1 John 2:16, Colossians 3:2, James 1:14-15, Job 31:1, Psalm 119:37, Proverbs 4:23, Matthew 5:29, Matthew 18:9
“If your eye causes you to sin…” is one of the boldest phrases from the mouth of Jesus, appearing three times in the gospels. Our eyes not only leads us into sinful behaviors, but also to take in sinf...
It is not objects that people really desire, but their lush coating of images and dreams. . . . It is never the object which is consumed—instead it is the relationship between us and the object of des...
In this excerpt by the Roman historian Tacitus, we get insight into the Jewish faith from an ancient, extra-Biblical account. We also see how the Israelites took the first commandment seriously: The...
The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing . . . destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.
Being made in God’s image is also about God’s purposes in the world (God through us). In order to understand how image is connected with purpose, we need to understand a common practice in the ancient...
The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a...
Among HIV patients better immune functioning is found among those who have an image of God that is more compassionate and loving than those who have images of God as more judgmental and punitive…Chang...
Ephesians 5:1-2, Philippians 2:12-13, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 1 Corinthians 11:1, 1 Peter 2:21-23, John 13:15
My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...
Matthew 11:28-30, Galatians 5:1, Deuteronomy 30:19-20, 1 Corinthians 10:23, John 10:10
When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...
300 10-Minute Devotions For the past six years I’ve been a volunteer chaplain at Haywood Pathways Center , a Christian residential program for people working to turn their lives around from addict...
Luke 19:10, Luke 2:7, John 19:18, Philippians 2:8-9, Isaiah 53:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17
In the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci journeyed to China, bringing religious art to share the Christian story with those unfamiliar with it. The Chinese readily embraced images of t...
1 Corinthians 12:8-12, John 1:, John 17:18, Philippians 2:6-11, 1 John 1:7, Romans 8:1, Colossians 1:13-14
The Cave One of the most famous passages in Plato's Republic is his "Allegory of the Cave," which is found at the beginning of book seven . Socrates imagines the human condition al...
Psalm 121:, Jeremiah 16:14-15, Matthew 6:25-34, Matthew 6:30, Psalm 91:11-12
Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Historical Background In our modern world we know so much about our universe that it is easy to forget that in the Bible there is a connection between ...
How Will We Preach and Teach from Proverbs? Reading, let alone preaching, from The Book of Proverbs comes with its challenges. Sometimes those sayings can seem just plain obvious and not much help ...
Please forgive us, O Lord, for we often forget how powerful you are. You are the potentate of time, yet we think we rule our lives. We are sorry for creating images of you that are smaller than realit...
For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea “oceans.” The point is to relate our present-day affinity for the ocean, seashore, and beach...
First, the quality Jesus blesses in the third Beatitude has nothing to do with all the negative images triggered by the English word “meek.” Although it is a challenge to pin down the exact meaning of...
Overall, from a biblical perspective, the sustained fertility and habitability of the earth, or more particularly of the land of Israel, is the best index of the health of the covenant relationship. W...
One day while drinking coffee, laughing, and sharing stories with one of my best friends, who is white, an unexpected question about race came up. It just popped up out of nowhere as we were talking a...
Paul tells the bride in Ephesians 6:10-12 that her enemies are 'not...flesh and blood,' but the unseen spiritual forces of evil and darkness. She is called to arm herself for battle, to 'b...
Ideally, when a baby is born into a healthy family, she is received with gladness. Her parents look on her with delight and the baby responds with joy. The baby is wanted—is loved. Her parents will ma...
The creation of food, tongues, and the human digestive system is the product of infinite wisdom knitting the world together in a harmonious whole. The symphony of glory that sounds from the triune bei...
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with th...
In Susanna Clarke’s wonderful fairytale Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, she tells a story about the rediscovery of magic in England in the nineteenth century. In the beginning of the tale, magic has...
Genesis 12:1-13, Genesis 27:35, Exodus 2:12, 2 Samuel 11:, Matthew 26:74
One of the first things that strikes us about the men and women in Scripture is that they were disappointingly non- heroic. We do not find splendid moral examples. We do not find impeccably virtuous m...
In the early 1900s, a “respectable” woman wore an average of twenty-five pounds of clothing when she appeared in public. The sight of an ankle could cause scandal. Over the next hundred years the pend...
Matthew 25:40, Romans 12:21, Luke 4:18-19, James 1:27, Micah 6:8, Isaiah 1:17
In October 2014 Wired magazine reported on the dirty work every social media company must somehow handle: moderating the deluge of exploitative, degrading content posted in unimaginable quantities aro...
Martin Luther’s larger catechism discussion of the first commandment (“You shall have no other gods before Me” [Ex 20:3]) included “whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God; tru...
Why did Israel create at Sinai a calf idol instead of an image of some other animal? The likely reason is that a calf or bull was among the most important of the Egyptian animal images that represente...