thought exercise on God Seeking Us

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...

There are no vowels in the Hebrew (YHWH), which makes it impossible to know exactly what the word is. Some old translations say ‘Jehovah’. Modern scholars tend to speak of ‘Yahweh’. When the word appe...

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...

God uses the wilderness experiences in our lives to teach us his name. If we, like Moses, wish to see God’s glory, it will often be in the wilderness that we see it. The beauty of the desert experienc...

Holy Scripture is witness to the light of God that arises in the midst of the deepest darkness to illumine the darkness. Scripture is not witness to the light taking away the darkness or exempting peo...

The “world” of 1 John 2:15 doesn’t refer to the created order or to the blessings that come from living in a modern society, such as modern conveniences or medical and scientific advances. For God cre...

Alfred Hitchcock said movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.” Car chases and first kisses, interesting plot lines and good conversations. We don’t want to watch our lead character going on a wal...

R. C. Sproul points out that diligence matters in sanctification. We may remember Archimedes’ “Eureka!” moment about specific gravity and Newton’s observation of the falling apple as point-in-time eve...

Advent is a coming, not our coming to God, but his to us. We cannot come to God, he is beyond our reach; but he can come to us, for we are not beneath his mercy. Even in another life, as St. John sees...

What if a true prophet—a true follower of the King—is not designed to stand by while all around them falls but instead is created to be the one who walks into the storm to engage—and yes, even confron...

In his June 1749 letter to Voltaire, the French Atheist Denis Diderot famously ruled that is is “very important not to mistake the hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not believe in God, is not imp...

My wife is a very social person. She loves being with groups of people, having dinners, celebrating special occasions or just hanging out with her friends. She is an elementary school teacher, which m...

The fact is there is nothing that we are doing that God could not raise up a stone in the field to do for him. The realization of this puts us in our true place. Though, lest we get too knocked down by...

In his classic book, Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster shares 10 principles that can help you cultivate an attitude of simplicity over consumerism: Buy things for their usefulness rather than...

Many of us presume that atheists and agnostics don’t think or care one bit for God. But this is not the case. Heinrich Böll, a German writer and devout Catholic, once joked, “I don’t like these atheis...

There are times, when we’re waiting on God to do something for us, when (sad to say) God seems to take forever. And there are times when God is waiting on us to do something for God, when (thank God) ...

The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck was convinced that buried in our explicit pursuit of sex is an implicit pursuit of God. He noted that sex is likely to be the closest that most people ever come to ...

Of the seventy-three psalms that are linked to David’s story, thirteen refer to specific incidents in his life. These references pull into focused clarity various parts of the story of this person who...

Sometimes, of course, the sense of God with us becomes much more distinct. My oldest brother, J. I. Willard, served for over thirty years as a minister under the blessing of God. But his entry into th...

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...

For all the gifts and abilities that God has given us, we are still his creatures who do not possess the divine control over life. But that limit is rejected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The ...

Last week, an atheist came up to me and asked how I could believe in a God who made parents eat their children.  Naturally, I was a little confused. A lot of people have odd ideas about God, but ...

The great African-American preacher Gardner Taylor, preacher of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn for over 40 years, begins one of his sermons with a paean to the God revealed to us in the 66 boo...

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...

For years Kyle and I [Jamin Goggin] had no trouble looking critically upon others in their quest for power. We bemoaned the rock-star pastors who were in the spotlight, whose churches appeared to be m...

I remember a story that R. A. Torrey told, growing out of a series of meetings he had held in Melbourne, Australia. He had been speaking on prayer. One day just before a noon meeting a note was placed...

We ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us...

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

Writer Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938), after years of seeking happiness, articulated his gloomy assessment of life: The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being ...

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...