Have you ever asked God to stop loving you so much?  I’m sure that sounds like a strange thing to ask, but C. S. Lewis, in his book The Problem of Pain , explains to us, that if we are complaining or resisting uncomfortable or painful things in our lives - which his providence has allowed - we may be doing just that very thing.  Why?  How?  We are forgetting that God’s love for us is an inexorable love.  If someone is being inexorable, they are insisting on their own way about things, regardless of how much someone may be complaining about it and petitioning against it.  God has an inexorable love for us, and that means he is going to insist on giving us what is best for us, even when we don’t like how he’s doing it. Here's an example of God's inexorable love: Jesus comes riding into Jerusalem in a fashion which he knows is a fulfillment of an Old Testament prophecy about the way the king of Israel would come home to his capital city.  The peopl...

[Paul on the Road to Damascus by Rubens] Years ago, there was a lot of debate in evangelical circles about "easy grace" and "Lordship salvation."  The concern was over people who were being told that they could become a Christian without submitting to Jesus's call to discipleship, as if discipleship was an optional add-on for people going to heaven.  The answer was that "Jesus must be Lord of all or he is not Lord at all."  "The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch" (Acts 11:26).  In other words, a Christian is a disciple; discipleship is not an option. We can understand that some evangelicals were so afraid of Pelagianism (salvation by works) that they could reduce the call to "repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ" [Acts 20:21] to just "believe in Jesus," and even minimize that belief to mere intellectual assent to the claims of Christ.  But that is surely a classic example of throwing out...