colossians on Spiritual Attacks

Whenever you’re running your life on those fuels, Satan’s got you where he wants you. The one thing he does not want is that God’s words “You are my beloved child” become the fuel of your life and hea...

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...

Preaching Commentary 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, Jar...

Almighty God, harsh words and personal attacks can bring out the worst in us. We find ourselves spending energy on thoughts of retaliation and plans to protect ourselves. Father forgive us. We long to...

You can only build an effective Christian life when you have a “settled core”: an inner self “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3). When you go to the gym or a Pilates class, your instructor might enc...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

Take anger, for example. Think of how little of your anger in the last couple months had anything at all to do with the kingdom of God. You’re not generally angry because things are in the way of God ...

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

Several times during the day, but especially in the morning and evening, ask yourself for a moment if you have your soul in your hands or if some passion or fit of anxiety has robbed you of it…. If yo...

My transition into my 40’s came with the obligatory hip surgery. The only way to stop the cycle of hip pain was to literally carve out some bone. Those parts had to be removed. But recovering my funct...

Just before Christmas, my whole family piled into our kid-moving vehicle and rushed to the nearest mall to grab some last minute Christmas presents before dashing to a holiday party. As usual, we were...

Reading the Bible without applying it to your life can be downright dangerous. On August 3, 1996, Melvin Hitchens, sat on his front porch and read the Bible. After his Bible reading, this 66 year old ...

Heavenly Father, you have called us to step outside the church and into your world to carry out your kingdom work. We are to love our neighbors, serve those who may call us enemies, and pray for those...

Context Jesus’ lesson on prayer in Luke’s gospel comes not in the context of a longer sermon (as with Matthew’s parallel in the Sermon on the Mount), but rather in response to a request from one of h...

Pastor: “Hear then the parable of the sower: When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is what wa...

One elderly monk in his community used to show his displeasure with other monks in a highly creative way. As you may know, most monastic communities chant the psalms several times a day together in ch...

A successful Irish boxer was converted and became a preacher. He happened to be in a new town setting up his evangelistic tent when a couple of tough thugs noticed what he was doing. Knowing nothing o...

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...

Just before Christmas, my whole family piled into our kid-moving vehicle and rushed to the nearest mall to grab some last minute Christmas presents before dashing to a holiday party. As usual, we were...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed ...

In The God-Shaped Brain , Timothy R. Jennings tells a well-attested story about how belief can affect the body. Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local...

In Soul-Making , Allen Jones shares an intriguing visit to the Coptic Monastery of St. Macarius out in the Egyptian desert. There, he meets Father Jeremiah, a monk who spins tales of the desert fathe...

preaching commentary The Transitive Property of Welcoming In elementary school math you learn various basic principles of working with numbers…the commutative property, the associative property, th...

Holy Spirit, you have come to reconcile us to each other, but we resist your work to bind us together. We hold onto grudges. Even though we know God has forgiven us in Jesus Christ, we are slow to for...

Loving and forgiving God, we want to answer your invitation to experience a Christ-centered life. Yet all too often, our lives are much more centered around our ourselves than around Jesus. Jesus send...

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

May the Spirit of God bless you with insight and revelation as you take this journey toward peace.  May you be led by Jesus to glimpse a new world where love is the language we speak and shalom binds...

The first three items in Paul’s fruit basket sound very spiritual. Heavenly almost. Very nice for Sundays, at least. But his next one, patience, brings us back down to earth on a Monday. What are we l...

Preaching Commentary A Highly Practical Text Often we come to scripture passages that require a bit of interpretive twists and turns to find ways of connecting the text to our modern-day lives in t...

As a young pastor, I wanted to pray for Jean, who had been sick in bed for about a week. So I took Mike, a fellow leader in the church, with me to her home. Her husband, Jim, greeted us at the door an...