genesis on Poison

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

In the north of England, there's a beautiful garden. It's full of delicate wildflowers, extravagant blossoms, verdant climbing vines, and tumbling water features. Like so many gems of English ...

Spoiler Alert: This review contains some minor spoilers about the plot of The Last of Us . Content Alert: The Last of Us contains adult themes, graphic violence, nudity, and strong language. ...

Lent 2021: A 40-day Heart Restoration Destruction No More Bonus Content: Video prep session with Scott Bullock on Genesis 9:8-17 . Password: fHUk*p2* AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we ...

In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations ...

Sometimes what seems like a failure is actually the seed of God’s work. As Mark Batterson tells the story, it started with David and Svea Flood. Sent to the Congo by a church in Sweden, they helped es...

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything onto which it is poured.

Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you...

Kate Bowler is a gifted scholar and writer who, as a young wife and mom, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer—kept going six months at a time thanks to immunotherapy. She writes honestly about how ...

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

Pastor: The serpent deceitfully says to the woman, “Did God actually say” what you think He said? All: O God, we have heard the deceiver’s words, and we have distrusted your word. We have not deligh...

In his poem Cocktail Party , T. S. Eliot captures a fundamental truth about human nature and the source of much hurt in the world. People’s actions are rarely driven by outright malice—intended t...

In his book “Where Is God When It Hurts?”, author Philip Yancey shares an unfortunate, yet central dynamic related to how Americans respond to pain: we do everything possible to avoid it. That means p...

In Four Quartets , T. S. Eliot writes that “any action is a step to the block.” He means that our actions always draw us closer to death, and in that sense every action we take is a wager of our ...

“He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-...

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

The book of Proverbs is, in ways, a treatise on talk. I would summarize it this way: words give life; words bring death—you choose . What does this mean? It means you have never spoken a neutral ...

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 ...

Every time your enemy fires a curse, you must fire a blessing, and so you are to bombard back and forth with this kind of artillery. The mother grace of all graces is Christian good-will.

I did some of my Clinical Pastoral Education Units in Gastonia. One of the units that I served was the Emergency Department. If there was an incident that was suspected to be gang related, they would ...

In Guilt and Grace , Swiss physician and Christian, Paul Tournier, writes… I cannot study this very serious problem of guilt with you without raising the very obvious and tragic fact that rel...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

It is the prerogative and charm of beauty to win hearts.

Every person enjoys dignity and suffers from depravity. The structure of personality is a result of the interaction of these two dynamics.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Love keeps no record of wrongs. We keep to-do lists so we don’t forget We check them twice We carry them in our pockets Holding on to the pain The disappointment The failure Re-viewing the wrong Poi...