The Church Searches for Better Programs; God Searches for Better People
Theologically trained, sanctified, Spirit-filled—this is the sacred ambition of the Word of God.
Theologically trained, sanctified, Spirit-filled—this is the sacred ambition of the Word of God.
Apostolic activity is in the job description of every baptized believer in Jesus Christ.
Only the Holy Spirit can take the tragedy of persecution and turn it into the triumph of the gospel’s proclamation.
Today’s Christians and churches don’t need more innovation or better programs or bigger buildings or newer worship songs as much as we need a constantly deepening confidence in the power of the gospel.
A martyr in death serves as powerful encouragement to the living to be a martyr in life.
Worship of the true and living God happens when we vulnerably trust in the certainty of God for the unpredictability of the future.
Faith means raising our level of expectation of the possibilities that hover just above and beneath the surface of everything, every person, everywhere, all the time.
In telling the biblical story, we don’t need people to glean from our wisdom. They must encounter the living God.
Anytime anyone tells the story of God there’s a lot more going on than is visible to the naked eye.
The biblical story, told in the power of the Spirit, is always charged with supernatural substance.
Our common mistake is not so much taking God out of the story as much as we make him a passive object instead of the active subject.
The Holy Spirit works with this Word-shaped memory to kindle in us a mystical imagination capable of gospel improvisation.