1 john on Violence

Notes on prayer: This prayer is designed for a leader and a congregation, but it could be further divided so that the Leader/People response sections are "voice 1" and "voice 2." ...

Notes on prayer: This lament can be used as prayers of the people, but can be adapted for other uses as well. It is designed to be responsive, but it would also work if prayed in unison. Leader: ...

In a story circulated among an ancient monastic community, a vicious warlord intimidated whole villages, sending it’s entire population into the hills to hide in caves, waiting for the ruler to move o...

Adolf Eichmann was one of the Nazi architects of the Holocaust who escaped after World War II to South America, where he was caught in 1960 and taken back to Israel for a trial. He was tried, found gu...

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

Pastor: By grace, through Jesus, God calls us His children so that we might become more like Him, setting our hope on His grace, and living as holy people who fear the Lord and love one another. Whe...

“If your eye causes you to sin…” is one of the boldest phrases from the mouth of Jesus, appearing three times in the gospels. Our eyes not only leads us into sinful behaviors, but also to take in sinf...

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he h...

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

In his excellent book, The Magnificent Story , James Bryan Smith shares a true story from Japanese culture that illustrates just how demanding strict disciplinarian fathers can be. The Japanese...

Love your enemy-it will drive him nuts.

To hate is an easy lazy thing but to love takes strength everyone has but not all are willing to practice.

God of mercy, in your gracious presence we confess our sin and the sin of this world. Although Christ is among us as our peace, we are a people divided against ourselves as we cling to the values of a...

In the New Testament sin is not merely an individual, privatized transgression of a moral standard (sins is typically used for specific transgressions). It is far more radical than that. Sin is a mist...

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?

Love is the crazy, mad, and perhaps ridiculous gesture of saying yes to life, of seeing it as worthy of our embrace and even worthy of our total sacrifice.

To become peacemakers, then, we must begin with ourselves. We must ask ourselves, “Why do I make cutting remarks to another person? Why do I make demeaning remarks about them?” We must also ask oursel...

Defilement is what sin does to us; damnation is what sin introduces as our eternal end. Except for God’s intervention. We have needs, and God addresses our needs. Even our sin, the most destructive re...

O Lord, We marvel that you would take on flesh and blood in order to be crucified, killed, and buried for us. You humbled yourself and submitted to the hatred of sinful men, accepting the thorns, the ...

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

We don’t come to Him as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our arms.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to makes us love one another.

Whoever seeks to avoid danger at all costs may ultimately lose the fullness of life, but the one who, out of love for Christ, dedicates themselves to serving others discovers a life that endures. Arch...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

In George Bernard Shaw’s play about Joan of Arc , as Joan faces her execution by burning, she addresses those in power who have condemned her: “I will now go to the common people and find comfort in ...

Loving God, we do not love others as you love us. We are often rude and insistent on our own way. We hold onto resentment and are then held captive by bitterness.  Bring us to repentance and help us l...

For though [something] be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.

When we don’t meet Christ in Scripture and are not regularly being discipled by or discipling others, it is impossible to discern what being a Christian means or to cultivate a relationship with God. ...