thought exercise on Rejoicing

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...

In a time where leader after leader's calls end in disgrace, it is helpful to remember that finishing, not starting, is what is most important. The following story illustrates this well: Two ship...

“Good work! You did your job well” (Matt. 25:23 MSG). That phrase reminds me of a story Joe Stowell told me about a time he met the president at the White House. Joe was president of Moody Bible Insti...

The renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini once led a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in London. His mastery and the orchestra’s precision resulted in thunderous applause from the audience. At ...

An old legend tells of a merchant in Bagdad who one day sent his servant to the market. Before very long the servant came back. White and trembling, and in great agitation said to his master: “Down i...

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. Every time a man bethinks himself that he is not walking in the light, that he has been forgetting himself, and must repent; th...

When Frederick Douglass asked his famous question, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” he didn’t simply ask a question about the United States of America . He asked a question about Amer...

What do you hear when you imagine the voice of God singing? I hear the booming of Niagara Falls mingled with a trickle of a mossy mountain stream. I hear the blast of Mt. St. Helens mingled with a kit...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

The first thing the group of American church leaders noticed about the Central Asian pastor they were meeting was his smile. It was huge. It was so big that anyone who looked at it had to smile too!...

Joy must be morally clean. God warned Israel not to be tempted by the kind of debauched “joy” of the Canaanite festivals, which included sexual immorality, drunkenness, gluttony, and idolatry. They ha...

I attended a gathering of givers where we took turns telling our stories. The words fun, joy, exciting, and wonderful kept surfacing. There were lots of smiles, laughter, and tears of joy. One older c...

Euangelion in Greek, which is translated as “good news” or “gospel,” combines angelos, the word for one announcing news, and the prefix eu-, which means “joyful.” Gospel means “news that brings joy.” ...

The prayers in the Psalms use words of waiting, watching, listening, tasting and seeing, meditating, and resting. It’s remarkable how inefficient these actions are. They aren’t accomplishing anything....

In a time of acute crisis, when death sneaks into houses and shops, when you may feel healthy yourself but you may be carrying the virus without knowing it, when every stranger on the street is a thre...

John Ruskin (1819-1900), the famous art historian, wrote about a beautiful tradition that existed among the shepherds of the Swiss Alps during his lifetime. These shepherds grazed their flocks often i...

On a trip to France during college, I (Cyd) was walking through a historic garden in Paris with my older sister. Rounding one of the reflecting pools, we both caught a familiar scent and stopped dead ...

Epiphaneia in New Testament Greek means manifestation. An effective method of teaching the content of the faith, not often enough used, is to instruct congregations in the texts of the seasonal hym...

Pastor and Professor Darrell W. Johnson sets the scene for the Sermon on the Mount with great description. This could serve as a model for the beginning of a sermon on the S.O.M. They were sitting i...

Just this morning, my family attended church with our son who has autism. He was particularly enthused by the music today, and he was moving around quite a bit. A man in the choir noticed our son, and...

While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C. S. Lewis describes this...

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully ...

The word blessed has been among the vocabulary I’ve removed from my daily life. In the faith of my young adulthood, it was a word that filled my conversations: a term to close out emails or to d...

If you read through G.K. Chesterton’s writings, it will not be long before you recognize the recurring theme of joy. Joy, Chesterton believed, ought to be a central experience of the one who realizes ...

Could joy, then, be a candidate for a one-word definition of the good life, perhaps in the same way some people think happiness is? Indeed, could it be better able to integrate in itself the requisite...

In his prose and poetry, David Whyte shares what David Brooks refers to as “emotional joy” in his book, While not necessarily unique to the Christian, this type of joy has the ability to draw us towar...

Judgment and joy don’t go well together – no, judgment leads to grumbling. I’m sure you’ve met people in your life who are hard to please – maybe even your parents, or your boss. People for whom n...

When God Talks Back, psychological anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann sets out to explain how sensible people believe in an immaterial God. One aspect of evangelical Christianity that she finds particularl...

Joy’s trick is to supply  Dry lips with what can cool and slake,  Leaving them dumbstruck also with an  ache Nothing can satisfy.

Gratitude has a ripple effect, spreading warmth and positivity to those around us. It is nearly impossible to hold onto resentment or self-pity while maintaining a grateful heart. John Kavanaugh share...