genesis on Humility

Of the medieval church’s many intellectual leaders, none has had more influence than the philosophical theologian Thomas Aquinas. He was born to a noble family near Naples, Italy, and joined the Domin...

Speedy Morris is the basketball coach for LaSalle University. He was shaving when his wife told him he was wanted on the phone by Sports Illustrated. He got so excited over the prospect of national re...

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders and several centuries later by St. Ignatius of Loyola are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but inste...

Have you ever noticed geese soaring across the sky in a V formation? Scientists have uncovered the wisdom behind this flight pattern: as each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the one beh...

In the 2008 Batman film, The Dark Knight , the Joker (played by Heath Ledger) tries to get Batman to reveal his identity by kidnapping and executing one citizen every day until he reveals himself...

Only faith survives; faith which is not a work, not even a negative work; not an achievement, not even the achievement of humility. . . . Faith is the ground, the new order, the light. . . . Faith is ...

At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our humbling, human tendency t...

Gracious God, sometimes I am so caught up in my failures, in all the ways I am not like you, that I neglect the deeper truth, the earlier truth of Genesis 1. You have made me, as a human being, in you...

Preaching Commentary At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our hum...

Preaching Commentary Approaching a Difficult Text I think it’s good to start with the observation that Matthew 15:21-28 is not an easy or straightforward text. Trying to turn it into an easy text w...

Growth in grace is growth downward. It is the forming of a lower estimate of ourselves. It is a deepening realization of our nothingness. It is a heartfelt recognition that we are not worthy of the le...

The doctrines of grace humble a man without degrading him and exalt him without inflating him.

We could search the world over, but we could not find a man so low, so degraded, or so far below the social, economic, and moral norms that we have established for ourselves that he had not been creat...