Staff/Lifeway Christian Resources

God is always speaking. To hear His voice is not usually a mystical experience. It consists merely of a willingness to pay heed to the God who lays a claim on our lives.

Archaeologists have found that ancient cultures erected statues and monuments to memorialize significant people and events. These memorials helped future generations understand their identity. In the Bible, God often instructed His people to erect memorials.

BRENTWOOD, Tenn. — The church flourishes when disciples are being formed. But how do churches know if they’re effectively forming disciples?

Some think of God only when life and existence have no other explanation. Unbelieving scientists tend to look on this view as evidence that the gaps are narrowing between theism and science. “Give us enough time,” they might say, “and humans will be able to explain how everything in the universe works.”

Annual performance reviews can create both anticipation and anxiety. In most cases, managers have a metric or checklist by which they evaluate a worker’s performance. In some unfortunate cases, an employee has no clue what the criteria will be for the review.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. That’s the phrase people say when things go wrong in life. We try to make the best of the situation. We try to take life into our own hands. And as Christians, sometimes we forget that God is there to help us, even in the tiny details of our lives.

If Jesus rose from the dead, it was the most sensational event in all of history and a conclusive answer to the most profound questions of our existence. On the other hand, if Christ did not rise from the dead, Christianity is an interesting museum piece and nothing more.

The book of Ecclesiastes says that God has “put eternity in [our] hearts” (3:11). That means that on some level the Lord has given us the capacity to grasp the infinite.

Sometimes we say that becoming a Christian is easy, but we forget that it’s also complex. Perhaps in wanting it to be easier, sometimes we have lost what it involves – confession, repentance and yielding to the work of the Spirit.

Why must we suffer? The suffering Messiah was a scandal to the early Church. That is not the kind of Lord the Church wanted, and it did not like to have the law of suffering imposed upon it by its Lord.