thought exercise on King

It is recorded that Frederick the Great, of Prussia, was once walking down a road outside Berlin when he came face to face with an unusual looking old man. “Who are you?” Frederick asked. “I am a ki...

When you purchase a game of checkers, you’ll notice that on the top of each piece is the insignia of a crown. That is because each checker was created to become a king. Once it is crowned because it h...

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...

In his wonderful book, God’s Big Picture, Vaughan Roberts gives readers an overview of the Bible, focusing on the importance of context for developing a deeper understanding of holy scripture. In this...

In this poem by Lord Byron, the poet re-imagines the ancient battle of Salamis, in which Xerxes, king of Persia was defeated by a Greek coalition in 480 B.C. The poem highlights how quickly the fortun...

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...

The kings Of history are rewarded with many impressive descriptors: majestic, exalted, glorious, sovereign. Men and women bow before such heights of nobility; even the eyes of wealth and status fall t...

In this modern day parable, Alan Fadling describes a king and his two servants. Each of the servants desires to do the will of the king, but they approach their work very differently: One of the serv...

In Romans 8:18, Paul describes the future of those who persevere in the faith: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us....

Francois Fenelon was the court preacher for King Louis XIV of France in the 17th century. One Sunday when the king and his attendants arrived at the chapel for the regular service, no one else was the...

Lord John Culpepper was witness to a dramatic turn of events in English history. He was a member of the privy council of King Charles I, who was executed in 1649, apparently contrary to the law and th...

In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth ove...

There are some stories that continue to be told generations after they were originally written. The tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table still captivates those eager to hear about a ...

The British novelist George MacDonald loved writing stories about princes and princesses. At one point in his life, someone asked him why he focused so much of his writing on them. His answer was prof...

Most of us probably assumed Elvis Presley enjoyed his unofficial moniker of “the king.” As it turns out, Elvis had a rather complicated, if not tortured experience with fame and fortune. One day duri...

In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor is a steward of Gondor, the great kingdom of men. He comes from a long line of stewards who have ruled Gondor as temporary lords while the kingdom waited for the n...

He [Jesus] was not the king they expected. He wasn’t like the monarchs of old who sat on their jeweled and ivory thrones, dispensing their justice and wisdom. Nor was he the great warrior-king some ha...

The Gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it’s about being called to follow a King. Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done—but someone with the power ...

Cody is a member of our church who moved to Thailand to share the gospel with college students. One night, a student named Annan invited Cody to go to a movie. The two of them arrived and sat down in ...

Elite athletes will sometimes say that “game recognizes game” (or occasionally more grammatically suspect variants of that). By this is meant that someone who is particularly skilled at something is u...

In this short excerpt, scholar N.T. Wright describes the expectations regarding the Jewish messiah king: The coming King would do two main things, according to a variety of texts and as we study a v...

Saint Aidan was an Irish monk who later became bishop of Northumbria (Northern England and Parts of Scotland) in 635. He also founded the famous monastery at Lindisfarne. There is a story told of his ...

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

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 ...

Rodney King had led the police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles. Eventually the police got him to stop, and after he exited the car, he was savagely beaten by four officers. The entire countr...

Saint Stephen’s Day, also known as the Feast of Saint Stephen or Boxing Day, is observed on December 26. You may have actually heard of St. Stephen’s Day through a popular Christmas carol “Good King W...

The streets of Cairo were hot and dusty. Our missionary friends Pat and Rakel Thurman took us down an alley. We drove past Arabic signs to an overgrown graveyard for American missionaries. As Nanci an...

Not long before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the congregation at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church: If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. An...

In the eleventh century, King Henry III of Bavaria grew tired of court life and the pressures of being a monarch. He made application to Prior Richard at a local monastery, asking to be accepted as a ...

William Barclay tells the story of Hugh Latimer, one of England’s great preachers and leaders of the English reformation (16th cent.), eventually a martyr for that cause. On an occasion when Latimer w...