Winston Churchill was responsible for some of the most striking and memorable speeches ever delivered. The strong rhetoric he often deployed during the Second World War was of course partly out of necessity, as the country desperately needed inspiration, at a time when the conflict was very much in the balance. One of the most famous messages he ever gave was in 1940, as he sought to prepare the British citizens for the looming Battle of Britain. During it, he stressed that the very future of Christian civilization was at stake and that the country needed to be ready to face the ‘fury and might’ of an enemy that wanted to sink the world into the ‘abyss of a new dark age.’ Whether or not they would succeed was uncertain, but he reiterated that if they succeeded it would be judged by history as ‘their finest hour.’

The power of the message lay not only in the evocative and inspirational tone, but in the strong moral language that connected the listener to a higher cause. In other words, it specifically challenged people on a personal level, like the famous war-time ‘your country needs you’ posters.

What is interesting from a Christian perspective is that the speech is doing precisely what the gospel message is doing, albeit in a different way. The power doesn’t come from inspirational or moral language, but it comes from connecting us to the higher cause: God himself.

Yet, if we are brutally honest, many of us feel a sense of inadequacy, when it comes to living up to this higher calling. We have personal failings that continually let us (and others) down, our lives don’t seem to be as successful as those around us, we feel ashamed by things in our past, and we harbor guilt for not doing more to help others. Such insecurities are only natural in a world that puts so much emphasis on what we achieve, but the gospel message is radically different because it applies to everyone equally, irrespective of who we are or what we have done. In fact, Christ’s unconditional love for us was so great that he even took the punishment we deserved for our wrong doing, so that we could be in a relationship with him. It’s very easy to forget just how profound this is, but he is offering us a new life.(1) Furthermore, Jesus doesn’t just leave us to fend for ourselves unaided, but he offers us assistance, through his spirit, so that we can be changed.(2) This doesn’t necessarily mean that we will all have a sudden transformation in our lives—although this certainly does happen—or that we will never do wrong again and things will be easy thereafter, but it makes all the difference to have God walking beside us through thick and thin, as well as to know that we can be secure in our identity in him.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Their Finest Hour →

Grief is a strange thing in that its memory is more characterized by what the relationship was or was not than by what characterized the death.(1) You look forward and ache over what has now been lost for the future. You look backward and grieve what never truly was and can now never be.

The award-winning author Paulo Coelho is a beautiful writer, and his lines of pure poetry are disguised as novels. His book The Witch of Portobello, a mystical story with many unusual turns, remains on my shelf, no matter where I live. I often pull it off, brush my hand across the cover, and flip it open to a page I have nearly memorized.

The story begins in Beirut, Lebanon, a country that boasts of warm hospitality, platefuls of hummus and tabouli, the Mediterranean coast, and beautiful cedars. Coelho describes his heroine, Athena, as an unusual girl who possessed a sense of spirituality from the time of her youth. She married when she was nineteen and wanted to have a baby right away. Her husband left her when the baby was still young, and Athena had to raise him alone.

During one Sunday Mass, the priest watched as Athena walked toward him to receive Communion, and his heart was filled with dread. Athena stood in front of the priest, drew her eyes closed, and opened her mouth to receive. I picture her standing there in vulnerability, asking to receive Christ’s body, given for her. She was hungry for the grace that it offered.

But he did not give it to her.

The young girl opened her eyes, terribly confused. The priest tried to tell her in hushed tones that they would talk about it later, but she would not be turned away. She persisted until she received an answer.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For the Weary →

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel across the country from Massachusetts to Montana. While I had often traveled across the country on family vacations, I had never driven through South Dakota. But on this trip I was able to see quite a bit of the state that makes up part of the Great Plains in the United States. Having lived near the city, I remember being struck by the vast expanses of what appeared to be uninhabited land. Rolling grasslands, without many trees, offered a view of the landscape that was as far as it was wide. I remember wondering why anyone would make a home in such a desolate place.

Several years after this trip, I read Kathleen Norris’s book Dakota and marveled at her poignant description of this land. Her memoir both enticed me and made me wary of life in the Dakotas. The opening paragraphs of her book explain why:

“The high plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act like a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it, before it bestows a blessing… This book is an invitation to a land of little rain and few trees, dry summer winds and harsh winters, a land rich in grass, and sky and surprises.”(1)

She concludes by saying that “the land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau termed our ‘need to witness our limits transgressed.’ Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Spiritual Geography →