's heir: Jesus himself."

"The culture of the the kingdom is not a projection of our lives now onto eternity, but instead the reverse: a vision of a new creation that breaks us and prepares us for our inheritance by patterning us, now, after the life of creation's heir: Jesus himself."

Next . . the Bible tells me "no" . . . can't wait

"Turning the other cheek often leaves you with two broken jaws, but Jesus is still King and still right."

" . . . we ought also to be the last people on earth to uncritically laud any political leader or movement as though this were what we've been waiting for. We need leaders and allies, but we do not need a Messiah. That job is filled, and he's feeling fine."

"...this ordering structure of the universe is a word, a pattern of wisdom, a Logos. That is not an impersonal force, but instead a rather forceful Person, one we have come to know as Jesus of Nazareth."

"The desire to believe something is much more persuasive than rational argument."

"Show me your laws and I will show you your God."

"Given a choice, most people probably will choose bread and sausage above individual liberties."

"Why do so many good people experience intense hardship, when they've done nothing to deserve it? My only answer to this was that if there is a conscious god of creation, he is remarkably cruel or simply indifferent. I'm basically more comfortable thinking that god might exist in some form, but it doesn't intervene, and it doesn't take sides. This belief got me through both Bush administrations."

"No truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture transcending way - but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture."

"Christian theism says I am no accident. I am no result of random processes...that I am the crowning glory of the creation of God, and as a result I have inherent dignity, worth and value. Christian theism cannot comprehend ideas like racism, classism, or euginics."

"God created us not to be cul-de-sacs of his bounty, but conduits."

"If you don't feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world."

"When Jesus said, 'The truth shall set you free,' He didn't mean without a battle. He meant that truth would win the war of liberation in the soul."

"...in this readiness to receive pleasure from things, we are ill shaped for Christ."

"...the only freedom that lasts is pursuing what we want when we want what we ought."

"God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him."

"The celebration was really in honor of the father's goodness...The father is rejoicing not because the son has...managed to...earn his favor...the father was rejoicing because he...had the long-awaited opportunity to forgive and restore the son who had so badly dishonored him...The feast in effect honors the father...This is how we will spend eternity-in never-ending celebration of the joy of our heavenly Father."

"The Prodigal's unfinished confession may seem a subtle detail in the parable...it made a not-so-subtle point for the Pharisee's benefit. There was no way they could have failed to notice one glaring reality in Jesus's description of the father's eagerness to forgive. The boy had done nothing whatsoever to atone for his own sin, and yet the father's forgiveness was full and lavish anyway, with nothing held back."

"Far from a mere mind change or an intellectual exercise, genuine repentance always demonstrates itself in the brokenness of the sinner's self-will. The sinner who has desperately tried to hide from God now diligently seeks Him instead. Apart from this quality, all the sorrow in the world is just meaningless remorse."