thought exercise on Pentecost

There were three annual festivals in Israel—Passover along with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), and the Feast of Tabernacles. You can read about them in Leviticus 23 and...

Writing to his parents while imprisoned on the day of Pentecost, the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this: At the tower of Babel all the tongues were confounded, and as a result men could no longe...

When the great theologian Jürgen Moltmann was sixteen years old in 1943, he was drafted into the German army and was soon captured by the Allied forces. He wound up in a prisoner of war camp in Scotla...

Many years ago a great Arctic explorer started on an expedition to the North Pole. After two long years in the lonely northland, he wrote a short message, tied it under the wing of a carrier pigeon, a...

Hannah was one of my wife’s work colleagues. She used to love spending time with our congregation, but she found the gospel message just plain weird. We did some Bible studies with her over the summer...

I’ve always thought that Jesus gave a very odd first step to completing the Great Commission, basically telling them, “Do nothing until the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (Luke 24:49, my paraphrase). Wit...

In his excellent book on worship, The Dangerous Act of Worship , pastor and president of Fuller Seminary Mark Labberton shares a story of the transformation of one of his former congregants: Ben ...

In describing whether it is possible for us to live like Jesus, pastor John Stott shares an illustration from William Temple: It is no good giving me a play like Hamlet or King Lear, and telling me ...

Christ followers were first called Christians at Antioch—about fifteen years after the birth of the church at Pentecost. There must have been something remarkable about this particular group of believ...

Serious attention paid to the themes of the season following the Feast of the Epiphany, in particular, can be a strong antidote to a weak Christology. To be sure, all of the church calendar is formed ...

Nobody ever went up to Jesus after his blistering warning about religious hypocrisy and shook his hand and said, “Thanks, rabbi. That was a nice talk." Nobody went up to Moses after the thunder, ...

The solution to gender, race and social divisions is not to eradicate our differences but to see them in light of Jesus. The Pentecostal movement in the United States in the early twentieth century wa...

Susanne Wesley, wife of Pastor Samuel Wesley, lived in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s She gave birth to nineteen children, ten survived. Everyday she would take her Bible to her favorite chair and...

In grad school, although I was studying to become a clinical psychologist, I started working at a Baptist church. I discovered then that I loved to preach . . . until one weekend when the sermon wasn’...

Sometimes what seems like a failure is actually the seed of God’s work. As Mark Batterson tells the story, it started with David and Svea Flood. Sent to the Congo by a church in Sweden, they helped es...

One of my favorite stories about intercessory prayer comes from Tony Campolo. A prayer meeting was held for him just before he spoke at a Pentecostal college chapel service. Eight men took Tony to a b...

This vortex of dying and rising—Jesus’ and ours in him—is the paschal mystery. Christians still tell it and taste it, especially when we gather for worship on Sunday. Christ’s Pascha—the word for the...

One key difference between much of the early church vs. the church of today (at least in the West) was the belief in, and regular experience of, miracles. As Joel Green, the noted professor and writer...

The Greek word for Easter, pascha, means “passage.” It evokes so many different passages for us: the Israelites’ passage from slavery to freedom, our own passage from sin to forgiveness, Jesus’ passag...

New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright recalls being at a party once when someone decided to read a portion of the seventeenth-century Prayer Book for laughs. The Prayer Book includes ...

Frederick Buechner is a master of capturing the excitement of the moment of Palm Sunday. It’s a great reminder that the story itself is a great illustration! We call it Palm Sunday because maybe t...

”Paul and his band were “released,” not sent. Let’s get the exegesis right. First, the operative agent here is the Holy Spirit, not the local church or any other human entity. Second, what those aroun...

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...

Pastor John Ortberg tells the story of a friend of his (also a pastor named Skip Viau) who was attempting to tell the resurrection story in a children’s sermon. He asked the question, “What were Jesus...

A student of mine called me late one evening after worship. He was really excited on the other end, and I had to ask him to slow down. So, he says, “Mother Kim, this strange thing happened to me today...

At the very beginning of creation, the book of Genesis tells us, there was watery chaos. And over that watery chaos there was, depending on how you read the Hebrew, the Holy Spirit hovering or a great...

Every Communion is an embodiment of God’s grace. We hear God’s grace in the words that are spoken. But we also see it, hear it, touch it, and taste it in the bread and wine. God in his kindness, knowi...

We must journey to the edge of heat if we would catch the flame. When Blaise Pascal died in 1662, his servant found a scrap of paper hidden in the lining of his coat. It turned out to be a testimony o...

[A] vivid scene from the Gospel of John [John 20:19-23]. It’s intimate from the start-a stunningly private scene that occurs behind locked doors among dear friends. The scene begins with a friendly gr...

In this excerpt from a sermon on the Lord’s Supper delivered by Augustine of Hippo to a group of Catechumens, (a Christian believer preparing for Baptism) the great bishop compares the process in whic...