philippians from hebrews 2

The Child of glory,  The Child of Mary,  Born in the stable;  The King of all,  Who came to the wilderness  And in our stead suffered;  Happy they are counted  Who to Him are near. When He Himself sa...

[I] try to get into their world a little bit [by listening to hip-hop], because if they’re only adapting to you and you’re not adapting to them in some way, I don’t think you’ve developed a relationsh...

Will the Real Jesus, Please Stand Up? Quite a few years have passed since I sat through a systematic theology class and had the professor pitch a variety of difficult to hit balls at us regarding the...

Imagine for a moment becoming a baby again. Imagine giving up language and muscle coordination. Imagine losing the ability to eat solid food and control your bladder. God as a fetus! Or imagine yourse...

I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So onc...

God became a part of the human family so that we could become a part of his heavenly family.

Only with great care. For thousands, carols will be their only link with a church. At the same time, sentimentality is perhaps the single most dangerous feature of our Church and culture-and the senti...

The Incarnation [and I might add Communion] remains a scandal to anyone who wants religion to be a purely spiritual matter, an etherized, bloodless bliss.

It can be great fun to put up a tent in your backyard to play in or sleep in. Imagine what it would be like for someone else to put up a tent in your backyard and begin living there—right in your back...

When he was a young boy, twelfth-century church leader Bernard of Clairvaux fell asleep outside a church while waiting to go in for a Christmas Eve service. In his sleep he had a dream, a kind of visi...

Why should I, who have been living from all eternity in the enjoyment of the Father’s love, go to cast myself into such a furnace for them that never can requite me for it? Why should I yield myself t...

I am watching a family of black-tailed squirrels. I should be working on a Christmas message but can’t focus. They seem set on entertaining me. They scamper amid the roots of the tree north of my offi...

I learned about incarnation when I kept a salt-water aquarium. Management of a marine aquarium, I discovered, is no easy task. I had to run a portable chemical laboratory to monitor the nitrate levels...

Ronald Rohlheiser begins his excellent book, Our One Great Act of Fidelity , with a story of a young girl. She had awoken from a nightmare, convinced that monsters had invaded her room and were comin...

C.S. Lewis on the Incarnation: We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less. . . . ...

Humble. Before Jesus, almost no pagan author had used “humble” as a compliment. Yet the events of Christmas point inescapably to what seems like an oxymoron: a humble God. The God who came to earth ca...

One thing we often do as human beings is take for granted how our physical presence can impact those around us. Do you remember how big your parents seemed when you were a kid? They were massive! Over...