Spirit Gives Birth To Spirit

I have a Buddhist friend out of my much-loved pool of Buddhist friends that said one day to me that Jesus never claimed to be divine.  I want to put that misconception to rest, because I have heard it more than once.  (As an aside, I think it is imperative that every Christian has some close friends outside of the Christian faith. It’ll keep you honest). Jesus claimed many times in the New Testament writings, his divinity.  There are simple too many instances to treat here.  But here are some.  Philip said, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied."     Jesus replied, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don't know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?" Jesus shouted to the crowds, "If you trust me, you are trusting not only me, but also God who sent me. For when you see me, you are seeing the one who sent me. I have come as a light to shin...

God is immanent and transcendent.  Immanent in that he is present every hour of every day.  Transcendent in that trying to sum him up is like trying to catch Niagara Falls in a teacup.  If we believe one or the other, and not both, we will have a false sense of God.  (Losing this balance is the root of most of the major heresy’s in the long history of Christianity.) He is immanent in that he is ever present and available.  When someone in Alcoholics Anonymous prays earnestly, “Higher Power, help me not to take this drink.”  He expects God to remove the urge for him, just for that minute, and hopefully for the next hour.  And you know what? God does.  It is why 12 step programs work.  He is an ever-present help in times of trouble. He is also immanent in nature.  Have you ever really looked at a tree?  Ever really thought about it?  It is a collection of dust that became a seed so perfectly designed that it, as big as a...

The Christian God is a God of time.  He is the other person in your relationship with life and the universe. In my experience, I believe that the thing he wants most from us is our time.  Time, interestingly, is the thing that is increasingly the most precious commodity in our society.  But it takes time to be in relationship with someone.  Lives without the intentional giving of time to others become increasingly superficial.  We know from relationships that the thing people want most from us is our time.  My wife desires, above all things, for intentional, present time with me.  My friends, the close ones, are one side of a relationship invested with time. God is a person too.  He wants our time.  Uninterrupted, focused, intentional time. God designed us to be in relationship with one another to teach us how to be in relationship with him (or her). But I am too busy. I am raising three screaming children, I have work and commit...

I think one of the things I hear most often from other Christians is that that their life is spiritually dry, that they are not hearing from God.  This is the same problem honest atheists, agnostics, and seekers have too.  Anyone who entertains the thought of a God, is confronted with this problem sooner or later. Some people are ushered into their faith in the crucible of pain.  They hit the dregs of life and find in their need, that they have reached the end of themselves and they have no choice but to cry out.  When they do, they are met with a voice coming back to them. Some people find that they are bored with life and caught up in its little battles and start searching for something deeper. And a voice clear and concise speaks something so profound to their heart that they never forget it.  Others hear the voice of God coming to them through someone they love, someone they have let into their inner life and they seek to find the source.  Some hea...

I have an atheist friend who’s introduction to Christianity was a man standing in front of an abortion clinic with a picture of a surgically eviscerated fetus.  In the dying years of the last century I was introduced to the oppressive opinions of the religious right as they attempted to exert their will over me by telling me how to live, what I could and couldn’t do, and how they were trying to enact laws to enforce it.  It is small wonder to me why so many people are averse to religion and Christianity in particular.   There is another face of Christianity. It is the face of people who are more concerned with the welfare of others than they are of themselves.  I see this played out in the tireless work of some of the volunteers in the ministry to the homeless in my church.  I saw this when I went to Ghana in 2007 with Habitat for Humanity, a Christian organization concerned with bringing affordable housing and clean water to the poorest of the world....

Standing out at the bus stop in the evening on a cold winter day, I caught a glimpse of the sunset just behind the building in front of me.  The bus was not in sight, so I walked hurriedly up the sidewalk away to catch a glimpse of the sun setting.  It was a ball of red and orange, sinking behind the horizon covered with a white blanket of snow, reflecting pink off the fluffy white snow clouds above.  It filled me with peace on the cold, still, winter evening. And it occurred to me.  This is how the Gospel is supposed to be.  Once you catch a whiff of the real thing, you will step out of life for a minute and walk towards it.  The more you do this, the brighter it glows and the more inviting and vibrant it seems.  It warms your life from the inside with a beauty so wild and so subversive, you cannot contain it within yourself, and you exude it from your person. And so others catch a glimpse. The Gospel is the proclamation of REDEMPTION preache...

In my reading, I am daily plunged into the ineffable otherness of God by C.S. Lewis, Brennan Manning, Henri Nouwen, and countless other authors, both current and ancient.  In my prayers every morning, I strain to listen for some response to my sacrifice of all the filth and muck I have in me, to ask to remove it.  I know, from existing on the Earth, that all that we know is too perfect, too complex, too engineered to be purely the result of chance and the natural laws by which all things abide. Who designed those natural laws, after all?  Are we on this planet a statistical improbability in a womb so finely tuned to our existence - that we would never have occurred without it, just a hopeless chance aggregation of dust and the laws that govern us? And with all of this, I have to ask, is what I believe real?  Do my prayers fall on deaf ears?  I have come to believe in my heart that God is in fact, real.  There is a point at which the evidence so saturat...