Claim OwnershipA Stranger in the House of God
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A Stranger in the House of God is the Podcast of award winning author John Koessler. Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outsider wondered about the God they worshiped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. John's podcast addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers.
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Send us a text Sometimes when we pray, we are angry with other people. On other occasions, we pray because we are angry with God. How do we manage our angry prayers? John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly colum...
Send us a text Prayer is an act of communion with God. But for most of us, it’s also about getting something from God. Most prayers include an “ask” of some kind. We aren’t praying just to hear ourselves talk. We do not struggle with prayer because it is hard. Our problem is that we are not sure it is worthwhile. We suspect that God is not interested in our case or fear that he will not decide matters in our favor. Delay and denial are the major reasons for this uncertainty. We pray, but the ...
Send us a text Whatever prayer may be, it is not an ordinary conversation. Believers in every generation have understood prayer as one of the means by which God communicates to his people. Yet it is a conversation where we do the majority of the talking. In prayer, we approach God but do not see either face or form and do not hear his voice. Therefore it is a conversation that lacks all the normal cues we rely upon for meaning. When we talk to God, we cannot rely upon inflection, body languag...
Send us a text Most books about prayer either assume that I don’t want to pray or that I don’t know how. Neither is really the case. My problem lies elsewhere. I don’t like the way God treats me when I pray.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for To...
Send us a text Jesus' last words were those of a victor, not a victim. They are the words of one who knows he is death's master.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the aut...
Send us a text Some have called Jesus' seven statements from the cross his last words. Among these seven sayings are three prayers. Jesus' three prayers from the cross help us to place the suffering of Christ in a larger context.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical ...
Send us a text Several years ago, at the Bible college where I taught, news reached the campus that a revival had broken out among the students of another school. It was much like the recent event at Asbury University, though on a smaller scale. The stories we heard were similar. Students knelt and wept at the front of the chapel as they asked God to forgive their sins. There was singing and confessing.Some of the students on our campus were unsettled by these reports. But not for the reasons...
Send us a text In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the first spirit to visit Ebenezer Scrooge is the ghost of Christmas past. Scrooge notes the spirit’s small stature and asks, “Long Past?” “No. Your past,” the ghost replies. Dickens is on to something here because this spirit often visits us at this time of year. The season of Advent, by its nature, implies a forward trajectory. It celebrates humanity’s long wait for the arrival of the promised seed of Abraham. In reality, we seem to spen...
Send us a text December is the season when tinsel-haloed angels draped in bedsheets announce the birth of Christ to bathrobe-clad shepherds on the church stage. There is a kind of charm in the way we tell the nativity story that might fool people into thinking it is merely a rustic folktale. But the Bible's account of the birth of Christ is not a children's story.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Ama...
Send us a text Christmas was important to me even before I called myself a Christian, though admittedly, this was mainly for non-religious reasons. I’ve long suspected that I have always loved Christmas more than any other holiday, not because of its spirituality but because it purchased my affections.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and ret...
Send us a text Heaven has fallen on hard times. In Christian thinking, looking forward to heaven is no longer fashionable. Jeffrey Burton Russell observes in his book Paradise Mislaid, "Heaven has been shut away in a closet by the dominant intellectual trends of the past few centuries."[1] There are a number of reasons for this. To some, the idea of looking forward to going to heaven seems frivolous. They feel that it is an exercise in self-absorbed indulgence. A quest for "pie in the sky by ...
Send us a text It's getting to look a lot like Easter. Which, frankly, isn't saying that much. Between Christmas and Easter, it's plain to see which holiday is the favored child of the church calendar. If Christmas is warm, Easter is cold. As it approaches, we don't seem to know whether to be happy or sad.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and...
Send us a text I have noticed that periods of social unrest are often accompanied by a corresponding outbreak of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I am referring, of course, to the accompanying blizzard of memes on Facebook and Twitter that display a quote famously (and probably incorrectly) attributed to Bonhoeffer: "Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." In most cases where it appears, the quote stands as a comprehensive indictment of anyone who has not yet expressed public outrage over some e...
Send us a text In the Gospels, Jesus is called the Holy One of God on two occasions. The first time was by a demon (Mark 1:24; Luke 4:34). The second was by Peter when many of the disciples were grumbling about the difficulty of Jesus' teaching. It is a reflection of the seriousness of our problem with holiness that the demons recognized who Jesus was before His own disciples did. It would be wrong to conclude from this that Jesus' approach to holiness was reductionist. Jesus did not simplif...
Send us a text Every age seems to have its preferred image of Jesus. The Scriptures do not portray Jesus as a symbol or even an archetype but as a living person. Yet there is some variation in the portrait they offer. We might think of the Gospels as a hall of portraits, with each episode intended to highlight some facet of the person and work of Jesus Christ. We are not interested in knowing Christ merely as a concept or an ideal. We want to know Him as a person. Furthermore, we want to know...
Send us a text Redemption is a drama unfolding along two storylines. The story of the Magi is a reminder that the journey of redemption includes evil as well as good. God is not responsible for the evil, but He is not a hostage to it either.John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes th...
Send us a text There are some people who are skilled at prayer. I am not one of them. R. C. Trench, the 19th-century Anglican bishop, once described prayer as “the simplest act in all religion.” I am inclined to agree with him. Until I start to pray. Then, a kind of uncertainty overtakes me. I do not feel confident. It’s not that I doubt whether God can grant my requests. I question whether He will. I often feel as if I must somehow win God over to my side of things. When I first learned to p...
Send us a text The first major challenge I faced after I became a serious follower of Jesus in the 1970s was that of telling my friends and family that I had “decided to become a Jesus freak.” The second was the decision to start attending church. That was almost 50 years ago. I am still going to church, but there are times when I am still ill at ease. I don’t always feel like I fit in. When I feel out of place in the church, I’ve noticed that it is usually the result of one of three factors:...
Send us a text I have heard more than one Christian express reservations about what we can look forward to in the age to come. What is it about Heaven that makes some of us nervous? John Koessler's latest book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, is now available. You can get it from Amazon. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and...
Send us a text When Jesus called the two disciples on the Emmaus Road "slow to believe," he was describing many of us as well. The disciples' struggle to believe provides insight into our own slow faith. Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the author of 16 books. His latest book , When God is Silent, is pu...
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