colossians on Faults

Every day God patiently bears with us, and every day we are tempted to become impatient with our friends, neighbors, and loved ones. And our faults and failures before God are so much more serious tha...

If you’ve decided your healing is dependent on other people acknowledging their faults you’ll still be waiting in your grave.

Gentled by grace.  That’s the incredible and inspiring story of Abba Moses the Black. He was a violent thief who became a humble and kind monk and one of the great Desert Fathers who served the Lord ...

One afternoon, I was playing with my son in our living room when I suddenly smelled something burning. I stood up and walked around, nose high in the air, sniffing furiously. My wife smelled it too, s...

In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor...

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

We repeat what we don’t repair.

The early church fathers named the primary sin patterns “passions,” borrowing a Latin term that could also be translated “sufferings ” As we live out a unique pattern or “face” of sin, we begin to thi...

He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven.

Lord Jesus, I have sinned times without number, and been guilty of pride and unbelief, and of neglect to seek you in my daily life. My sins and shortcomings present me with a list of accusations, but ...

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because, while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

Our sins had taken root deeply, down to the deepest soils of our hearts. Know that Christ has uprooted our sins to the last fiber, planting His Word of forgiveness that can never wither.

No one heals himself by wounding another.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

When my kids were little, I used to hang piñatas from our favorite tree in the backyard as often as possible. Sometimes we did it for their birthdays, but sometimes we did it because it was Saturday, ...

Forgiveness vacillates like this. It has fits and starts, good days and bad. Anger intermingled with love. Irregular mercy. We make progress only to make a wrong turn. Step forward and fall back. But ...

A. Parnell Bailey visited an orange grove where an irrigation pump had broken down. The season was unusually dry and some of the trees were beginning to die for lack of water. The man giving the tour ...

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 ...

If you’ve ever watched a war movie, or a film that takes place in the military, you’re likely to have encountered a specific scene, in which a subordinate will have something to tell a senior officer ...

For some, faith begins with a hard shell, a rigid set of answers and platitudes that keep them safe but eventually prevent them from growing into who they could be. The system that was initially prote...

Holy and merciful God, we confess to you and to one another, and in the company of the communion of saints, that we have sinned by our own fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and ...

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...

Blessed be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above. Before the throne of God We pour our impassioned prayers; Our fears, our hopes, ...

God of the Nations We stand apart from you We stand apart from each other We stand with our tribe Hiding behind walls Throwing our stones Our divisions dishonor you We harm instead of heal You weep Of...

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

We forgive persons, not institutions. We forgive persons for what not for what they are. We forgive persons for what they do to seriously wound us. We forgive persons for what they do to wrong us when...

When we confess our sins, God is faithful and just. God purifies us from all unrighteousness. Friends, be encouraged today. Your sins need no longer to weigh you down. In Jesus, our sins have been for...

Faith and good works are both necessary. But one is the root and the other the fruit.

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

A police inspector went to visit a primary school, where he was asked to take a Scripture class. He began by asking, ‘Who knocked down the walls of Jericho?’ There was a long silence as the children s...