thought exercise from john 6

The Grand Prince of Kiev (now called Russia), Vladimir the Great, was under intense pressure to choose a national religion. The year was 987 AD, and paganism was quickly going out of fashion. More and...

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America i...

A conversation in 1784 between Charles Simeon (a Calvinist and believer in unconditional predestination) and John Wesley (a follower of Arminius, who denied unconditional predestination) can help us u...

In The Phantom Tollbooth , there is a special kind of food called “subtraction stew.” Produced by a mathemagician, this stew makes you hungrier after you’ve eaten it. Our three main characters don’t ...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

Celebrated as one of the greatest writers of all time, French writer Marcel Proust (1871–1922) filled out a personal questionnaire at the start of his career for a magazine like the one we know today ...

The experience of Barry Taylor, former rock musician and now pastor, suggests a reason. He told me, “In the early 1970s my best friend became a Jesus freak. I thought he was crazy, so I started search...

Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular:  There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible — until we manage to get so used to it that we ...

A few days ago I met with a young couple. Their toddler was injured in a car accident. When I visited them in the hospital, the child was on life support. As we stood outside the ICU and spoke, I saw,...

Frank Laubach recounts the profound shift in his life that came when he wholeheartedly committed to following God’s will: Before that moment, I was barely alive—like a tree rotting from within. Bu...

‘In the beginning God.’ The first four words of the Bible are more than a way of launching the story of creation or introducing the book of Genesis. They supply the key which opens our understanding t...

A loaf of bread is the bearer of at least four major narratives or histories; (1) a narrative of natural processes that yield diverse plant growth, yeast spores, salt, sugar, and water; (2) an agricul...

God wants to feed his people. In keeping the one tree from them, God protected Adam and Eve. When they broke table fellowship with God, they suspected that God was withholding something good, that thi...

The creation of food, tongues, and the human digestive system is the product of infinite wisdom knitting the world together in a harmonious whole. The symphony of glory that sounds from the triune bei...

In North America, the fastest-growing segment of the population, categorized according to religious affiliation, are the “nones,” meaning those who are done with formal religious affiliation. This inc...

It’s remarkable that when the Father declares at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” Jesus hasn’t yet done much of anything that many would find impressive. He hasn’...

God wants to feed his people. In keeping the one tree from them, God protected Adam and Eve. When they broke table fellowship with God, they suspected that God was withholding something good, that thi...

If we are honest with ourselves, for many of us who celebrate the sacraments on a regular basis, at times we take them for granted. We lose sight of their nature to inspire and remind us of our covena...

Jesus Christ was prone to making comments which seem to support an almost infinite variety of exegesis. A remark like ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and ‘unto God the things that are ...

Charles Templeton was a close friend and preaching associate of Billy Graham in the 1940s. He effectively preached the gospel to large crowds in major arenas. However, intellectual doubts began to nag...

Paul talks about “the table of the Lord” in 1 Corinthians 10:21. We are hosted by Jesus. In Roman Catholicism the bread itself is effectively the host, because it hosts the physical presence of Christ...

While I was speaking to some college students recently, an interesting twist on the contrast between our unresponsiveness and God’s great desire for us came up. One student asked, “Why would a loving ...

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 excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the tension that all ministries must live in; the focus on this world or the wor...

In one of the classic scenes from Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist, the misfortunate young orphan, Oliver, is stuck in a workhouse, laboring for long hours and getting barely enough gruel to keep h...

The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, “Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can...

A man walks into a pet store and says, “I want a talking parrot.” The clerk says, “Yes sir, I have two birds that talk. This large green parrot here is quite a talker.” He taps on the cage, and the bi...

For Christians, to share in the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, means to live as people who know that they are always guests – that they have been welcomed and that they are wanted. It is, perhaps, the...