What makes the testimony of the disciples so believable in the days after the resurrection of Jesus is that their experience of God left them transformed. In the three days preceding Christ’s rising from the dead, the eleven sat cowering in their homes, sure of their imminent arrest. A little over a month later, and they were proclaiming Christ’s resurrection from the streets of Jerusalem in tongues they did not know. Thousands of Jews came to know their Messiah through the power of their testimony. And their testimony had power because it was not merely intellectual assent but transformative body,…
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One of the biggest surprises that adult life has brought me is the fact that I have enemies. I’m not talking about the devil or even people who find me annoying. I am talking about bona fide enemies who actively wish me harm or who for reasons of their own, hate me. Another surprise that adult life brought my way is how easy it is to hate them back. Hatred is a bleak desert of an emotion. And it pretty much always leads to despair. After all, no life springs forth from the kind of hatred one feels towards someone…
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I imagine everyone has a box inside their minds in which their ideas of God fit nicely. I know that my God box existed, for the most part, completely unconsciously in an unexamined part of my soul. After all, trying to understand who God is a strenuous activity for most of us. I think that for myself, my earliest imaginings turned the idea that man is made in the image of God completely around. I believed, without recognizing that I thought this, that God was just like a man, only much, much larger. My box was designed to keep God safe…