thought exercise on Lordship

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...

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...

Though lords still exist today in some parts of the world, the term is used mostly as an honorary badge, so it’s easy to forget what the term even means. Throughout history, lords were rulers who had ...

“A young man came to visit me with a question on his mind. He asked, “I prayed to receive Jesus as my Savior, but why has nothing really changed in my life?” I asked him, “Who is running your life?” H...

People in the world naturally want to boss others. Imagine a boy beginning work with a firm. He has a lowly place and is ordered around by everyone. Do this! Do that! Every dirty job is his. He is the...

…I started reading The Kindness of God by Catholic theologian and philosopher Janet Soskice. In her examination of the etymology of the word kindness, Soskice helped me see it for the first time as a ...

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 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...

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 ...

There’s a story told in Soviet Russia during the reign of Joseph Stalin. An elderly woman was praying in a Russian Orthodox Church. Walking to the front of the church, she came to a cross of Jesus and...

[The ascension] is easily said and understood that the Lord ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God. But they are dead words to the understanding if they are not grasped with the heart....

St. Anthony, the “father of monks,” is the best guide in our attempt to understand the role of solitude in ministry. Born around 251, Anthony was the son of Egyptian peasants. When he was about eighte...

While written almost 30 years ago, this poll of Christian leaders provides some interesting fodder for how to define excellence from a Biblical perspective: What, then, does excellence—as it is descr...

What the early Christians did not have to deal with to the same extent that we do today is how race has become an idol. On both sides of the racial divide, so much is twisted by the social constructs ...

I had just finished presenting much of the material in this chapter [on the role of the Church helping the poor] to an audience in Africa. A very tall and muscular African man in the audience approach...

The central vision of world history in the Bible is that all of creation is one, every creature in community with every other, living in harmony and security toward the joy and well-being of every oth...

A friend of mine once remarked that how we care for the land often mirrors how we care for those dependent on it, especially women and children. Is our attitude one of entitlement and privilege? Do we...

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 ...

Medieval Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the fourth petition (“give us this day our daily bread”), points out several ways that our own...

The word stewardship has recently fallen on hard times. To many it’s no longer relevant to the day in which we live. To some it’s a religious cliché used to make fund-raising sound spiritual. It conju...

A wealthy plantation owner invited John Wesley to his home. The two rode their horses all day, seeing just a fraction of all the man owned. At the end of the day the plantation owner proudly asked, “W...

While I don’t agree with late professor and scholar Marcus Borg on significant theological positions, I appreciate how he described the context surrounding Jesus’ new paradigm of kingdom living: In hi...

In the years 1014-1035 there ruled over England a Danish king named Canute. King Canute tired of hearing his retainers flatter him with extravagant praises of his greatness, power and invincibility. H...

The central plot device of The Lord of the Rings is the Dark Lord Sauron’s Ring of Power, which corrupts anyone who tries to use it, however good his or her intentions. The Ring is what Professor To...

On March 11, 1830, a young English girl was studying a lesson on the royal family with her tutor. As she examined the genealogical chart, she suddenly realized the astonishing truth—she was next in li...

As a novice in a Catholic religious order, Ronald Rolheiser was taught the importance of religious poverty by having to write “Ad Usam” inside every book he was given. This was to teach him that the b...

In the English language, worship is an important word. It comes from ancient Anglo-Saxon and means “worth-ship”—to ascribe ultimate worth to something or someone. Matthew is portraying the nature of t...

Hugh Latimer was the Bishop of Worcester, England during the reign of King Henry VIII. On one occasion he preached a sermon that offended the king, who sat in the audience. The king commanded Latimer ...

Neil Marten was a member of the British Parliament from 1959-1984. One day he was giving a group of constituents a guided tour of the Houses of Parliament. During the tour, the group happened upon the...

Truth be told, whether we realize it or not, we all harbor romantic notions of aristocracy. Though we claim equality as a cultural value, there is a part of us that dreams of leisure, luxury, comfort,...