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Weighing the Options
Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ... -
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The Martyr's Mindset: Ignatius of Antioch and Death as Worship
How many modern Christians consider dying to be the worst thing that can happen to them? We pray for safety, healing, and protection, and rightly so. However, do we live in the truth that death has tr... -
Quote
How shall my heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? -
liturgy
Adapted from Philippians 3:7-8, 10
"But whatever gain we had We count as loss for the sake of Christ. We consider everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord." For his sake we will... -
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Losing Everything
A ship went down in a storm, and only one man survived. He was fortunate enough to land on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. With just a few items in his pocket, he was able to build a small... -
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When Success looks like Failure
Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain... -
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Preparing for Change
Change invariably leads to loss, loss to grief, grief to anxiety and, finally, anxiety to hostility. We need therefore, to acknowledge grief. We need to understand and choose to walk with the grieving... -
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Hiding Sorrow can Create Confusion
Dan B. Allender, in his book Leading Character, tells the story of a friend whose daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. He kept news of his daughter’s illness to himself, fearing that his employees wo... -
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I Couldn’t in Good Conscience…
The British poet Thomas Campbell, attending a horse race with some friends, bet one of them (Thomas Wilson) £50 that the horse Yellow Cap, would come in first place. After the race ended, Campbell, th... -
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Fear & Growth, Risk & Comfort
Fear and growth go together like macaroni and cheese. It’s a package deal. The decision to grow always involves a choice between risk and comfort. This means that to be a follower of Jesus you must re... -
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Finding Money
Honoré de Balzac, who would later gain fame as a celebrated writer in post-Napoleonic France, was known for his intricate characters and keenly realistic writing style. Like many young artists, he end... -
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Unless there is an element of risk in our exploits for God, there is no need for faith. -
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Business: A Dog-Eat-Dog World?
In his book A Better Way to Think about Business, the late business philosopher Robert Solomon, a student of business jargon, speaks of having been struck by the imagery that peppers many [business] p... -
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Cheap Grace vs. Costly Grace
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting to-day for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market… Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system…. Chea... -
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The Deepwater Horizon Crisis and Our Need for a Savior
In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor... -
Quote
When we lose sight of beauty our struggle becomes tired and functional. When we expect and engage the Beautiful, a new fluency is set free within us and between us. The heart becomes rekindled and our... -
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One Mark of Resilience
Many of life’s annoyances just have to be ignored. That doesn’t mean that we suppress, ignore, or deny every pain. Serious pain has to be confronted. But one mark of resilience is learning to tell whi... -
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Medical literature is replete with case reports of patients dying, not from actual illness, but from believing they were sick, from the fear they were going to die. -
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The Value Remains the Same
Garry Smalley was a Christian counselor and prolific author. He was known for one particular illustration about the intrinsic value each of us has as children of God. Speaking at a large event, he ask... -
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The Self-Destruction of Executives
In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde... -
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Gardeners and Failure
All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem fairly intrigued by the pe... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Luke 16:19-31
Introduction Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other wo... -
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The Conscience Fund
Did you know that ever since 1811 (when someone who had defrauded the government anonymously sent $5 to Washington D.C.) the U.S. Treasury has operated a Conscience Fund? Since that time almost $3.5 m... -
lectionary
16th Sunday after Pentecost
Introduction Our text falls within a larger section (Luke 16) in which Jesus deals head-on with questions of money, specifically the need to choose God over mammon (the worship of money), in other wo... -
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Calling on God, not Bank of America
The comedian Richard Pryor, who was critically injured in a severe accident, once shared on Johnny Carson’s show that when faced with life-threatening situations, worldly concerns lose their significa... -
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What Drives Success?
In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ... -
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A Step to the Block
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 ... -
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A Christian Business: What Does that Mean?
While from the outside there might not be immediately noticeable differences between a well-run company reflecting a gospel worldview and one reflecting primarily the world-story of the marketplace, i... -
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Circumstances or God’s Faithfulness
On a daily basis we’re faced with two simple choices. We can either listen to ourselves and our constantly changing feelings about our circumstances, or we can talk to ourselves about the unchanging t... -
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Throwing Away Valuable Resources
In many parts of the country, leaf clean-up is an annual chore. They fall from the trees, blanket our lawns, and we often bag them up and toss them out (or burn them). There’s a lesson in this… In my...
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