thought exercise on Gut

If cosmic geography is culturally descriptive rather than revealed truth, it takes its place among many other biblical examples of culturally relative notions. For example, in the ancient world, peopl...

Sometimes we are given the advice to trust our guts when we make important decisions. Unfortunately, our guts are full of questionable advice. Consider the Ultimate Red Velvet Cheesecake at the Cheese...

We rationalize to make life with ourselves possible in a morally challenging world. Often the motivation for rationalization, though, is quite different. In recent decades, psychologists have argued c...

An American pastor once asked an Indonesian missionary who works among Indonesians but with a different people group from his own, “Are you afraid you’ll get caught?” Christian mission work in Indones...

In an attempt to engage in critical thinking, scholars suggest asking whether our opinions are true by simply asking if the opposite could be true. This practice (I’m not joking) is named after on an ...

Sarah Grimke, the daughter of a slaveholder and judge in Charleston, South Carolina, was five years old in 1797 when the sight of an enslaved person being whipped seared her conscience. Like many whit...

We may misunderstand the significance of food and dining in the Bible if we fail to understand the powerful cultural mores related to food. We can easily transfer our judgments about foods (that parti...

One of my favorite stories is of John of Kronstadt. He was the Nineteenth Century Russian Orthodox priest at the time when alcohol abuse was rampant. None of the priests ventured out of their churches...

Not everyone instinctively warms to the idea that God is a Father. There are many for whom their own experiences of overbearing, indifferent or abusive fathers make their very guts squirm when they he...

My experience with following indicates that it can be even more difficult than leading. Following requires humility, risk, attention, awareness and guts. It means serving someone else’s agenda and fol...

Isaiah 58 tells us that the Lord wants us to share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our homes, share our clothing with those who need some and not hide ourselves from the rest o...

My wife, Susan and I were sitting in the office of a fellow pastor, Jack Harrison, in the fall of 1992. The recommendation of friends had led us to Jack’s office. “He’s an amazing counselor,” they sai...

Many Christians . . . find themselves defeated by the most powerful psychological weapon that Satan uses against Christians. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-e...

There’s a gut–wrenching scene in the Korean film Secret Sunshine that captures the scandal of grace better than any film I’ve ever seen. The scene takes place in a prison, as protagonist Shin-ae (Jeon...

Before I spoke at a conference, a soloist sang one of my favorite songs, “Amazing Grace.” It was beautiful. Until she got to the tenth word. “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a soul like ...

In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas codified beauty as being directly connected to Jesus Christ with three characteristic features. He wrote, “Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of...

I’m convinced some company today could make a killing if it had the guts to market dysfunctional greeting cards. Most birthday or holiday cards gush with flowery sentiments such as, “To the greatest f...

Reading the Bible without applying it to your life can be downright dangerous. On August 3, 1996, Melvin Hitchens, sat on his front porch and read the Bible. After his Bible reading, this 66 year old ...

Another Bible translation says that Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (NKJV, emphasis added). What did she mean by magnifies? When you look at something through a magnifying glass, it looks much...

It’s easy to label what we consider “good things” in our lives as gifts from God and to welcome them with gratitude. But when difficult things happen, we don’t look at them as part of God’s good plan ...

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

When someone promises us something wonderful, we can hardly wait for that promise to be fulfilled. If the promise is something good, we want it now! We really don’t like to wait. And yet the very best...

It can be great fun to put up a tent in your backyard to play in or sleep in. Imagine what it would be like for someone else to put up a tent in your backyard and begin living there—right in your back...

The heart is used in Scripture as the most comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It has been described as “the place of cons...

Food is a holy and humbling mystery. Every time a creature eats it participates in God’s life-giving yet costly ways, ways that simultaneously affirm creation as a delectable gift, and as a divinely o...

Judaism has a prayer called the Asher Yatzar that is often recited after using the bathroom, a prayer grounded in the very real needs of our bodies. At first, some of us might blush over the idea of G...

Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...

Jesus was a whole human who had a head and a heart and a spirit. I forget that Jesus came to this earth, not as a brain in a Mason jar floating in formaldehyde, but as an embodied, incarnate, integral...

The seat of gratitude is the heart. Yet the workings of our hearts remain, in many ways, mysterious. On December 28, 2016, celebrated Hollywood actor Debbie Reynolds died at age eighty-four. The previ...

Now, what is the heart? Neurologically speaking the “heart” is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the part of the brain right between your eyes and slightly back from your forehead. It is in this br...