thought exercise on Sacrificial Living

In the Second World War, a group of soldiers were fighting in the rural countryside of France. During an intense battle, one of the American soldiers was killed. His comrades did not want to leave his...

How many modern Christians consider dying to be the worst thing that can happen to them? We pray for safety, healing, and protection, and rightly so. However, do we live in the truth that death has tr...

In The Hiding Place Corrie ten Boom tells of the time she and her father needed to find a safer place for a Jewish mother and child they had been concealing from the Nazis. A local clergyman cam...

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 ...

The monarch butterfly is the only species of butterfly that migrate like birds. They spend their summers in the northern United States and their winters in Mexico, but it takes four generations of mon...

At the beginning to the musical Les Misérables , the lead character Jean Valjean is arrested by the police, with silver he has stolen from a kindly bishop who had given him shelter. Valjean is plainl...

These disciples turned the world upside down because they saw a dead man come back to life by the power of God. And whatever that “knowing” and “seeing” did in them, it did it at a deep level because ...

A few years ago I led a two-day retreat for some Christian men. …We agreed that we don’t want to be a bunch of dudes , allowing American cultural images of masculinity to shape our hearts. Nei...

I never met my father-in-law; he died when my wife was a young girl. But I admire him tremendously because of the intuition he had as a new husband. At church the day after his wedding, having consumm...

On a beautiful April afternoon in 2008, two college softball teams faced off in a decisive playoff game beneath the Cascade Mountains. The Western Oregon Wolves battled Central Washington University, ...

In 2021, I heard a story on the radio about the “Kindest Family in America”. As far as I can see, this is the only year Parents magazine awarded such a prize. When I first heard this headline I rolled...

It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate Son of God, that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life…my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by h...

Christ was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world....

A truly remarkable example of sacrificial courage took place in Folsom, New Mexico, in 1908. When a flood was racing toward the valley, a resident from the hills warned a local woman, S. J. Brooks, th...

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...

Francis Chan tells the story of Domingo and Irene Garcia: He’s a mechanic. She’s a hairdresser. They have been foster parents to thirty-two children and have adopted sixteen. Domingo and Irene are in...

Cruciform love is welcoming the immigrant simply because they bear the image of God, even if the only thing they bring to us is hassle and possible harm. Cruciform love is praying for those who persec...

How do you define what it means to “make a sacrifice?” We say we sacrifice for our family, or sacrifice for our careers. We speak of Jesus sacrificing himself so that we can experience eternal life. A...

I heard a story about a little boy who wanted to give God an offering but had nothing to give. He sat on the floor, watching people pass by and place their offerings in large wicker baskets. How he lo...

In 1987 director Bernardo Bertolucci released the film The Last Emperor to raving reviews. It was based on the autobiography of the last living emperor of the Manchu dynasty in China, Henry Aisin-Gior...

An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatibl...

Even if people reject the gospel, we still must love them. A good example of this was reported by Ralph Neighbour, pastor of Houston’s West Memorial Baptist Church (in Death And The Caring Community ...

At a funeral Mass for a friend of Archbishop Romero who was murdered by the government because of her faith in Christ, Romero invited those present to follow this Lord who died, this God who sacrifice...

Father Damien was a priest who became famous for his willingness to serve lepers. He moved to Kalawao, a village on the island of Molokai in Hawaii that had been quarantined to serve as a leper colony...

One day, a father bought his little boy some French fries. The father, doing what any dad would do, reaches over and moves to take one of the fries off of his kid’s plate. The little boy screams, slap...

Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls. When one member of a couple suffers from Alzheimer’s, the other doesn’t just go away. Instead, as Lewis puts it, love says, “B...

One Sunday, an usher brought to me an offering plate holding a bacon biscuit that a college student had deposited in the morning offering. A little note attached said, “Silver and gold have I none, bu...

During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Corrie ten Boom tried to enlist a pastor to help hide Jews. Showing him a Jewish baby in need of rescue, the pastor said “No. Definitely not. We could lo...

A passage often referred to in order to describe the sacrificial, countercultural quality of the early church comes to us interestingly enough, from one of its strongest critics, known later to histor...

In the OT sacrificial system, the worshipper himself would kill the animal used for the sacrifice. First they would bring the animal near, indicating their desire to be made clean and worship. Next th...