2 corinthians on Presence

Suffering is not evidence of God’s absence, but of God’s presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic salvation work. There is a way to accept...

preaching commentary The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on t...

We come into this world blissfully unaware of these fragile, beautiful things we call our bodies. In our mother’s womb, we bathe in continuous warmth and nourishment, changing shadows and muffled voic...

Please know that when I take up my cross every day I am not talking about my wheelchair. My wheelchair is not my cross to bear. Neither is your cane or walker your cross. Neither is your dead-end job ...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to r...

preaching commentary The Servant Leader The servant leader is the hero of this text.  And the example,  par excellence,  is the Apostle Paul. He has never shied away from holding himself up as a pe...

God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.

The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),...

The context The parables we hear this week are part of a collection of parables of the Kingdom collected by Matthew in chapter 13 of his gospel account. As with the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7),...

The Servant Leader The servant leader is the hero of this text.  And the example,  par excellence,  is the Apostle Paul. He has never shied away from holding himself up as a person to be imitated, as...

In Jeremiah it is clear that the excellence comes from a life of faith, from being more interested in God than in self, and has almost nothing to do with comfort or esteem or achievement. Here is a pe...

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

We all know people who have been made much meaner and more irritable and more intolerable to live with by suffering: it is not right to say that all suffering perfects. It only perfects one type of pe...

Pastor: Heavenly Father, save me from sin! I know I am righteous only through Jesus’ righteousness, but I greatly desire to be more like him! I am your child, so help me to resist the temptation to si...

The sufferings of Paul are not interruptions to his mission but are intrinsic to it; through them the message of Christ crucified is embodied.

I love that part in The Silver Chair when old age simply vanishes from frail King Caspian, because age is the unavoidable meltdown, stripping even the bravest and most beautiful of their former glor...

Let this be thy whole Endeavour, this thy prayer, this thy desire, that thou mayest be stripped of all selfishness, and with entire simplicity follow Jesus only.

Fear and growth go together like macaroni and cheese. It’s a package deal. The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus you must re...

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it's one of the great thing...

One of the great leaders of the first generation after the apostles was a man named Polycarp. Polycarp, it is believed, was discipled by the apostle John and carried out a long and fruitful ministry i...

The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because i...

God became a part of the human family so that we could become a part of his heavenly family.

Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwel...

I place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of God. If anything will advance the interests of the kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving o...

There is an iconic scene in the cult classic The Matrix that makes for a great metaphor. Morpheus gives Neo a choice between two pills: You can take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake up in y...

From a purely biological point of view man is not at home anywhere in the world.

Chris Spielman was at one time a paragon of athletic performance. A two-time All-American Linebacker at Ohio State University, and later three-time all pro for the Detroit Lions, Spielman knew what it...

A prominent citizen in town was dying. As he lay in his lovely home, the best doctors surrounding him, he whispered, with a note of despair, ‘I’m leaving home, I’m leaving home.’ Across town there la...

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.