comfortable

the industrial church has become a wounder of the healers rather than a healer of the wounded. put bluntly, the american church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. we say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works- but our lives refute our faith. by & large, the gospel of grace is neither proclaimed, understood, nor lived. too many christians are living in the house of fear & not in the house of love.

If a random sampling of one thousand american christians were taken today, the majority would define faith as belief in the existence of God. in earlier times it did not take faith to believe that god existed- almost everybody took that for granted. rather, faith had to do with one's relationship to God- whether one trusted in God. the difference between faith as "belief in something that may or may not exist" and faith as "trusting in God" is enormous. the first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. the first can leave us unchanged; the second intrinsically brings change.