philippians from matthew 1

In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is...

You have wonderfully created us, O God, and yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature. Allow us to share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesu...

Leader: Our God is not only for us, People: He is also with us. Leader: Through His suffering, death, and resurrection, People: God’s Son, Jesus Christ, has secured our home in eternity. L...

We believe in one God,     the Father, the Almighty,     maker of heaven and earth,     of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,     the only Son of God,     eternally b...

I believe in one God,     the Father Almighty,     maker of heaven and earth,     and of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord Jesus Christ,     the only-begotten Son of God,     begotten...

Just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil an...

By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is a...

“He stands by you:” A drowning man cannot pull himself out of the water by his own hair. Neither can you do it. Someone else must rescue you. This is the good news of Christmas. He who stands by you a...

Christmas is telling you that you could never get to heaven on your own. God had to come to you.

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...

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...

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...

The Son of God did not want to be seen and found in heaven. Therefore he descended from heaven into this humility and came to us in our flesh, laid himself into the womb of his mother and into the man...