I look to Mary not for redemption but as an exemplar of what a yielded life looks like, as a woman who physically embodied the kingdom of God by virtue of simple obedience...

To have Jesus conceived by the Holy Spirit without remembering He is born of Mary is to embrace a spirituality that lacks particularity, place, context...

To attempt to understand anything meaningful about the life of Jesus apart from the third person of the Trinity would be…well, inconceivable...

Today I went trespassing. On the journey I was heartbroken, frightened and still later, bizarrely inspired. I had just finished up with a productive but very long board meeting. I had been with my colleagues on the Western North Carolina Youth and Christian Education board, and we met for 8 hours. Mondays are never particularly great for me...

So yes, I am one of “those people” who believes that God still speaks using supernatural means. Because there seems to be as much peril as there is promise in this way, many Christians over the centuries have overreacted against abuses of “signs and wonders” (a former professor of mine was fond of saying “abuse always leads to no use)...

I found I have a lot more to say about hearing God. Some of my most lasting, formative spiritual experiences have been similar to the story I shared yesterday—men and women who took the risk of speaking a word from God into my life. Whenever you talk about hearing God, the key word is always risk...

I was about 12 years old, sitting in one of the old padded chairs in the chapel of East Coast Bible College. It was fall convocation, when all the students would gather for a week of prayer, worship, preaching, and two-hour altar services. My father was the president of East Coast for 9 years, during the most formative time of my life. I quite literally grew up on that campus—living there for 4 years, staying with my grandmother up by the lake in the summer...