As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.
Mark GalliThe cost of discipleship is to live the life God has given us, serving in mundane ways the people he's put in our path.
Mark GalliThe Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.
Mark GalliGod's love for us is uncoerced and so freely given that it does not demand a response. But so freely is it given that it creates freedom in the recipient, so that our response is not one of obligation or duty, nor the returning of a favor, but uncoerced love.
Mark GalliI 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.
Mark GalliThis is part of what it means to become holy, to be refined by fire. Difficulties and sufferings are God's form of hazing. Sometimes it gets so hard, we think Him cruel. But He's only looking for men and women who will keep their cool when things go horribly wrong, a people prepared to dash into burning rooms to rescue those about to be engulfed in flames.
Mark Galli