church history on God's Creation

Lord, there is no seedling in the thicket that does not call you its maker. And I, too, come knowing that whatever the quality of my life is, it is thou, O God, who stamped your purpose on my soul. So...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

Love Loving the Word of God is a great pursuit, but it’s not always easy. Like most love relationships, there are inevitable highs and lows. And as teachers of the Bible, many of us walk a delicate...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

Pastor: In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. People: Amen. Pastor: With all the host of heaven, from every nation, in every language, we cry out: Peopl...

Imagine you are an alien who earned your interstellar passport and decided to spend a day on planet Earth. Suppose you picked a small town somewhere in the United States. Maybe you wouldn’t be surpris...

Jesus, You name us Beloved, Blessed Son, Daughter Sibling, Heir Help us remember You name us Child of the King Redeemed, Forgiven Saved by grace through faith Help us remember You name us Ligh...

If you understood Him, it would not be God.

I have chosen to focus on this psalm [119] because it formed the important center of Celtic praise. In Ireland it was once referred to as The Biait . The word comes from Psalm 119: 1, which begins B...

One common mistake is assuming that everyone else finds faith easy, while we alone struggle. Yet there is comfort in recognizing that we are not alone in our pursuit of Christ in the midst of a broken...

The Creed was the focused, worshipful expression of people whose lives had been totally transformed by the Bible and by the risen Jesus Christ. The Creed’s words are not windows with the shutters pull...

Yet for all that, God, for the salvation of them that were in error, endured to be served by these things, whereby those without were used to serve devils; only He slightly altered them; that He might...

The Life of Saint Patrick So I am first of all a simple country person, a refugee, and unlearned. I do not know how to provide for the future. But this I know for certain, that before I was brought ...

A Story from the Philokalia A story is told in  The Philokalia  about a young monk who went to an older monk to confess a struggle. The older monk was appalled, telling the young monk that his strugg...

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...

Have you heard the acronym “K. I. S. S”? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Paul doesn’t exactly call the Corinthians stupid (in 1 Cor. 15), though elsewhere Paul sounds tempted to do so, when ...

The church does not exist to make the world run more smoothly, but to be a truthful sign of what the world is meant to be.

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

In Book Eight of Confessions , St. Augustine recounts how, in a state of deep inner turmoil, he “heard from a nearby house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not which, chanting repeatedly, ‘Ta...

The African Methodist Episcopal Church began when Richard Allen and Absalom Jones demanded an equal place in the Methodist Episcopal Church and were refused. In their preaching and teaching, jus...

The early Christian writers used some stunning expressions of delight and gratitude when they mentioned Jesus’s death. Think of Paul saying, “He loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), or “The ...

A Joyful Easter Proclamation John Chrysostom (344-407) was the Bishop of Constantinople and is remembered as a Doctor of the Church. He was a renowned preacher (his name, Chrysostomos means "...

We taste Thee, O Thou Living bread, And long to feast upon Thee still: We drink of Thee, the Fountainhead And thirst our souls from Thee to fill.

When Johann Sebastian Bach sought to convey the heart of Christian truth through music, he chose the Mass as his foundation. His B Minor Mass begins with a heartfelt plea from the full chorus and orch...

The Bible ceased to be a foreign book in a foreign tongue, and became naturalized, and hence far more clear and dear to the common people. Hereafter the Reformation depended no longer on the works of ...

In a way, the Reformation began in one monk's overwhelming guilt. Martin Luther was riddled with guilt and filled with anxiety because he could see that he could not live up to God's standard ...

I cannot submit my faith either to the pope or to the council, because it is as clear as noonday that they have fallen into error and even into glaring inconsistency with themselves. If, then, I am no...

​​The Lord called the Magi by a star; He called the fishermen by fish; He called the tax collector at the money table. He lowered Himself to each, that He might raise all to salvation.

Paul’s vision in Ephesians is one of a single, united people of God, created through the cross to embody peace and reconciliation.