Christward Collective

If you know life in Christ, you know languishing in Christ. We all go through dry seasons. The Christian life is never lived from mountain top to mountain top. Every saint has known lackluster days in relationship with the Lord. God doesn’t feel close. You have His peace, but are not peaceful...

When we think of Jesus, we dont tend to think of Him as One who had many possessions. After all, the Scriptures are clear that "though He was rich, yet for our sakes, He became poor that we through His poverity might become rich" (2 Cor. 8:9). At His own admission, we know that the Savior...

My Muslim friend and I sat across the table from one another, enjoying gyros at a little Greek spot that had just opened. It was an exercise in co-education, each of us thoroughly convinced of our religious convictions yet wanting to be sure we heard opposing viewpoints accurately. So the Christian...

Shakespeare wrote that each person’s history is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Christian view of personal and world history is quite a contrast; we believe God ordained it, organizes it, and moves it towards a meaningful, definite, and...

Loneliness was perhaps among the most immediate consequences of the fall. Adam’s first new instinct was to hide from God and then to distance himself from his wife. After the pronouncement of the curse, they were directly driven out of the Garden, out of the presence of God (Gen 3). That...

One of the more difficult questions to settle--both from a biblical and historico-theological perspective--is that which concerns how we are to view the children of baptized, professing believers. On one hand, we can be quite sure that the children of professing believers are, no less than the...

Practical atheism thrives on deficient views of God, eroding the joy that Christians should experience in their everyday lives, enveloping the disciple in a mist of uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety. The habits of Christianity (its diverse rituals and liturgies) can form disciplines of holiness--...

Persistent prayer proves hard for many Christians. We may labor on our knees for years as we pray for our unbelieving child, an empty womb, our spouse to be converted, the friend battling cancer, depression to no longer have a hold, a sin to lose its grip, or the gift of just one good friend. We...

Tradition is a word that evokes a wide range of emotion. Some think of traditions and feel safe and warm all over, while others would happily take the name Scrooge if it meant freedom from mindless monotony. But a tradition by itself does not find its value in how it makes us feel. Rather, its...

We often categorize ourselves as being either a thinker or a feeler. A thinker is more likely to make decisions and act based on knowledge and a feeler based on emotion. When it comes to matters of faith, a thinker would emphasize what we know about God’s word and a feeler what we feel or...