We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

On Attending to the Light in Darkness

Joe Spurr via Compfight

Donald Miller has posted a reflection on his Storyline blog about highlighting goodness and thereby pointing to Jesus in the aftermath of events such as the bombing in Boston this week. We want to emphatically declare together that “an enemy has done this” (Matt 13:28). But we also want to be a people who will attend to the light shining in the darkness, the hands and feet of Jesus bringing help and comfort. Where are you noticing the light of God in the darkness?

From Donald’s blog:

The real idea is that apart from God, true purity does not reside in us. Without His light shining through us, we are dark inside. But we often take this too far, devaluing the true goodness that is, while earthly, in every human being. We all reflect the goodness of our Maker, whether we know that Maker or not. When we shine a light on the courage and bravery, kindness and altruism displayed by every human being, we say to the world, “See that goodness inside of you? That comes from your Father. You got that from your Father,” and as such invite people to know their God.

Related Reading

God is Not What You Expect

Jesus came, in part, to finally reveal the absolute truth about God. He is the way and the truth (alethia) and the life (Jn 14:6). The word “truth” means “uncovered.” And what we find once God is uncovered is that he’s completely different than what we fallen humans generally expect God to be. As we…

Memorial Day

For Memorial Day, we thought we would repost Greg’s thoughts from 2007. In this post, Greg expresses his conflicted feelings over this holiday and gives a brief defense of Christian pacifism.  *** Hope you all had a happy Memorial Day. (Isn’t that something of a misnomer — a happy time remembering people killed in war?) Memorial Day…

Good From Evil

The Bible is very clear that God has nothing to do with evil. There is “no darkness” in God. (I Jn 1:5). Far from intentionally bringing about evil, God’s “eyes are too pure to look on evil” (Hab. 1:13). All evil, therefore, must be ultimately traced back to decisions made by free agents other than…

Myth Become History

The Gospel of John tells of the coming of Jesus in an unusual way. John writes: In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. Everything came into existence through him. Not one thing that exists was made without him. He was the source of life, and…

The Twist that Reframes the Whole Story

Many people read the Bible as if everything written within it is equally authoritative. As a result, people read it along the lines of a cookbook. Like a recipe, the meaning and authority of a passage aren’t much affected by where the passage is located within the overall book. The truth, however, is that the…

Getting Behind the “Letter” of Violent Portraits of God

“I will do to you what I have never done before… in your midst parents will eat their children, and children will eat their parents…” Ezek. 5:9-10 In my previous post I offered a brief review of Matthew Bates’ fascinating work, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation by Matthew Bates (Baylor University Press, 2012). Among other…