You may renounce many things, but never give up the truth. Only truth can set you free.

Lies grip the hearts of leaders in subtle ways. They stoke the flames selfish ambition. They displace Christ and place self on the throne. They echo the ancient temptation: “You will be like God”.

The sense that Christianity is losing influence and moral values are eroding creates a fear that can lead to support for strong leaders, aggressive rhetoric and simplistic solutions.

Jesus' entry on a donkey raises an uncomfortable yet necessary idea: perhaps true credibility does not lie in the spectacular, but in being faithful to oneself.

At its core, repentance is relational. True repentance does involve a turning from sin, but that turning becomes a fruit of our turning to God.

The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt teaches us that true renewal begins on our knees, in our hometown squares as much as across our shared and loved continent.

Abraham Kuyper’s letter in 1898: “When government intrudes upon the pulpit or dictates family life, it overreaches. When religious groups or ideological movements seize the state to impose their own views, they too violate the balance of spheres”.

As the church in Germany and in the West in general struggles with secularisation and decline, Lausanne reminded me: the Church is alive and vibrant.

Anyone who puts his faith in himself has a short future. One of the biggest dangers of our day is pride.

All the energy we waste looking outwards should be used more productively looking inwards to check what our failings are and seek to rectify them.

 If my heart is concerned about what people think of me, I may well be blind to the truth of the text I claim to understand and then proclaim to others.

Read the second part of an in-depth report about the 2024 World Without Orphans global forum held in Chiang Mai.

We need to be careful not to let our egos creep in and turn an opportunity to serve others into a self-patting exercise.

Humility means depending on God alone in every situation, always being ready to learn from Him.

Wonderful enrichment for life and haunting warnings await us if we just travel into the Bible with our hearts open and ready to learn.

On many occasions, we think that we serve and obey God, but in fact what we are serving and obeying ourselves.

The Bible says  God used a thorny bush which burned without being burnt up to manifest himself to Moses, as no human being could look at the Almighty directly.

Being around Christians and using Christian language is not enough. Without a vital personal relationship with Christ, they are merely running on the fumes of Christianity.

Let’s continue to read His Word and be gripped by who He is. We could rejoice in the reality that far surpasses all our dreams and yet opposes all our fleshly pursuits.

The Chinese legendary speed skater finds inner strength in the Bible, which she carries everywhere, even to the skating rink. An article by the United Bible Societies China Partnership.

Only those who know they are completely powerless before God, and accept what God did for them, can be saved.

We find ourselves on a mission frontier, on the periphery of world Christianity. That should cause European Christians to be humble but also hopeful.

There are people who believe that they can do without God in their lives. Others say that God only speaks through them.

We can speak of the meaning of God’s Word with gracious attitudes but also with boldness.

We need to include humility in our hermeneutics as a foundational attitude. The Bible is not subject to us, we are subject to it.