Hope
We experience radical changes in our Christian life now and then, but it’s not all about change. It’s about being in some way the same new creation you were when you died and were raised with Christ in baptism. [...]
Part question, part protest, the plaintive cry “Are we there yet?” punctuates any family vacation worth talking about. Clearly, we’re not where we were, but we also haven’t arrived [...]
Beautiful. We hear the word so frequently that we give it little thought, applying it to everything from a Rembrandt masterpiece to a child’s first scribbles. Yet beauty is so profound that, alongside goodness and truth, it is widely regarded as one of the great transcendentals, and an entire branch of philosophy—aesthetics—is devoted to its […]
Grounded in Heaven: Recentering Christian Hope and Life on God by Michael Allen Eerdmans, 2018 192 pages (paperback), $18.00 The central message of Michael Allen’s Grounded in Heaven: Recentering Christian Hope and Life on God might be summed up in one pithy axiom: The vertical empowers the horizontal. The more those who know the Lord […]
There’s no way I can follow my brother in eulogizing my father, so I’m not going to try. I’m not going to speak as a son on the passing of my father. I do want to tell one story about my dad, but before I get to that let me tell you what I want […]
“Pastor, I just want to be with the Lord in heaven and for all of this to finally be over,” Ella exclaimed with an earnestness that let everyone know she meant it. This was her third round of chemotherapy, and the will to fight the good fight had diminished with each drop of poison introduced […]
What do a city, a garden, romanticism, and a family reunion have in common? (This could be a cateogry on Jeopardy!). If you answered “heaven,” you’re right (if you didn’t, don’t worry; neither did we—hence this interview). While Scripture isn’t lacking in analogies and descriptions of heaven, it doesn’t portray it the way our literal, […]
On October 13, 2010, Florencio Avalos emerged from the ground and breathed fresh air for the first time in many days. He and thirty-two other miners had suffered virtual entombment two thousand feet below ground in the partially collapsed San José Mine in the Chilean desert. As Avalos stepped from the capsule that had lifted […]
Do you know as much about the Old Testament as you do about the New Testament? The women’s Bible study group in my church didn’t, and they decided to do something about it. When I joined in, they had been faithfully studying through books of the Old Testament for over a year. So when they […]
Editor’s Note: A few years ago, Michael Horton was asked to deliver the funeral message for Don, a long-time Christian friend who—having encountered a number of family, career, and health difficulties that led to a deep depression—committed suicide. Being concerned to avoid speculation about questions that cannot be answered, while affirming Scripture’s answers to our […]
Are you good at waiting? Is sitting in traffic or standing in line like a hammer to your thumb, making you want to scream? Historically, humans haven't been known for their ability to wait patiently, but our society treats this virtue as an infectious virus—something to be vaccinated against and eradicated. If you have to […]
"Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church" by N. T. Wright
N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church is a running complaint about the dominance of fundamentalist and liberal approaches to death, the resurrection, the intermediate state, and the mission of the church. Surprised by Hope is more polemical than insightful, too condescending to be comforting, […]
I am a Southerner. Lost causes don't bother me. We are used to them. And ours is not even lost-at least, not in the long run. In the short run, I am not very optimistic for our society or for the church. We as a society are trying to maintain our democracy while dismantling its […]
