Craving Answers, Craving God

Sometimes churches close for demographic reasons: a small, rural community whose citizens are moving away will perhaps struggle to keep its churches open. But the primary reason why once healthy churches shrink and die is that they stop recognizing their foundation, Jesus Christ. The liberal way of ignoring the foundation is to ignore his teachings, his strong Jewish commitment to the way God’s La...

If God is indeed infinite, like the Bible says, then it’s clear we can never completely comprehend what this means. After all, if the finite (we humans) could comprehend the infinite it would no longer be infinite. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand who God is. Like any other intellectual pursuit (learning new technology, a new language, a new musical instrument, etc.), reaching...

Christians often talk about serving the Lord. And while it’s true that the Bible calls his people to serve him with all their hearts, it’s a mistake to think that what this means is that God needs us to meet his needs. So, in what sense is it appropriate to talk about us serving God? First, since God is God and we are not, he is in charge and we’re not. As such, he is our master and we are his ser...

Music has a power which logic and rationality do not - the power to tap into the human emotional experience. This experience is no less spiritual than understanding and reflecting on the truth of the gospel intellectually, merely different. Music evokes memories that mere words cannot, connecting us to our experience of God in worship from the past. Music taps into our creativity, allowing us not...

What makes the books of the Bible sacred scripture is that they were written by prophets (Old Testament) or apostles (New Testament). The books of the New Testament bear witness to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, either as a first-hand account of his life, death, and resurrection (we call these the four Gospels) or by reflecting on and applying this Gospel to the life of the Christian communiti...

After a discussion about how it’s impossible to prove things like whether spirits exist or not, Chuck and Aaron talk about how the Bible describes the spiritual world. The existence of angels - powerful, supernatural beings whose job it is to serve God - is assumed by the Bible, and there are times when angels interact with humans. Most of us have never had an experience of an angel, but the Bible...

For Christians, the question of how we can be saved has too often been framed as a future question: how can I know I’m going to heaven when I die? But the Bible just doesn’t talk enough about going to heaven when we die for us to justify making that the baseline of our assurance of salvation. Instead, the Bible talks about our assurance in terms of what God has done in the past and is now doing in...

For the past three hundred years it has seemed obvious to many modern Westerners that cataclysmic, global floods are impossible, and so the biblical story of the great flood has been seen as a legendary myth highlighting the vindictive judgment of the Bible’s angry God. But this assumption fails to acknowledge the existence of great flood narratives spread throughout the ancient world - from the C...

The question of whether Christians should go to church or not can only be answered by answering the question, are Christians the church or not. Once again, Western-style individualism blocks us from even understanding the nature of the problem. The Bible insists that our highest value comes not from our individuality but from how our individuality flourishes in community. By ourselves we have no w...

Legalism is the belief that humans flourish best when they have order, structure, and rules to guide them. The opposite philosophy is liberty - the belief that humans need freedom from restrictions to flourish. Christianity, while definitely promising freedom from the burden of sin while also providing order and rules for living, definitely holds that humans flourish best when in relationship, esp...

Is Christianity merely a crutch for those who believe - a sort of whistling-in-the-graveyard, a head game naive and superstitious people play to avoid the hard reality of materialistic realism? The rise of the psychological sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries might lead us to think so. But what psychology does well - describe the human mind, human emotions, human behavior, and human...

Stoicism, which flourished in Greece around 250 years on either side of Christ’s birth, taught that the highest good for humans is to be ultimately happy. This happiness, though, is far different from our culture’s notion that happiness is equal to personal pleasure; instead, Stoicism held, true ultimate happiness can be experienced only through the practice of virtue - especially the virtues of c...

While the Bible insists that those who deny the reality of God are fools, this in no way means such skeptics are unintelligent. The biblical idea of “fool” and “foolishness” has less to do with brain power and more to do with an unwillingness to conform to reality: it’s foolish to not go to the doctor when you have cancer because it doesn’t align behavior with the real-life situation. Many smart p...

Islam and Christianity share a lot in common: they’re both Abrahamic religions - tracing their heritage back to God’s call of Abraham and the promises God made to his offspring, they both insist that polytheism is wrong and that there’s only one true God, they both hold that this one true God is holy and cannot tolerate sinful behavior. But the main thing they disagree about is the Muslim insisten...

When it comes to current events Christians too frequently fall into one of the twin ditches of either allowing themselves to become spokespeople for one of the approved cultural positions (usually either “conservative” or “liberal”) or withdrawing from the world in the name of “separation of church and state”. The key is understanding that the Gospel of Jesus’ kingdom stands over against all human...

The content of movies has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. What once was considered offensive and even pornographic is now commonplace. The false dichotomy of either mindlessly enjoying all contemporary media or withdrawing from and rejecting it undermines the Christian’s vocation to both be separate from the idolatrous values of the world and simultaneously live redemptively in and for...

Our first impulse when someone we know and love goes through a season of suffering tends to be either to try to assert ourselves too much - by talking too much, using trite cliches, or by trying to cheer our friend up by distracting them, or by avoiding them altogether - frequently by rationalizing to ourselves that our friend probably needs some alone time. But both these paths fail to show genui...

The two most common notions in the West of what makes a man masculine are, on one hand, a physically strong, domineering man who leads through sheer force of physicality or personality and, on the other hand, a sweet, sensitive man who refuses to assert himself. Both of these visions, while acknowledging some important aspects of what men should be, have resulted in the fostering of a self-absorbe...

The Western Liberalism of John Locke, Rousseau, and the founding fathers of America, promised to set us free from the tyranny of kings and priests. That the God of the Christian Bible would be a casualty in this great purge seemed to many to be a necessary step on this path to liberation. But far from making us happy and free, sociologists, counselors, and therapists (not to mention the billion do...

The separation of church and state is taken for granted in the current West, but this sort of division between a person’s religious beliefs and his or her public persona finds no place in the biblical worldview. So how are Christians supposed to think about their relationship with their country? The key is to recognize the difference between one’s identity and one’s vocation. The Christian’s ident...

One mistaken notion about Christianity is that its primary goal is to foster good ethical behavior. But the biblical reality is that Christianity is fundamentally God’s plan to rescue his humans and creation as a free act of grace. This grace is both necessary (since we humans have rebelled against God we have rendered ourselves unable to do anything to make ourselves right) and loving (God is com...

When Christians talk about the spiritual gifts, they frequently get hung up discussing the so-called charismatic gifts - healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, etc., but this unfortunately short-circuits the very important discussion about what the spiritual gifts actually are, and (maybe more importantly) what they do. Chuck and Aaron have just this discussion. The spiritual gifts are different...

Dating, since it is a fairly new phenomenon in how humans relate to each other, is not mentioned in the Bible. But the Bible has much to say about romantic relationships, and how we should look for a future spouse. First, the Bible highly values the marriage relationship, so any effort put into finding a spouse is worthwhile. But second, it must be recognized that our current system (in the West a...

In a culture obsessed with individual rights and personal autonomy, parenting and raising kids remains - mostly - a relationship recognized as being valuable to the extent that it is self-sacrificial. What is it about our relationship with our own children that glorifies and valorizes the type of love that gives and expects nothing in return? Chuck and Aaron talk about how the relationship between...

Why is marriage so important? The Bible describes God not as one powerful being, but as three persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - who have always known and loved each other with complete commitment. And when they decided to create human beings in their image, they decided to create a married man and woman so the humans could experience in their lives together what the Trinity has...