praise

Christian singer and songwriter Amy Grant has been sent home from the hospital and has postponed her upcoming shows after she was in a bicycle accident last week.

Aventer Gray issued an encouraging health update about her husband, megachurch pastor John Gray, who was recently hospitalized for a week with a life-threatening saddle pulmonary embolism.

A desire to truly experience God runs deep within our veins. However, for most Christians, experiencing God is either elusive and frightening or impossible and improbable. But to the thirsty pilgrim, God’s presence is a wellspring of life. Do we fight for it, or let it fade away? Do we contend for a deeper walk with God, or complain about our life? Do we pursue God like never before, or postpone intimacy?

A Kentucky cop recently performed CPR on a week-old baby girl who stopped breathing, saving her life.

Why is it true that the only relationship that matters is your personal relationship to a personal Redeemer and Lord? The biblical answer to our question is clear: God made us in his image (Genesis 1:26) for personal relationship with himself (cf. Revelation 3:20). As the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”

Transactional religion, from the Greco-Roman world to today, treats God’s word and power as instruments to be used for our purposes. We need to measure the news and everything else we experience in this fallen world through the prism of God’s unchanging, authoritative, completely true word. We need to read, pray, and worship for God’s glory rather than our own, to live for his honor above our own, to commune with our Creator for no reason except to be with our Father, to love our Lord and our neighbor for their sakes rather than ours. Anything less makes the King of the universe a means to our end. This is idolatry, and it is dangerous.

A Texas man is crediting God for helping him find a 3-year-old boy who went missing in his community.

A photo of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson and his wife, Ciara, praising God in a church has gone viral. While some found the image to be endearing, many more found it to be an invasion of privacy.

Let me be brutally honest: many who show contempt for profoundly deep and moving experiences with God have never experienced them for themselves. If they avoid prayer meetings, complain about extended and emotional worship, never miss a meal for God, are unaffected by the depravity around them, and are too mature to go to the altar, are these people truly filled with God’s Spirit?