analogies from luke 15

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the sixth commandment ( Thou shalt not commit adultery ) and the second half of our lives struggling with the fifth comma...

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...

If you think of your identity and heart as an engine, you could say there is a kind of fuel that powers it cleanly and efficiently—and a kind of fuel that is not only polluting but also destroys the e...

In her memoir, Confessions of a Good Christian Girl, Tammy describes the internal turmoil she experienced trying to be a good, rule-following Christian who had unexpectedly built an entire life arou...

Hope remains possible even amid our failures—whether we disappoint God, let down our families, or fall short of our own expectations—because divine compassion operates like an inexhaustible well. Each...

The 19th and 20th century Canadian-American pastor Harry Ironside once told a story of a new Christian who gave his testimony during a church service. Beaming with joy, the man spoke of how God had re...

Martin Luther said that every Christian ought to read the Bible from cover to cover every year. But, likening the Bible to a forest, he also said that reading the Bible doesn’t become really enjoyable...

On May 1, 2023, a small aircraft carrying seven passengers crashed deep in the Amazon rainforest, one of the most remote regions on Earth. The Cessna had been flying between two villages in southern C...

Carl Jung, one of the early pioneers of modern psychology, wrote this from his years of experience as a therapist: The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of ...

Many Christians know John Newton as the author of the hymn Amazing Grace and other beloved hymns. Fewer know that Newton’s own life matches the beauty of transformation written in Amazing Gra...

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 .” ...

The guillemot, a small Arctic seabird, nests in dense colonies on the rocky cliffs of the North Atlantic and Arctic. Thousands of these birds gather in tight spaces, with hundreds of females laying th...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

To help us in our confession we may want to picture a path littered with many rocks. Some are small pebbles, others are quite large, and still others are almost completely buried so that we cannot kno...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

In 1890 Francis Thompson, a Roman Catholic poet, described God as “The Hound of Heaven”:  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;  I fled Him,...

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

Ralph Fiennes (1962–) is a renowned British film actor, with a long-list of film credits to his name, including The Constant Gardner, Schindler’s List, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.  He also starred i...

Do you remember seeing the golden sarcophagus of the pharaoh Tutankhamun ? What has he got in his hands? If you remembered that he was holding a shepherd’s crook, you’re right (he is also holding a...

In this excerpt, the French monastic leader Frere Pierre Marie, shares an interpretation of Jesus as the true prodigal son—bringing all of us home with him: He, who is born not from human stock, or ...

The child became a man and the man became a preacher whose sermons were full of commonplace things: seeds and nets, coins and fishes, lilies of the field, and birds of the air. Wherever he was, he had...

The neighborhood bar is possible the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give his church. It’s an imitation, dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but...

Starbucks exploded by not just offering customers a cup of coffee but by giving them a comfortable, sophisticated environment in which to relax. Customers felt good about themselves when they walked i...

In the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas, U2’s Bono does a great job describing God’s grace. After describing how the concept of karma is central to many religions, Bono explains how karm...

Jesus doesn’t just use the shepherd metaphor when he refers to himself as the door. Over and over in the Bible, we are compared to sheep. Some people think it’s heartwarming. But I hate to tell you, i...

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life…. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for pe...

Sam and Pam, two friends, both arrived in the United States as immigrants from the country of Quadora. Each one wanted to buy a house, and it so happened they each found one for sale by a certain weal...