studies on God's Help

Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi has a scene set in South Africa where the young Indian lawyer and a white clergyman are walking together on a boardwalk, contrary to South African law at the time. ...

While there are an infinite number of ways for a movie to fall short, a common complaint is if the inciting incident of the drama is solved in a way that comes out of nowhere, even breaking the logic ...

Sisters Corrie and Betsie ten Boom were ultimately sent to the Ravensbrück after being arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 for hiding Jewish people and members of the Dutch resistance from the Nazis. In ...

There’s a story (probably apocryphal) about a small dog that had been hit by a car and left injured by the side of the road. A passing nurse noticed the wounded animal, saw it was still alive, and sto...

A climber recently had to be airlifted off Japan’s Mount Fuji due to altitude sickness. That alone would have been a dramatic enough story. But four days later—still recovering—he climbed back up ...

King George V of Britain, who was king during the tumultuous years of World War I, shared a New Year’s card with his friends that featured a drawing of an open gate. Below the image, he included thi...

Not long ago, I had a young couple come to me and say, “Pastor, we’re looking at buying a house. We’ve looked at this one house, and we really like it, but we want to make sure it’s God’s will. Would ...

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham describes the importance of looking on the past with grace: Developing a redemptive memory requires recalling not only the pain of the pas...

The same week the global economy shrank by $7 trillion, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hit a record 231 million percent. In other words, if you had saved $1 million Zimbabwean dollars by Monday, on Tuesday...

Children are God’s gifts to immature people to help them grow up. They are also God’s gifts to help parents go deep with God. . . . Parenting is not for anything. It is not a contract with God in whic...

One remarkable illustration concerns Peter Marshall, the Scot who in the middle of the twentieth century became one of America’s most widely acclaimed ministers. Through his outstanding qualities as a...

Reporters Alex Alston and James Dickerson tell a sad story about a church that sought to integrate its ranks: The Mississippi Delta was in a tizzy over rumors that blacks might show up at white church...

Reporters Alex Alston and James Dickerson tell a sad story about a church that sought to integrate its ranks: The Mississippi Delta was in a tizzy over rumors that blacks might show up at white church...

To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p...

As I have worked to clarify my calling, I have learned to pay attention to my energy levels in response to different activities. If I experience a particular activity as being inordinately draining, I...

Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University and half the namesake of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, was an American minister who began his ministry in 1880. While he wrote and preached countle...

Adam was called by God to take care of Eden. But it was too much work for one man. Eden was massive. Adam was incapable of gardening the whole thing. He needed help.  That’s why God created Eve. Go...

Alexander Maclaren writes about the importance of recognizing our dependence on God for all we have: Up to the very edge we are driven before He puts out His hand to help us. It is best for us that w...

The early church took a view of suffering that stands in testimony to our comfort-addicted culture. For example, Ignatius of Antioch, a martyr in the second century, forbade his community from asking ...

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

Pastor John Ortberg shares this amazing story about how God sometimes uses even our broken pasts to to help others: I read about a woman who locked her keys in her car in a rough neighborhood. She t...

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

In his important book, The Crucifixion of Ministry, seminary professor Andrew Purves describes what he needed as he faced down a cancer diagnosis and the upcoming chemotherapy he would soon endure: ...

The coaching philosophy of Don Shula helps us understand the gifting of the church for God’s mission. Shula spent 26 years as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins. Under his leadership they had their ...

But hope is hard to come by. I should know. I remember the time when I was once busy dying. It wasn’t long after I had broken my neck in a diving accident that I spent one particularly hopeless week i...

The offer of this with-God life has not expired in our day. When my friend Kim was a young girl, her dad pulled the car off the road one day to help a woman change a flat tire. While he was lying unde...

A lesson often learned the hard way in each of our spiritual journeys is mistaking goodwill for vocation. Sometimes we feel deeply about an experience we have, whether it be on a mission trip or even ...

Is it possible that God’s promises are given less consideration and value today than in the time of evangelist Dwight Moody? Moody described the preciousness of God’s promises this way: Let a man ...

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 ...

Author and Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers suggests that instead of imagining a kingdom, a better way for us to understand what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of this script, this new way of livi...