If the last thing, practically, that Moses said before he died was, “You need to be in a covenant relationship with God,” then it would behoove us to figure out what that is. What is a covenant relationship with God? In Deuteronomy, we have a series...
If we look at Jesus Christ, at the case for Jesus being who he said he is, there are five things to see. First, there was a man who claimed to be God. Second, he apparently did miracles. Third, he got the people closest to him to believe he was God....
In John 5, Jesus heals a lame man, and then he begins to teach about himself. He makes some astounding claims, and the people challenge him. “Why should we believe you?” In the context of Jewish jurisprudence, if a claim was made, you had to have tw...
You can’t talk publicly about Christianity unless at some point you get down to say, “Well, what is it?” There’s great consensus that 1 Corinthians was written just 20 years after the death of Jesus Christ. So when Paul says he’s summarizing the mes...
One of the best ways of having a discussion about faith is to not simply talk about what you believe, but also how you came to believe it. Not just the content, but the process or the journey you went on. It’s often very helpful, because everybody is...
We all have very strong moral convictions about what we think is right and wrong. And in a pluralistic society, we need to find ways of sharing our beliefs and being honest about who we are in a way that’s respectful and promotes peace. One of the wa...
If we’re going to have a truly open society, we have to learn how to be public about our deepest faith beliefs, and yet to do so in a way that’s respectful to others and promotes peace. So how do you talk about God and God’s existence? One way to ta...
To become a mature society in which we’re able to talk about faith, we also have to be able to talk about doubt. We don’t get much help here from either religious people or secular people. Religious people tend to see doubt as a bad thing. And secula...
Ecclesiastes is one of the most confusing books in the world. It depicts a very disillusioned man. And you may be saying, “Is the Bible really saying all human life is pointless?” To understand what’s going on here, we need to keep two things in min...
We live in a pluralistic society, so we must ask this question: how can people be true to themselves and still get along? No matter who you are, if you care about the social fabric, that’s a huge question to answer. My goal is to show Christians how...
It’s very common for people, even those who want to live the Christian life, to feel they have to check their brains at the door if they’re going to believe. Often, we hear this basic approach to the Bible: the gospels were written down after years o...
We live in a culture of choice. In our individualistic culture, our place and our parents and our social location don’t determine everything that we can do. We have some choices. Choices! What does that mean? That means we’ve never needed wisdom mor...
We live in a culture in which there are more choices than there ever have been. But you can be incredibly good, moral, and knowledgeable and still make pretty stupid choices. Wisdom is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of choices that...
There are choices everywhere, just zillions and zillions of choices. And if you don’t make good choices, it can be very destructive. Bad choices blow up on you. Every choice is like a fork in the road, and once you make it, you really can’t go back t...
The trouble with the Sermon on the Mount is it’s so familiar that almost nobody listens to it, almost nobody knows what it’s saying. How do we know that? At the very end of the sermon, it says the crowds were amazed at Jesus’s teaching. And that word...
