acts on Self-Reliance

A little girl once wrote a letter to an advice column in the Newspaper. In it, she tells a story about her uncle and aunt. “My uncle was the tightest man I ever met.” She said. “All his life, every ti...

A. W. Tozer once wrote,  Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a ...

For the most part, when we think of saints or heroes of the faith, we think of people who are altogether different than we are. They seem to embody a quality of communion with God that is impossible f...

Preaching Commentary The Missing “Advent” Text A lectionary preacher moving from the fifth to the sixth Sunday after Pentecost in Year A will notice that a familiar chunk is missing, sent back in t...

The Missing “Advent” Text A lectionary preacher moving from the fifth to the sixth Sunday after Pentecost in Year A will notice that a familiar chunk is missing, sent back in time to the third Sunday...

We can't save ourselves by pulling on our bootstraps, even when the bootstraps are made of the finest religious leather.

Within thy circling power I stand; On every side I find thy hand; Awake, asleep, at home, abroad, I am surrounded still with God. …O may these thoughts possess my breast, Where'er I rove...

Free us, Lord, from our obsession with ourselves long enough to care for others; to be so concerned about the well-being of the human community that me don’t have to worry about our place, our church,...

We are a long time in learning that all our strength and salvation is in God.

If you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you w...

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

Aseity refers to God’s self-existence (a—from, se—oneself). God exists ‘from himself.’ God owes his existence and completeness as God to nothing outside himself. . . . God’s act of creation was not c...

Humble and self-forgetting we must be always, but diffident and apologetic about the gospel never.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

We must learn to see our limits as the entrance into the good life, not what bars us from it. But as we grow older, waiting feels like an inconvenience or affront. We take out our phones when we’re...

It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where ...

This scripture guide is adapted from the Summer Settings sermon guide. For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea “oceans.”  The poi...

Living by grace inspires a growing consciousness that I am what I am in the sight of Jesus and nothing more.

O Lord God, You have commanded us to believe in Jesus; and I would flee to no other refuge,  wash in no other fountain,  build on no other foundation,  receive from no other fullness,  res...

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

“I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

The hymnwriter and theologian F. W. Faber writes with beautiful prose the challenges that each one of us faces when it comes to living a life faithfully according to the truth that is within us: M...

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I…vividly remember one of my teachers telling the story of three young boys whose route to school went alongside a high wall. Every day as the boys walked to school, they wondered what was on the othe...

Notes on the Passage Besieged from All Angles:  The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Ja...

The renowned scholar and musician Albert Schweitzer’s life was turned upside down one summer morning in 1896 while reading his Bible. He came upon Matthew 16:25: “For whosoever will save his life shal...

Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? Or at least . . . Do you care about the same truth?”

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.