Matthew 6:19-21, Isaiah 9:6, Luke 2:10-11, Matthew 2:1-12, 1 Timothy 6:6-7, Luke 12:16-21
If you ever find yourself sympathizing with Charles Dickens’ character Ebenezer Scrooge regarding the commercialization of Christmas, you’re not alone—this has been a common complaint for quite some t...
1 Timothy 6:6-19, Deuteronomy 6:5, Deuteronomy 5:21, Isaiah 1:23, Joshua 1:7, Psalm 62:9-10, Matthew 7:24-25, Luke 12:15, Luke 12:32-34
Ageless Wisdom If you are reading this as a pastor, teacher or preacher, I want you to jot down how old you are here _________. If you wrote a number less than 30 know this letter and this passage...
1 Timothy 6:6-19, Deuteronomy 6:5, Deuteronomy 5:21, Isaiah 1:23, Joshua 1:7, Psalm 62:9-10, Matthew 7:24-25, Luke 12:15, Luke 12:32-34
AIM Commentary Ageless Wisdom If you are reading this as a pastor, teacher or preacher, I want you to jot down how old you are here _________. If you wrote a number less than 30 know this letter...
Romans 12:1, Isaiah 58:10, Philippians 2:3-4, Matthew 20:26-28, 1 Timothy 6:17-19, Luke 9:23
Merciful Jesus Give us courage to deny privilege to lay down favor and safety in order to take up the cross of opportunity and justice Too often we fail to do this Merciful Jesus Give us courage to d...
The search for the good life, which so often is defined in terms of “things” and the means to get as many “things” as possible, has turned into a dead end as more and more people have more and more.
Ecclesiastes 5:10, Proverbs 11:4, Exodus 32:1–35, Luke 12:15, 1 Timothy 6:10, Psalm 49:16–17, Matthew 6:24, Matthew 6:19-21
Jesus warns against greed and seeking wealth, because ultimately, money is fiction. Gold coins? Slips of paper? Ones and zeroes in a computer? They only have value because people think they do....
Matthew 6:24, 1 Timothy 6:9-10, Colossians 3:5, Psalm 115:4-8, Matthew 13:22, Mark 8:36, Ecclesiastes 2:11
Andrew Carnegie rose to become among the world's richest individuals through his steel empire. In the midst of this acquisition of massive wealth at just thirty-three years old—Carnegie conducted ...
Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...
I wasn’t raised in a Christian family. I only entered the “Christian bubble” of a Southern Baptist youth group in junior high, where I pledged myself to abstinence before marriage at a True Love Waits...
God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...
Matthew 6:19-21, Luke 12:33-34, Luke 12:15, Hebrews 13:5, 1 Timothy 6:6-8, Luke 16:13, Matthew 6:24
Members of the Natomo family sit on the flat roof of their mud house in Mali, Africa, posing for their early morning photograph. Their earthly belongings are arrayed in front of them. Two kettles, pla...
1 Timothy 6:6-8, Proverbs 15:16, Matthew 6:19-21, Philippians 4:11-13, John 6:
The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can...
Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed...
Ephesians 5:16, Luke 12:15, 1 Timothy 6:6, 1 Kings 3:, Luke 12:21
An emissary from a learned society came to invite the eminent scientist Louie Agassiz to address its members. Agassiz refused on the grounds that lectures of this sort took up too much time that shoul...
Habakkuk 2:5, James 3:16, Mark 8:36, Luke 12:15, Isaiah 57:20, 1 Timothy 6:9, 1 John 2:16
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 family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet. . . that is ...
In this tragic world, we are surrounded by discontented people. Every minute of the day, it is possible to see evidence of this restless discontentment in the way people respond to circumstances. Peop...
Christianity Does Not Reject the Body The “spirit-good / body-bad” dualism that often passes for Christianity is actually an ancient gnostic error called “Manichaeism,” and it couldn’t be further from...
During a retreat at the Taizé compound in France, a young American shared a remarkable discovery. He said: “Back home, surrounded by all my possessions, I often feel uncertain about many things. Here,...
Hebrews 12:5-11, Proverbs 3:11-12, Psalm 94:12, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, Philippians 3:12-14, Matthew 23:23-24, James 1:22-25, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27
While formally or structurally speaking, there are mechanisms of discipline operative in both the convent and the prison, in both the factory and the monastery, more specifically, these disciplines an...
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, has made more money in a single day than Heller had earned fro...
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...
Contentment is when we tell the Shepherd that His provision is enough for all our physical and material needs. If our old car gimps down the road, that is fine. If we get a shiny newer auto with less ...
John 4:13-14, 1 Timothy 6:9-10, Psalm 62:5-6, Jeremiah 2:13, Colossians 3:5, Romans 1:25, Matthew 6:33
I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning b...
Matthew 16:26, Luke 12:16-21, Ecclesiastes 5:10-15, Matthew 6:19-21, Luke 12:15, 1 Timothy 6:7, Mark 10:24-25
I heard of a funeral in California where a man requested to be buried seated behind the wheel of a brand new Cadillac, dressed in a tuxedo, with a two-dollar cigar in his mouth. He left the money to i...
A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act li...