Inheriting Faith: A Peace Freely Given and Hard to Find
Forgiveness from God is not a probation period that depends on how next week goes.
Bread for the curious soul Forgiveness from God is not a probation period that depends on how next week goes.
What if a single phrase from the Irish language could change the way you see your emotions — and yourself?
The word gospel has been used so many times it has lost its edges, but it started as a military announcement carried by the fastest rider to the farthest battlefield. This is what the word actually meant, where it came from, and what it means to carry it today.
Sometimes what we're calling faith is decision-making with a prayer attached to the front of it, and the reason we can't tell the difference is that we've never learned what it sounds like when God actually speaks.
The temptation for a Christian sitting with Zephaniah in 2026 is to pick a side in the political argument and idolize it, to decide that the de-creation happening around you belongs entirely to the other tribe and that your tribe is the remnant worth preserving.
The righteous person does not live by having satisfying answers. He lives by faith, which here is not a feeling. It is a decision about where to plant your weight when the ground is uncertain.
"Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea."
The story of sibling rivalry runs like a thread through the entire biblical narrative. Cain and Abel. Ishmael and Isaac. Esau and Jacob. Joseph and his brothers. The pattern is not accidental.
Finally. Someone is saying it out loud. The neighbors are wicked and God sees it.
God, by putting Hosea through this marriage, is not illustrating a theological point from a safe distance. He is showing us what it feels like from his side.
The 850 minutes we spend scrolling are often the symptom of a heart that has either stopped caring or is trying to numb the pain of a world that demands too much.
The ground breaks open not because we finally got our act together, but because the God who commands the winter is the same God who commands the thaw.
When we approach prayer primarily as a transaction, we bypass all of that. A transaction requires nothing of you emotionally. You don't have to locate yourself. You don't have to be honest about where you actually are, as opposed to where you think you should be. You just submit the request and wait for processing.
Hope is a more powerful catalyst than doom.
The fundamental shift from passive reception to active proclamation is the true mark of a life lived in the New Creation.
If the tomb is empty, the rules of scarcity, the reign of evil, and the social walls of separation have been fundamentally dismantled by our Savior who was our example.
If our faith only shows up when the church crowd is watching, is it truly alive? Or is it just a seasonal costume we wear?
We acknowledge the victory of Christ in our theology, but we inhabit the defeat of anxiety in our biology.
Our faith shouldn't be a photo op or a brief burst of godliness before we let a hyper-connected world take the wheel again.
Jesus doesn't pray for us to interrupt our lives for a single Holy Week. He prays for every single one of our weeks to be interrupted by eternal life.
Paul’s radical statement, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), demands a daily commitment, not just an annual one, if we want to actively invite Christ to live in us.
What if, instead of adding more noise to your life this month, you allowed for a sacred dormancy?