Everything New

To be human is to believe, holding in your consciousness a whole galaxy of realities that include the visible and the invisible. Not to believe, or being unwilling to believe, or thinking that believing is far too much to ask, is to tear out the heart of who we were made to be. It is […]

Here is one definition of faith: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is not a catalog of things we know because we accumulate knowledge of them through our eyes or ears or touch, but it is the knowledge of things that

When faith happened in my life it was like the irrepressible onset of dawn. I love watching the sunrise on the horizon of Lake Michigan, and it always reminds me of the dawning of the new life of faith. The black-painted sky gradually thins and stars lose their sparkle against the graying morning. On the

Over the years, I have been interested in lighthouses, probably because Door County, Wisconsin, where I grew up, has many lighthouses around its 200-mile shoreline. There are treacherous shoals around this peninsula, and in the days of wooden ships, hundreds were lost. A great, great uncle of mine lost his ship on one of the

Cross and tomb go together in the Christian gospel: both were occupied for a short span, both abandoned, both defeated. The apostle Paul, who knew what it was to suffer for choosing to be associated with Jesus, said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in

[continued from last week’s e-newsletter, “The Most Wonderful Tomb” ] Any of us can choose whether to hope that we have enough gold in the tomb to make ourselves comfortable in the coffin, or whether we have the vivifying Spirit of Christ filling the decayed parts of our lives now, and carrying us along with the

Howard Carter and a few workmen made their way down an ancient 30-foot passageway cut into the rock in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. For over 3,000 years, no human had stepped down that corridor. At the end, Carter began cutting a hole in the door until he peered inside and saw “wonderful

In his book, The Cruciality of the Cross, P. T. Forsyth wrote, “Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there…Christ, I repeat, is to us just what his cross is. You do not understand Christ til you understand

I was walking through the tiled corridor of the history building at the University of Wisconsin, having just finished teaching a class, my mind focused on pressing ahead to the cafeteria for a bite to eat. But my way was blocked by a cluster of twenty or so students who stood motionless and quiet, staring

Jesus in English, Yeshua in Hebrew, is a name that means “salvation.” As Joseph heard from an angel in a dream regarding Mary, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” There are two sides of salvation: the

Ask yourself, just for a moment, what you really believe is going to happen as history unfolds in ever-greater extremes. Charles Dickens’ famous opening passage from A Tale of Two Cities begins this way: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the

In the cross and in the resurrection, God wins. God has won the war, though the battles continue. He has sent his grace, his unstoppable intent to pour out mercy and kindness, to the human race like food flowing into famine and water into parched mouths.

Surely she would escape from her kidnappers if she had the slightest chance, everyone assumed. If there was any opportunity for her to call out to someone for help, or pass a note that said, “I’m Elizabeth Smart, help me,” she would. And so, for the nine months of her captivity since she was snatched

During the brief earthly ministry of Jesus, his disciples gained an accumulating picture of who Jesus of Nazareth really was. Plenty of evidence pointed to the fact that he was not just from Nazareth. He came from God’s place and with a divine mission, and it was getting more astounding all the time. The statements

This is what Christians since the earliest days have said about the person of Christ: First, he is clearly one person, not some dualistic oddity. But in that one person there are definitely two full and distinct natures. Jesus was truly human–not just a body with divinity replacing human nature. And he was truly divine–not