Alex > Recent Status Updates

“I realized how little I knew of what makes a true missionary statesman; of a faith that never staggers at the promise of God, no matter how incredible to the natural man its fulfillment seems; of a trust in the Unchanging One, who keeps the heart at rest and unperturbed in a changing world; of a burning love that counts not life dear unto itself, but is expendable for God; and of a vision that is never dimmed.”

“Today’s seas are still subject to the Christ of Galilee.”

“Sociological studies find that committed Christian men make the most loving and engaged husbands and fathers.”

“Surprisingly, research has found that nominal Christian men have the highest rates of divorce and domestic violence. Even higher than secular men.”

“Unless a church teaches doctrines like the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ, their children’s religious experience is formed in a way that is less and less distinctively Christian.”

“Since the focus is on a person, not a way of life or an experience, the crucial thing to say is not how to live or what the rules are, as in other religions, but rather what the story is about this one person, Jesus Christ.”

“The preacher’s job is not making Christ relevant to us but helping us to see his beauty—so that we may know what is glorious, wonderful, and joyous about our Beloved.”

“For we belong to our Beloved, and we will not find who we really are by looking at our lives first and then trying to fit Christ into them. That gets things backward.”

“You have to keep giving people Christ every time you preach, for he is the bread of life, and we don’t cease hungering for the nourishment of his presence just because we decided to believe him once a long time ago.”

“Unfortunately, in a great many sermons nowadays the “application” part expands until it crowds out everything else, and you hardly hear about Christ at all.”

“To wait for Christ to make all things new is to wait in hope that all the redeemed will praise God for the lives he has given them and for the meaning of their suffering, which will be made known to them in the end.”

“Sometimes the most we can do to relieve their suffering is just hear their awful words and bear with them patiently. This is the cross of listening, a cross Job’s friends were unwilling to bear.”

“The Bible is full of promises, pointing toward a future of rejoicing which is yet to come, but which we are to anticipate now.”

“For the point is not that you’re supposed to feel glad all the time, but that something good has happened that’s really worth celebrating.“

“Consumerism wants to convince us that the kind of thing Christ has to give us—the same person, himself, forever—is the last thing in the world we could possibly want. And anything that reminds us of such constancy, the same old songs and the same old words, the same ordinary lives—well, if consumerism is right, there must be something wrong with people who live like that.”

“[The church] transforms people, not by giving them life-changing experiences but by repetition, continually telling the story of Christ so that people may hear and take hold of him by faith.“

“You can’t be excited all the time—it’s too exhausting. But you can be ordinary your whole life, and that’s the real strength of the ordinary: it lasts for the long haul. When the ordinary person you’ve become is one whose heart is shaped by love, constancy, kindness, and honesty, you have a good life…We get there by way of the ordinary habits of our lives.”

“…a repeated string of “life-changing experiences” is a sign that nothing much is changing. They’re part of a cycle of highs and lows, a period of excitement followed by a period when you crash and burn, none of it really going anywhere.”

“The good life is a life of constancy, without which we are hardly capable of any love worth the name.”

“A virtue is a set of patterns, a habit of the heart, not an experience you have at any one moment like a feeling or a choice.”

“But love is not a choice—or rather, it is not only a choice, just like it is not only a feeling. Love is a way of life for the long haul (again, think of love for your children) and its presence in our hearts is what Christian doctrine calls a virtue….”

“Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible.”

“For if you avoid asking questions about your faith, then your heart ends up losing the sense that the Christian faith is really true…For if you deal with your doubts by not thinking about them, then they’re likely to do just what emotions do when you try to deny them: come back to bite you.”

“Since the new evangelical theology serves the needs of consumerist religion, it’s not about teaching the truth but about increasing market share—which means getting people to come to your church and stay. The cheap and easy way to do that is to draw people in with various kinds of church-as-entertainment, and then make them feel guilty for not having the right feelings or experiences.“

“Reason governs emotions by doing for emotions what emotions can’t do for themselves: making them part of our self-knowledge.”

“The task of reason is not to deny feelings but to think about them and understand them, to listen to them and discern the truth they’re often perceiving.“

“Because feelings are perceptive, we have to pay attention to them if we want to think well.“

“So when you see the English word “mind” in a translation of the Old Testament, the original term in the Hebrew is almost always one of the two closely related words for “heart,” leb or lebab—words for the organ in your chest but also for the place where you feel and think and understand.“