A good theology of suffering teaches us not to waste our sorrows, but to sidle up as close as we can to the heart of Jesus as we endure our pains. While I’d rather sound like Elijah than Eeyore when I pray, the “positive confession” can sometimes be more spiritualistic than spiritual. I want to …
Mature Christians Join Jesus In His Suffering
“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings” So, the experience of resurrection, that we spoke about in the last post, comes with a price, a huge price. It’s called the cross. Remember how Jesus beckoned us to take up our own cross and follow …
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The Deepening Quality of Suffering (Avoiding Superficial Spirituality Part 10)
“No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works in that soul by means of the dark night.” This is a line from the famous poem called, The Dark Night of the Soul, which Saint John of the Cross wrote from his ten-by-six feet prison cell in which he was imprisoned …
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God, the Traffic Jammer
In two recent posts I suggested that we might think of the Creator as sort of like a “Traffic Engineer” who made a system that works for our maximum safety and minimum disasters. I qualified my remarks by admitting that God’s system doesn’t rule out traffic jams and accidents caused by freeway blowouts or wrecks …
Stuck in traffic… “What’s going on up there?!”
“We are not intended to understand life. If I can understand a thing and can define it, I am its master. Logic and reason are always on the hunt for definition, and anything that can’t be defined is apt to be defied…” Oswald Chambers I don’t believe Christians – even real good ones – are …
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