To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it. To love as God loves us--in freedom and with no strings attached--is a way to grant others a liberating gift.

To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.

To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it. To love as God loves us--in freedom and with no strings attached--is a way to grant others a liberating gift.

Only unconditional grace can transform a hardened heart into a grateful heart. Only a free gift can demolish any notion of quid pro quo. Only an utterly merciful act of love can fashion a new creation capable of love. As theologian Karl Barth puts it, 'As the beloved of God, we have no alternative but to love him in return.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.

As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.

The cost of discipleship is to live the life God has given us, serving in mundane ways the people he's put in our path.