March 26, 2026

Today the conversation is about what genuine faith actually looks like from the inside — how it thinks, prays, grieves, and holds together. Mere Orthodoxy has a sharp piece on sentimentalism, arguing that warm religious feeling is not the same thing as faith, and that confusing them leaves people with something that cannot hold under pressure. That connects directly to American Reformer's argument that Christian discipleship has to reach the mind — not just the emotions, not just the will. Both pieces are asking the same question from different angles: what does it mean to be genuinely formed, rather than just moved? Desiring God comes at it harder still, asking what Scripture says about people who live against God's grain — not a gentle question, but a necessary one if formation means anything at all.

Mere Orthodoxy also ran a piece on Christians under Nazi Germany — what they chose, what they justified, what they got wrong. It's the sharpest thing in the feed today. Earlier this week we were watching this same tension surface in a different form: what does faithfulness actually cost, and does the church have the nerve to find out. Christianity Today meanwhile has two quieter pieces — one on anxiety and one on prayer — that could read as soft, but shouldn't. If sentimentalism is the disease, learning to actually pray and actually rest in God is part of the cure. World Magazine's piece on the cost of compassion lands in the same place. Genuine faith is costly. The feed today keeps returning to that. Not the feeling of faith. The weight of it.