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In some ways, the whole point of the Exodus was Sabbath. Let my people go, became God’s rallying cry, that they might worship me. At the heart of liberty – of being let go – is worship. But at the heart of worship is rest-a stopping from all work, all worry, all scheming, all fleeing-to stand amazed and thankful before God and his work. There can be no real worship without true rest. Mark…

So I like a new definition of teaching: helping people make meaning. This moves me from a lecturer to a learning-environment designer. Roy Moran, Spent Matches, p. 84.

A missionary traveled to Saudi Arabia, where she stayed with some Muslim friends. The lady of the house asked the missionary if she would come downstairs to see a new room she had decorated. Out of courtesy, she followed the lady downstairs where about eighty people had been waiting. The lady then asked the missionary to share with them about Isa (Jesus). “But isn’t that illegal in Saudi Arabia?…

So mission is joining God in his caring, sustaining, and transforming activity on earth. Mission is good news to the world. It is good news because it brings people into relation with Jesus. But it is also good news because it promises to bring shalom into the world. The ultimate goal of mission is the sabbath shalom of God: the threefold harmony of God, creation, and humankind, which will…

There is more ethnic diversity in the United States than in any country in the world. Three are estimated to be 584 unengaged, unreached people groups in North America right now living in our cities.God is moving people and groups into our cities and our neighborhoods. We can reach them without even getting on a plane. We need to send more who will go overseas, but we also need to preach the…

Pascal … argued explicitly that there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough obscurity for those who don’t. For Pascal, God has arranged things this way because certainty is not our main need, just as ignorance is not our main problem. “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will.” Pascal thus emphasized that the…

Most of the biblical history consists of people waiting for God to do something. And often they waited in very dire circumstances that made the wait all the more difficult. They were held in the tension between the divine promise and the seeming absence of any implementation of that purpose. Matthew Jacoby, Deeper Places, page 92.

In our constant struggle to believe we are likely to overlook the simple fact that a bit of healthy disbelief I sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls. I go further and say that we would do well to cultivate a reverent skepticism. It will keep us out of a thousand bogs and quagmires where others who lack it sometimes find themselves. It is no sin to doubt something, but it may…

Preaching, caring for the flock, and equipping the saints can be profoundly secular. Listening to a child, designing a software package, and examining a balance sheet can be profoundly Christian. What makes a work Christian is faith, hope, and love. R. Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days, p. 248.

To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. Our Christians presence in the world is indispensable to evangelism, and so is that kind of dialogue whose purpose is to listen…

Returning to a simplistic yet profoundly biblical understanding of the church as a gathered community is essential. The church should refrain from nostalgia for a past when its halls were packed and from condemning those who have moved for various reasons. Instead, it should view migration challenges through a missional lens, recognizing the numerous new and previously unseen mission…

The New Testament presupposes a community in which every person is a theologian of application, trying to make sense out of his or her life in order to live for the praise of God’s glory: theology of, for, and by the people of God. R. Paul Stevens, The Other Six Days, p. 21.

… in the modern world, truth without beauty is powerless and ineffectual … [Hans Urs] von Balthasar claimed that goodness apart from beauty becomes unstable and arbitrary. David Bentley Henry has likewise urged that the Christian gospel addresses the world not primarily as a series of arguments but as a story involving a unique interrelation of truth and beauty: “Making its appeal first to the…

The Great Commission is not just the glamorous “far, far away,” but the humdrum local outreach in the streets and fields where the believers live, and also to the difficult sections of the community nearby that we would normally seek to avoid. Jesus was not giving a range of alternatives from which we could choose, even if his calling is to a specific location, whether local or afar. Patrick…

Evangelist Luis Palau says, “The church is like manure. Pile it up and it stinks up the neighborhood; spread it out and it enriches the world.” Eric Swanson studies healthy churches, and without exception they are externally focused: their goal is to make a significant and sustainable difference in the lives of people around them. Luis Palau, quoted byDavid Murrow, Why Men Hate Going to Church,…

We always follow the strongest desire we have in any moment. The way to escape a destructive desire is not to try to deny the desire. This never works. We can overcome one desire only with another greater desire. Where one desire clashes with another, the greater desire will turn the lesser desire into repulsion precisely because it threatens the greater desire. Matthew Jacoby, Deeper Places,…

The only thing we must do in life is the will of God. Given that we were created in accordance with God’s will, this is as natural to the soul as flying is to a bird or swimming is to a fish. Far from being onerous, the doing of God’s will is actually the very means by which we experience the joy of life. It is the flight path of the soul. And what is more, it is also beautifully simple. God’s…