Gaining a heart of wisdom
If it is true that, as we age, we become even more of whatever we have been all our lives, then Luci Shaw is becoming more and more difficult to "shelve." A poet and essayist well into her eighties, she continues to tackle topics ranging from quantum mechanics and the incarnation to the haecceity** of… Continue reading Partners in Revelation: Bringing Beauty into View
The year is really no longer "new," and the image I've chosen for this study is -- thankfully and finally -- out-of-date (although we did have snow flurries on Sunday morning), and so today we conclude our study of Hebrews with the rich content of chapter thirteen. For weeks, I've been planning and pondering how… Continue reading Grace for Breakfast
. . . dangerous, reckless, irrational, absurd, shocking, rare, and surprising. These are not the labels normally associated with the word "grace," but Tullian Tchividjian would say that this is because our idea of grace is too tame. In One Way Love, he begins a conversation about the love of God that pulverizes the church's… Continue reading Drastic, Gratuitous, Liberating, Scandalous
John Piper shares a story of his experience at a sky-scraper construction site in Minneapolis. The foundation was in place and he gazed, astonished, into the depths of the hole -- four, five, six stories down into the soil of middle America, ensuring a sturdy foundation. His application from this experience was that a deep foundation is needed to support a lofty… Continue reading Receive. Respond. Repeat.
What if you really believed what the Bible says about God -- that He loves you like a perfect Father, like a perfect Husband, like the perfect Friend, like the perfect Leader? What if you let the truth sink into your soul that God's perfect love is not tied to your performance or to your success or to the… Continue reading Trading Guilt for Grace
The Beauty of Grace by Dawn Camp, ed. -- A Book Review Lovely, fragrant, fresh, inviting: the adjectives that bubble into my mind for The Beauty of Grace are the same descriptive terms that I would use for the bouquet of flowers pictured on the cover. Dawn Camp has found a way to slow down the internet… Continue reading Because You Can’t Underline on the Internet
Vanishing Grace by Philip Yancey: A Book Review "Like a sudden thaw in the middle of winter . . .": this is Philip Yancey's descriptive metaphor for grace on this fallen planet. "It stops us short, catches the breath, disarms." Vanishing Grace was written out of Yancey's concern that the church is failing to demonstrate the warm and compelling grace of… Continue reading Permanent Freeze
