Faith in Christ is able to endure doubts-it's able to endure temptations-bec ause it faces them, not because it pretends they're not there.

Our weaknesses are an opportunity for God to show his strength.

The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.

Jesus and spirituality can easily become therapies that merely help us cope with life. They can serve us if we chose Him over other service providers. We even talk about "making Jesus my personal Lord and Savior," as if we could make Him anything!

Christians must return to the great story that has its fulfillment in life after death, so we may live and die well in the light of our extraordinary hope that enables us to embrace the ordinary lives God gives us here and now.

God’s Word does not merely impart information; it actually creates life. It’s not only descriptive; it’s effective too, God speaking is God acting.

Once we truly grasp the message of the New Testament, it is impossible to read the Old Testament again without seeing Christ on every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event and narrative. The Bible must be read as a whole, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation, letting promise and fulfillment guide or expectations for what we will find there.