christian living from proverbs 31

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticize what goes on around us.  …Civility is a different matter, though. I can treat ...

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...

O God, Father of us all, we praise you for so binding humanity together that we must each lean upon the strength and labor of others. We ask your blessing on all men and women who have worked to build...

O God, we pray for the church, which is set amid the con­fusion of contemporary life and is face-to-face with a great new task. Be with your church, O God. Grant the church a new birth through the...

Yahweh demanded justice for the poor, compassion and equality for foreigners and refugees, systemic redress for poverty, structural mechanisms to protect the homeless and family-less from abuse and de...

A missionary was preaching in the village market, and some of the people were laughing at him because he was not a very handsome man. He took it for a time, and then he said to the crowd, “It is true ...

Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.

The magic of a couple’s relationship is that, when two people fall in love, whatever they need to do for themselves to grow emotionally is most often the very thing that the partner needs from them. I...

In this beautiful illustration from Tom Long’s well-known preaching guide, The Witness of Preaching , a pastor shares a true story of what valuing human life can look like when God’s Kingdom takes ro...

Brandon and Faith Lee, who started Bird and Branch Coffee, are what faithful witnesses look like. When they sat down across from my wife and me, they had a dream to start a coffee shop that would serv...

After several years of engagement in justice work Warren says in reflection on the story of the Good Samaritan, “I realized it’s not okay to have a road that perpetuates the beating, robbing, and pote...

A man appears before the pearly gates. “Have you ever done anything of particular merit?” St. Peter asks. “Well, I can think of one thing….” the man offers. “Once I came upon a gang of high-testoster...

The British romantic poet Lord Byron (George Gordon) grew up with the disability of clubfoot, which kept him from engaging in many of the activities and joys of childhood. He was nevertheless, a perso...

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...

Martin’s [Luther King] voice was more than the communication of intellectual ideals and spiritual vision. It was a call for action, action which he personally led. . . . [Martin] saw leadership as a p...

Beauty will save the world.