Craving Answers, Craving God

The God of the Bible commands his creatures to praise him - to talk and sing about how great he is, but the idea of a God like this who would demand praise and worship from his creatures is seen as incomprehensible and even offensive by many non-believers. Why would the greatest Being in the universe need to be told how great he is? Is he insecure? Is he needy? Why would he use dictatorial powers...

Humility is almost universally admired in the West, and people who are full of themselves are almost universally avoided. But although this value is common, humility is a uniquely Christian virtue. Only if there is a God who created all things and people and transcends his human creatures is the refusal to think of other creatures as less than ourselves wrong. And according to Christianity, becaus...

The Bible describes marriage as two people becoming “one flesh.” This incredible concept is more than just a helpful metaphor - in marriage (and through sex within marriage), God has created a new singular unit out of two separate people. In this way God has designed marriage to make concrete what He himself - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - has experienced from eternity past - absolutely perfect u...

Marriage has always been both beautiful and difficult, and never more than it is now. Our cultural conviction that we as individuals are more important than our relationships butts heads with our desire to experience love and acceptance. But God has created marriage to be a way for couples to experience what it means to find themselves in a mutual, self-sacrificial commitment. And this experience...

Many secular people believe that science has made religion obsolete - that since we now have rational explanations for natural phenomena we no longer need God. This assumes that religion’s job is to explain natural phenomena, but while science’s job is to explain such phenomena, religion’s job is to tell us why such phenomena exists and how to live as relational and moral beings in our physical wo...

The word “sin” is a largely forgotten word. People in our culture find it an oppressive and judgmental word, and so we typically use it ironically or pejoratively. But the idea of a “sin” is one that’s held by all people everywhere, because sin is simply the violation of a received moral code. In our culture’s case, the idea of sin (if not the word) is reserved for violations of our culture’s mora...

In our philosophically relativistic culture, telling someone that you believe in a universal truth is at best, weird, and at worst, offensive. How should Christians, who are commanded by Jesus to “go into all the world and preach the gospel” to everyone, live out and talk about their faith in a world that finds such conversations triggering. Chuck and Aaron discuss the need for wisdom - to know wh...

When you compare what the Bible says about jobs and vocations with what our contemporary, materialistic, Western culture believes, it’s clear that our work is both less important than we’ve thought, and also more important than we’ve thought. Less important, because work promises to be a portal to money and things; hence, a pathway to fulfillment and importance. However, it’s clear from the shatte...

When non-Christians hear Christians talk about repentance, they usually think it’s an attempt by the Christians to call them out for their sins, but the biblical idea of repentance is much bigger than individual sins; repentance is about changing your entire way of life from one outlook, worldview, motives, aims, etc., and substitute that for an entirely new way of being you. Likewise, when Jesus...

All Christians agree that Holy Communion was instituted by Jesus on the night before he was killed, but there the agreement frequently ends. Is the bread and wine we receive at communion an object lesson that helps us to remember and think about Jesus, or does Jesus actually come and give himself to us when we celebrate his supper? While the latter view is the historical view of the church, the fo...

If God saves humans in order to have a relationship with them, then prayer is less a spiritual discipline that must be exercised, or a ritual that must be performed, or a “spiritual” way to work on our psychological help. Instead, prayer is a vital part of our relationship with him. Like any relationship, God wants to hear our voice, to know what we’re thinking about, to open ourselves up to him s...

Christian unity frequently seems to be a reality in theory only. There are so many different opinion groups within the Christian world, so many denominations, and so many subgroups even within those denominations. The primary reason for disunity in general, including in the Christian church, is that we humans have been damaged by the fall and now value power over truth. The result is inevitable –...

Evangelism is inherently uncomfortable in our postmodern culture – the notion that one person has a right to tell someone else what they should think is deeply troubling to many of us. Chuck and Aaron discuss how to do Christian evangelism in a way that respects this concern, and lives and speaks the gospel in a context of relationship-building. When Christians allow the Holy Spirit to lead and gu...

Are we good or are we bad? This is a complex question. When we compare humans to each other it’s hard not to notice that some people are nicer, kinder, harder working, more honest, etc., than others. And in our relationships with other humans, trying to do good and help our neighbors is definitely a good thing! But the Bible insists that, however good or bad someone may be, before God they are not...

Just about every human agrees that being a good person – doing kind things for others, being honest, working hard, etc. – is important. And this is true! But the problem is when we begin using these good things as a way to give ourselves value and try to locate our identity and meaning in these things, because when we examine ourselves closely and honestly we find that our words and actions can’t...

Worship, or the act of ascribing worth, is a universal human activity. Every human being has something that he or she counts as the highest value in their life. These values will inevitably manifest themselves in worship activities: rituals, meals, economic activity, etc. Christian worship is no different: ascribing the highest worth to the creator God who meets us in the person of Jesus of Nazare...

The Bible claims that God loves all the world. Every ethnic group, language group, and nationality; men and women alike; both rich and poor as well as young and old, are welcomed into the family of God. In other words, Christianity is the most inclusive group in the whole world. But the Bible also says the only way to become a member of this family is by faith in Jesus Christ. In other words, Chri...

The Bible claims that the creator God is a God of order and purpose, but everyone agrees that life frequently seems to be out of control. But God’s sovereign rule doesn’t always mean that life will be comfortable, prosperous, and orderly. In fact, God’s order and control is so all-encompassing and powerful that it contains apparent chaos, and he is using what looks like chaos to us to produce good...

The death of Jesus of Nazareth, by crucifixion, is an irrefutable historical fact. But what his death means, if anything, is the subject of much debate. On one level, Jesus was the casualty of Imperial Rome’s claims to universal power – his claim to be in some sense a king came into conflict with Caesar’s claim; but on another level, Christians insist that Jesus’ death paid for the sins of the wor...

We see lots of angels portrayed in religious art, and there are even television shows and movies that revolve around the activity of fictional angels, but what does the Bible say about angels, who they are, what they look like, and what they do? In this episode Chuck and Aaron talk about what the Bible says about angels. Angels look different at different times – sometimes they are clearly powerfu...

The idea of the rapture, a time when Jesus will come and take his followers out of the world, has been popularized in the broader culture through books like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. And while the Bible teaches that when Jesus returns he will raise his people from the dead and gather those who are still alive up to meet him in the air, the word that...

In a world that, from the perspective of many people, is getting worse all the time, can we know if God is interested in this world? One of the problems with this question is that American Christians tend to have a Deist view of God – a God who lives in the sky and is disengaged from our world. This view of God makes the belief in a apathetic God the default mode. And while this means that Christi...

In the midst of wars, violence, and global pandemics, it’s hard not to think about the end of the world. Especially since the end of modernism, with its bright optimism, almost everyone in the contemporary postmodern world are convinced the world is becoming a worse place and is headed for some sort of large-scale destruction. This fear has exposed our culture’s gods – science, medicine, money – f...

We all need something to trust in – something that we can rely on when the chips are down. We also need hope – the belief that things are going to work out – in order to stay sane and committed in our daily lives. Chuck and Aaron talk about faith and hope, what they are and how they overlap in meaning but are slightly different angles on how humans engage the world. For Christians, faith is not ba...

Many non-Christians see Christians as hypocritical – people who do not live up to their own stated standards. But this isn’t a particularly Christian problem, it’s a human problem: no one lives up to the goals and ideals of their own ideology. When non-Christians correctly point out the hypocrisy of the Christian church, Christians must be repentant. If hypocrisy is a human problem, then Christian...