john on Words

[Saint] Valentine was a priest in Rome when Emperor Claudius II began his hostile reign. Valentine was arrested for performing Christian weddings. While imprisoned, Valentine befriended the jailer’s d...

Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves ...

WORDS. We think words, hear words, speak words, sing words, write words, and read words—all the time. Every day. What do words have to do with Christianity? Almost everything. At every stage in redemp...

Mark Rutland humorously recalls a survey asking Americans which words they most long to hear. As expected, the top response was, “ I love you. ” The second was, “ I forgive you .” ...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

In the silence, we raise our voice before you. We wonder aloud why you are so far from us when we call. In the agony of our cry, we are reminded that it is we who have wandered from your fold, from th...

Eternal and Glorious God, Your grace calls us toward growth and service in You. Yet today we acknowledge the many times we have forgotten Your mercy and rejected Your love. Forgive us when we sin agai...

Voice 1: Words! Voice 2: By them the universe was created: planets and moons, stars and sky, all living things, day and night. People: We come today to worship and adore the Creator of this world and...

Taking Off the Old Clothes and Putting on the New Our passage continues Paul’s teaching on “the putting off of the old self” (anthropos) (of sin, corruption, and death) vs.22 and putting on the “new ...

Walker Percy wrote six novels in which he made us insiders to the spiritual disease of alienation that he found pervasive in American culture. His name for the condition is “lost in the cosmos.” We do...

President Calvin Coolidge returned home from attending church early one Sunday afternoon. His wife had been unable to attend, but she was interested in what the minister spoke on in the service. Cooli...

Jesus Christ was prone to making comments which seem to support an almost infinite variety of exegesis. A remark like ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and ‘unto God the things that are ...

In The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, the cartoon character Calvin says to his tiger friend, Hobbes, “I feel bad that I called Susie names and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I did it.” ...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

In A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean’s Father, a Presbyterian Minister, is sitting on the bank of the river, reading the Gospel of John while his sons are fishing. When Norman comes over to wher...

Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.