stories on Discipleship

George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus...

There once was a popular shaman in India whom people would seek out for advice. People would stand in line for hours, waiting to hear the choices they should make in their lives or the changes that wo...

[M]y husband, Nick, tells a story of when he was a teenager riding his bike with his friends, and his chain came off his bike. Nick took the bike to his dad, who said, “I'll fix it, you watch”. Hi...

The U of C [University of Chicago] has produced ninety-eight Nobel laureates, but I’m not sure any of them left as big an imprint on that university as its famed football coach, Amos Alonzo Stagg. Sta...

Some years ago our pastor told an unusual story about a Southern plantation owner who left a $50,000 inheritance to a former slave who had served him faithfully all his life. That was quite a sum of m...

*it is possible this story is apocryphal, we were unable to find the original source of the story. Admiral Nelson of the British Navy was renowned for his mastery of naval strategy, a genius fro...

In the early 1800s, the German naturalist and explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt journeyed through South America on a scientific expedition. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, he encountered Indigenous...

A friend of mine, lecturing in a theological college in Kenya, introduced his students to “The Quest for the Historical Jesus.” This, he said, was a movement of thought and scholarship that in its ear...

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

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...

As we travel through the New Testament, it becomes clear that Jesus’ disciples often get distracted, almost like they have a case of spiritual attention deficit disorder. They quickly lose focus and w...

Before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, many believed the world ended somewhere beyond Gibraltar, reflected in Spain’s royal motto: “Ne Plus Ultra,” meaning, “there is no more beyond.” But when Columb...

“It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.’ To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still ma...

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...

I (Josh) know a young man named Mark who was on the brink of self-destruction. He partied away his first semester of junior college and was later kicked out of school. He was devastated by his loss an...

I had just finished presenting much of the material in this chapter [on the role of the Church helping the poor] to an audience in Africa. A very tall and muscular African man in the audience approach...

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper: Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wa...

When our daughter Sara was four years old, she burst into the house carrying a water-filled baggie in which swam a wide-eyed burst of sunshine. “Look what they gave us at the birthday party!” (Gee tha...

One of the first Bible study groups I ever attended was at the Sigma Chi fraternity house at Cornell University. We were a hodgepodge of academics, sorority girls, fraternity boys, star athletes, matu...

When we speak of Christian living as a learned craft, we have a particular image in mind, that of an apprentice serving for years under the tutelage of a master. This is what my (Rich) grandfather did...

In ancient Judaism, discipleship was taken very seriously. It was taken so seriously that eager disciples would ty to follow their rabbi (teacher) everywhere they went. Why? Because they wanted to see...

We all desire to learn from our role models, but some take this ambition to the next level. The writer Hunter S. Thompson was so obsessed with the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and specifically his...

One of the fastest ways to learn a language is by immersion . This term can mean a few different things, but the basic idea in all of them is that you are exposed to that language in your social inte...

A couple years ago I got to take a tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The name is a bit misleading because what they are most known for are there amazing gardens. And so we were o...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...