Tag: grace
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The Honeymoon: First Love and the School of Love
When Christ calls, He does not add a fresh coat of paint to a tired room. He breaks a window to heaven and lets a new world in. Scripture names this miracle new birth. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). A heart…
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The Shield and the Cross: The Servant, the Soldier, and the Savior
When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon imagined Steve Rogers, they gave form to a yearning that lives in every heart: the longing to stand between evil and the innocent, to bear the blow meant for another. Captain America began as a fragile dreamer, a boy who could not fight yet refused to look away. His…
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Legacy of Faith: Remembering Pastor Voddie Baucham Jr.
There are lives that thunder. There are others that ring like a tuning fork, steady and clear, so that all the instruments in the room find their pitch. Pastor Voddie’s life was the latter. He did not court applause. He tuned hearts to the note of God’s Word until the noise of our age sounded thin by…
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The Essence of Abiding: Living in Union with Christ
“Abide in me, and I in you.” With these few words in John 15 the Lord gathers up the whole Christian life into one image. He does not invite us to admire him from a distance, nor to copy him as one copies a sketch. He joins his life to ours as a vine joins…
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Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Part Ways
Free speech is not a talisman that turns folly into wisdom or rudeness into courage. It is a legal shield against government punishment for words. It is not a contract that binds employers, customers, or neighbors to applaud, employ, or endorse those words. We confuse categories and then act shocked at the bill that arrives.…
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The Small Door to a Vast Kingdom
Christianity is often presented as if it were a public park. There are signs that read “open to all,” and a smiling docent at the gate inviting every passerby to stroll inside. The Scripture that stands like a banner over the entrance is John 3:16, and rightly so. Yet if we walk a little farther…
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Called Before Coming: An Essay on Grace, Cost, and the Narrow Way
The gospel is not a trinket on an open stall, waiting for whoever happens to wander by. Scripture presents salvation as God’s gracious initiative that awakens the dead, not a human project that polishes the already living. The Lord speaks first, the heart answers second. “No one can come to me unless the Father who…
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An Open Letter to Rep. Jones of Tennessee
Dear Representative Jones, First, grief. On Wednesday, August 27, during a school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, two children—Harper Moyski (10) and Fletcher Merkel (8)—were killed, and many others were wounded. The alleged shooter, 23-year-old born Robert Westman, died by suicide at the scene. City and national reports place the number of injured…
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Predestination and the Elect: A Scriptural Reflection
There is, within the soul of man, a persistent yearning to untangle the mysteries of salvation, justice, and the divine will. Few doctrines arouse more awe or resistance than that of predestination. Yet, if one is to approach the Scriptures with honest inquiry and not with the prideful assumption that God’s ways must resemble our…
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Blood of the Martyrs
The sorrow that comes upon us when the innocent are murdered while they pray should drive every soul to its knees. What words can suffice in the face of such terror? Men and women, little children, saints of Christ, gathered in the hush of midnight prayer, were visited not by the comfort of heaven but…
Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World 