studies on Jesus' Sacrifice

In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: “God gets his family back.” From the fi...

I asked participants who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this ...

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 .” ...

In his excellent study of the famous Biblical passage on shepherds, ( The Good Shepherd: A Thousand Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament ) , scholar Ken Bailey provides helpful context...

I heard about a pastor who was asked by a man in the community to do his brother’s funeral. Neither of the men had been churchgoers or showed any religious inclinations. The man offered to give $25,00...

Once, while on vacation, on our way to church, Terri and I got into a disagreement over something. When I felt I was losing, to make my point, I stopped the car and got out. We were on a country road....

The word Gehenna is used by Jesus twelve times in the four Gospels. God’s first response to the belittlement of his name is this Greek word Gehenna, which we would translate “hell.” The interesting th...

The New Testament portrays Christ, the Son, as actively “sustain[ing] all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3), serving as the cohesive force of the universe. A.H. Strong expands on this idea: ...

In Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don't Give Away More Money, the authors point out that if Americans who professed to be "strong" or "very strong" Christians tit...

Recently I read about an experiment done by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He came up with a fascinating hypothetical exercise, which went something like this: Participants were handed a summary of a p...

The leading causes of death [in America] are self-inflicted — side effects of tobacco, obesity, alcohol, sexually transmitted disease, drugs, and violence. We need a transformation. We need the kind o...

How many of you have ever been told that women talk more than men? How many of you have heard this statistic, on average women use 20,000 words a day to men’s 7,000? I know I’ve heard this quote in se...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

John Donne (1572–1631), was a British poet who entered the ministry in 1615 and served as dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, from 1621 until his death, Donne underwent a profound transformation aft...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

What is happening to us, we who are the ministers of Jesus Christ? Many of us are professionally, spiritually and financially depressed. The figures produced by studies only serve to quantify what we ...

In their book Passing the Plate (Oxford, 2008), Christian Smith and Michael Emerson introduce the phrase “discretionary obligation” as a way to understand the typical American Christian’s approach to ...

Recently I was running the vision of our church by my thera­pist, who is this Jesus-loving, ubersmart PhD. Our dream was to re-architect our communities around apprenticeship to Jesus. (That feels so ...

There is no question then of the doctrine of the Trinity being a kind of numerical puzzle designed to test faith or to baffle the human mind. The doctrine does not state the paradox that God is one be...

Much of American spiritual life trudges through the muck of solitary spirituality. Twenty years ago, Robert Bellah described this phenomenon. in Habits of the Heart , with his now famous description ...

In his book Gratitude Works, psychologist and Gratitude expert Robert Emmons begins by drawing an important connection between the practice of gratitude and memory. He also goes on to share how religi...

What is the difference between people who thrive and people who decline over a long period of time? It’s not that they don’t get knocked down; it’s that they bounce back up. Every successful person I ...

Studies reveal that 37 percent of Americans take fewer than seven days of vacation a year. In fact, only 14 percent take vacations that last longer than two weeks. Americans take the shortest paid vac...

I preached my first sermon at National Community Church on January 14, 1996. The only thing I remember about that message is my opening illustration. I can’t remember the original source, but I think ...

Of the medieval church’s many intellectual leaders, none has had more influence than the philosophical theologian Thomas Aquinas. He was born to a noble family near Naples, Italy, and joined the Domin...

In Vanishing Grace , Philip Yancey examines the growing negative perceptions of evangelicals. Although the book was written in 2014, these dynamics have only intensified in the era of MAGA and Ch...

Ministers run the awful risk . . . of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives — let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to — of a living God who transcends ...

In this excellent little character study, Tolstoy describes the inner monologue of the character Pierre Bezuhov from War & Peace , who is able to justify and convince himself that a promise made ...

Within the Christian community this leads to a prominence of teaching on the will of God and how to know it. Russ Johnston draws upon his own wide experience to remark how this continues to be one of ...

Desire is part of what it means to be a child, as implied in Jesus’ words to his disciples when he tells them, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never ente...