Matthew 18:3-4, Hebrews 11:1, Genesis 28:10-17, Proverbs 3:5-6, Isaiah 11:6, Luke 2:8-20, James 1:17
In his book of sermons titled The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner mentions two qualities of childlikeness. First, children have no fixed preconceptions of reality. If someone tells them that ...
John 12:1-3, 2 Samuel 6:14-16, John 6:1-13, Zephaniah 3:17, James 1:17, Psalm 34:8
Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are and other children’s books, gets many letters from his young fans. A favorite was a “charming” drawing sent on by a little boy’s m...
Proverbs 10:19, James 1:19, Matthew 12:36, Colossians 4:6, Amos 5:13, 1 Samuel 3:
My friend Joi told me that when she was growing up, her parents invented a ploy to keep her from talking all of the time. They told her that people are allowed only so many words in one lifetime, and ...
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession, and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. Especially strong thinking powers (...
Romans 12:17-21, Matthew 23:23, Amos 5:24, Zechariah 7:9-10, James 1:19-20
As any parent of small children will tell you, children have an amazingly acute sense of justice. Even the most fractional disparity in the distribution of the most trivial family good will be met wit...
Isaiah 61:3, John 11:32-35, Romans 8:28, Genesis 37:50, James 1:17, Romans 6:23 , 1 Corinthians 12:28
A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particu...
Proverbs 31:10-31, Matthew 6:19-21 , Luke 10:38-42, Ecclesiastes 4:6 , Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, James 1:17, Isaiah 9:6, Luke 2:11, John 3:16-17 , Luke 2:10
Ann was a working mother in her 30’s, and one of the millions of women who saw the marshmallow castle on the December cover of a popular women’s magazine. Ann confessed, later, that she felt like a “b...
1 Samuel 16:7, Proverbs 4:7, Philippians 2:3-4, Matthew 7:12, James 1:19
In the intro sequence of the beloved children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , the first interior shot does not show the host. Instead, in the beat before Fred Rogers appears on the screen si...
Proverbs 3:5-6, Micah 6:8, Matthew 7:13-14, James 1:5, Romans 12:2, Jeremiah 6:16, Psalm 119:105
A few years ago I was with my family in Washington, D.C., a wildly complex city laid out like a square wheel with broken spokes making an angular maze that is a nightmare to navigate. However, my fami...
1 Corinthians 3:2, Hebrews 5:12-14, Luke 10:25-26, Deuteronomy 6:7, James 1:22
[M]y husband, Nick, tells a story of when he was a teenager riding his bike with his friends, and his chain came off his bike. Nick took the bike to his dad, who said, “I'll fix it, you watch”. Hi...
Proverbs 3:5-6 , Exodus 31:1-5 , 1 Kings 3:5-12, James 1:5, Matthew 25:34-40, Psalm 37:23
George Washington Carver was one of our great scientists, and he often prayed, addressing God as “Mr. Creator.” One night he walked out into the woods and prayed, “Mr. Creator, why did you make the un...
Hebrews 12:6-7, James 1:2-4, Psalm 94:12-13, Proverbs 3:11-12, Romans 5:3-5
Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was th...
James 1:19, Luke 24:13-25, 1 Corinthians 14:9, Matthew 13:10-17
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place .” George Bernard Shaw Three-year-old Matthew was chewing on an apple when he asked, “Daddy, why is ...
Isaiah 1:17, Colossians 3:12, Romans 12:10, Proverbs 31:8-9, Galatians 6:2, Matthew 25:40, James 1:27
In this beautiful illustration from Tom Long’s well-known preaching guide, The Witness of Preaching , a pastor shares a true story of what valuing human life can look like when God’s Kingdom takes ro...
Mark 13:37, Philippians 4:4-5, James 1:17, Psalm 95:2-3, 2 Corinthians 9:7, Matthew 2:10-11
What do you want for Christmas this year? If you were to ask a typical little boy, he’d probably give you two words: video games. There’s a little boy I know named Brian. For weeks he bugged his paren...
Matthew 13:13, Colossians 4:6, Proverbs 25:11, Luke 24:45, 1 Corinthians 8:1-2, James 1:19
In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twen...
One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...
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...
James 1:19, Proverbs 3:5-6, John 7:24, Proverbs 18:17, Proverbs 14:12, Luke 6:37, 1 Corinthians 4:5
Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible ...
The Necessity of Memory Memory—or, more actively, remembering , plays an all-important role in our lives. Our culture likes us to focus on the now, "looking forward rather than looking back&q...
2 Corinthians 3:18, Romans 8:29, Philippians 2:12-13, James 1:22-25, Colossians 3:10, Ephesians 4:22-24, 1 Peter 2:2-3, Hebrews 12:11
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...
Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . ....
Philippians 1:6, Romans 5:3-5, Jeremiah 29:11, 2 Peter 3:18, James 1:2-4, Psalm 121:1-2
It’s part of the life cycle of every living thing to grow and mature. It’s also natural for us to hope that we will be better people today than we were yesterday and that the things that trouble us at...
Luke 11:1-13, Matthew 18:23-35, Colossians 3:13, James 1:2-3
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...
John 20:19-31, John 11:40, Mark 9:23, Romans 10:17, James 1:6, John 20:29
There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Charlie Brown are walking home from school. Charlie Brown tells Lucy that he got straight As. Lucy responds, “I won’t believe it unless I see the report ...
A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...