Eric Metaxas

Another version of the __rosperity Gospel_ or __ame It and Claim It_ teaching has to do with finding a verse in the Bible and then __laiming_ that verse. Proponents of this thinking believe that God must fulfill his promise to us in whatever verse we are __laiming_ because what God says in his Word, the Bible, is true, and we can trust it to be true. So someone might pray: God, your Word says in Isaiah that by your stripes we are healed and I know you are not a liar and that your Word is true and I claim that Scripture in Jesus__ name and therefore I will be healed of this stomachache! We need to have faith in what the Bible says, but we have to be careful that we aren__ trying to force God to do what we want. That is arrogance rather than humility.God loves us, but we cannot demand things of him as though our faith is in charge rather than God. If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn__ matter. It was all God. It is God and God__ grace that heals, not our prayers and not our __aith._ Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish.

It was not apathy or passiveness. For him, prayer was a display of the strongest possible activity.

Praying to God involves both us and God. God wants us to participate in what he is doing, and for sure one of the main ways we participate in what he is doing is by prayer. We can also participate in what he is doing by feeding the hungry and helping the poor and caring for the sick and giving of our resources to those who have little. God wants us to partner with him. So there is a paradox at work, and a mystery. On the one hand, the Bible says that apart from God we can do nothing. And yet, on the other hand, God invites us to do some things with him. This is at the heart of the mystery of prayer. God wants us to use our faith and to pray. But we can focus so much on the importance of our faith and our prayers that we forget about God and think it is our faith and our prayers that perform the miracle, rather than the God to whom we pray and in whom we have faith as we pray.

Even though prayers are not offered only to get a desired result, there is little doubt that most miracles are the result of prayer. God wants us to pray to him and ask him for things, just as any loving father and mother want their children to come to them with whatever is on their minds. But if our focus is solely on getting the outcome we want, the prayer will fail, precisely because our belief is placed in the wrong place. It__ a great irony. If all we care about is the result, then we are effectively making that result our God, rather than God himself. So if we are praying to our __od___he God of results__ather than to God himself, then we are praying to a __od_ who is not God, and who is therefore powerless to help us.

If we are talking about a loving God, we are talking about a God who asks us to trust him, whether we get what we ask for or don__. But he will never force us to trust him. That is entirely up to us. We have free will and we can accept his love or reject it, or claim it doesn__ exist at all. We can trust him or distrust him as we like. But if he really and truly is the God of the Bible, who loves me with an unchanging and self-sacrificial love (agape), then I really and truly can trust him in all circumstances, which is tremendously freeing. In fact, I can go one step further than trusting him. To use a biblical phrase, I can rejoice in him. But is only possible if we really do know that God has our best interests at heart at all times. Of course, we have to decide on our own whether we believe that. But if we come to see that, that is true and do allow ourselves to believe it, we are precisely where he created us to be: in his loving hands.

Another version of the __rosperity Gospel_ or __ame It and Claim It_ teaching has to do with finding a verse in the Bible and then __laiming_ that verse. Proponents of this thinking believe that God must fulfill his promise to us in whatever verse we are __laiming_ because what God says in his Word, the Bible, is true, and we can trust it to be true. So someone might pray: God, your Word says in Isaiah that by your stripes we are healed and I know you are not a liar and that your Word is true and I claim that Scripture in Jesus__ name and therefore I will be healed of this stomachache! We need to have faith in what the Bible says, but we have to be careful that we aren__ trying to force God to do what we want. That is arrogance rather than humility. God loves us, but we cannot demand things of him as though our faith is in charge rather than God.If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn__ matter. It was all God. It is God and God__ grace that heals, not our prayers and not our __aith._ Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish.

the battle for our culture must be waged at the level of the imagination.

The author of the hymn 'Amazing Grace', John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: 'I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.' The author of The Gulag Archipelago , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: 'Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.' This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run.

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.

Christianity contains within itself a germ hostile to the Church (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren__ much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.

For Bonhoeffer, the relationship with God ordered everything else around it. A number of times he referred to the relationship with Jesus Christ as being like the cantus firmus of a piece of music. All the other parts of the music referred to it, and it held them together. To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by "rules" or "principles." One could never separate one's actions from one's relationship to God. It was a more demanding and more mature level of obedience, and Bonhoeffer had come to see that the evil of Hitler was forcing Christians to go deeper in their obedience, to think harder about what God was asking. Legalistic religion was being shown to be utterly inadequate.

Death is only dreadful for those who live in dread and fear of it. Death is not wild and terrible, if only we can be still and hold fast to God__ Word. Death is not bitter, if we have not become bitter ourselves. Death is grace, the greatest gift of grace that God gives to people who believe in him. Death is mild, death is sweet and gentle; it beckons to us with heavenly power, if only we realize that it is the gateway to our homeland, the tabernacle of joy, the everlasting kingdom of peace. How do we know that dying is so dreadful? Who knows whether, in our human fear and anguish we are only shivering and shuddering at the most glorious, heavenly, blessed event in the world? Death is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.

To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God__ purposes.

There was only one reality, and Christ was Lord over all of it, or none.

let anyone using those weasel words __reedom of worship_ know, they have __reedom of worship_ in China and it is meaningless and it is vile. __reedom of worship_ says you may do what you like in that building on Sunday mornings or whenever you like, but when you come out you will bow to the secular orthodoxy of the state. That is the antithesis of what the Founders meant in guaranteeing __reedom of religion.