Gospel in Life

In Psalm 69, we have the prayer diary of Jesus and an expression of his anguish and his sufferings for us. This psalm, of course, is written by David, and it’s about King David and his immediate problems. But it actually doesn’t refer only to David—it also refers to a greater king than David and...

At the end of the end of the last of Moses’ sermons, he says something so simple that it’s difficult. Moses starts saying, “I’m offering you this personal relationship with God.” He’s saying, “It’s not too difficult. It’s near you. You don’t have to go up to heaven. You don’t have to go over the...

When you’re about to die, there are no tangents; you get right to the point. You only say the things that are the most important that you’ve ever learned in your whole life. Here, at the very end of the end of his sermons, at the very end of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses gets...

If the last thing, practically, that Moses said before he died was, “You need to be in a covenant relationship with God,” then it would behoove us to figure out what that is. What is a covenant relationship with God? In Deuteronomy, we have a series of sermons that Moses preached just before he died....

If we look at Jesus Christ, at the case for Jesus being who he said he is, there are five things to see. First, there was a man who claimed to be God. Second, he apparently did miracles. Third, he got the people closest to him to believe he was God. Fourth, after he was...

In John 5, Jesus heals a lame man, and then he begins to teach about himself. He makes some astounding claims, and the people challenge him. “Why should we believe you?”  In the context of Jewish jurisprudence, if a claim was made, you had to have two or three corroborating witnesses. Jesus responds to the...

You can’t talk publicly about Christianity unless at some point you get down to say, “Well, what is it?”  There’s great consensus that 1 Corinthians was written just 20 years after the death of Jesus Christ. So when Paul says he’s summarizing the message the Corinthians heard and believed before this, he’s talking about something...

We all have very strong moral convictions about what we think is right and wrong. And in a pluralistic society, we need to find ways of sharing our beliefs and being honest about who we are in a way that’s respectful and promotes peace. One of the ways we can make for a more civil...

To become a mature society in which we’re able to talk about faith, we also have to be able to talk about doubt. We don’t get much help here from either religious people or secular people. Religious people tend to see doubt as a bad thing. And secular people tend to think perennial doubt is...

We live in a pluralistic society, so we must ask this question: how can people be true to themselves and still get along? No matter who you are, if you care about the social fabric, that’s a huge question to answer.  My goal is to show Christians how they can be part of the solution....