Devotionals

After Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and philosopher, died in 1662, they found a piece of paper in the lining of his coat. So important were these words to him (which he had written eight years earlier) that he kept them close to his body day after day. The scrap, which contained his central […]

What is a person? You are a person; a stone isn’t. You have self-awareness; a tree doesn’t. You can be moral; electricity is amoral. You are alive; a corpse is not. “Person” usually refers to a living human being, although from a Christian point of view “person” also refers to God, and we assume that

There are only so many different views on the question of God. Do you know what you believe?

Once we did a survey in our church and one of the questions was: “Do you often feel lonely and unnoticed?” A full 75% of the respondents said no, which made me glad for those who had connected with other people. But my heart went out to the 25% who said yes. Loneliness is an

If God were great but not good, he would manipulate, deceive, and just plain lie. But because he is good, he is true and he is truthful. When we say that God is true, it is so much more than saying he is accurate (like a bank statement being true or a newspaper report being

The Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth believed that there are really two overarching attributes of God: holiness and love. Put the pieces together (because God is a whole and complete reality), and you can speak of the “holy love” of God. His holiness is our assurance that he is different from the defilements of this

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New.] In many doorways of the Roman Empire there was a depiction of a god with two faces pointing in opposite directions. Janus was the god of transitions. He looked ahead and he looked behind–to the past and the future. He was a kind of

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] God is right in everything he is and does. His goodness, in other words, is the shape of the way he relates to others. There is nothing God has ever done that is not right and nothing he will

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] Having looked at attributes of God’s greatness in recent weeks (see archive), we now turn to attributes of God’s goodness. First, his holiness. “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory.” Those

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] Imagine our confusion if we thought that God is glorious (sometimes) or is Spirit (once in a while) or knows us (at least 75% of us, plus or minus 5%). No, whatever God is, he is consistently. God “does

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] Because God is personal, he is a knowing being. His mind perceives truth and defines truth. He embraces us with a knowledge that is not just stored information in a Super-Divine File, but is an extension of love. His

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] How can we summarize what God means when he tells us he simply is? When Moses asked God what his name was (for there were many alternative names for gods), God’s answer was, “I AM WHO I AM.” This

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] Have you found that the longer you live, the more you realize your own finitude? Perhaps you used to think you could accomplish anything, but you’ve grown to realize you can do what God has enabled you to do

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] Jesus said, “a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his

[This post is in a weekly devotional series called Everything New. Sign up here if you’re interested.] God is great; God is good; and we thank him for our food. Amen. I must have spoken those simple words hundreds of times at the dinner table when I was a child, but I most certainly did not