Life on Planet Earth on Thought World

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What We’ve Learned About the Mind

Author

Keywords

Scripture

Proverbs 4:23, Luke 6:45, Matthew 12:34-35, Luke 6:45, 2 Corinthians 10:5, Proverbs 17:22

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

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Help with My Chaotic Thoughts

Author

Jennie Allen

Keywords

Scripture

2 Corinthians 10:5, Matthew 6:22-23, Luke 11:34-35, Psalm 19:14, Matthew 15:18-19, Mark 7:20-23

In the first chapter of her book, Get Out of Your Head , author Jennie Allen shares a vulnerable and honest moment from her own life about just how hard it can be to focus in a world of distraction...

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Fighting Your Own Thoughts

Author

Alan Fadling

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 3:3

One of my continual battles is the one that happens in my own heart and mind. I continue to discover and fight negative patterns of thought and emotion that are shaped less by Jesus and more by the wo...

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Author

Knox McCoy

Keywords

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

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Words Create Worlds: Thoughts from the Founder's Desk

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

Have you ever heard the expression, "words create worlds?" It's been attributed to various people, but what's most important is just how true it is. I think I first grasped this in c...

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The North and South of Temperament

Author

Anne Bogel

Keywords

Even though Carl Jung first introduced the terms introvert and extravert back in 1921 (in his now-classic volume Psychological Types), the concepts—especially introversion—crashed into the public’s co...

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Getting Lost, Sort Of

Author

Samuel Rodriguez

Keywords

God knows where you are and has never left you, regardless of how you may feel or how uncertain you are of where you’re going. It reminds me of when our kids were small and we visited Disneyland for t...

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Salt & Light

Author

John R. W. Stott

Keywords

Scripture

Matthew 5:13-16, Ephesians 5:8-9, Colossians 4:6, John 8:12-20, Luke 14:34-35

Salt and light are indispensable household commodities. Several commentators quote Pliny’s dictum that nothing is more useful than ‘salt and sunshine’ (sale et sole). The need for light is obvious. Sa...

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A Jubilee Church

Author

Kent Annan

Keywords

Scripture

Leviticus 25:10-12, Isaiah 58:6-7, Acts 2:44-45, Micah 6:8, Luke 4:18-19, Matthew 25:35-40, Acts 4:32-35, Romans 12:9-21, 1 John 3:17-18, 2 Corinthians 8:1-4

From the outside Calvary Church in Holland, Michigan, looks like a typical large church that many Americans attend. The church developed the typical way: it started small and then began to grow. As th...

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Different Religions Attempt to Explain Evil

Author

N. T. Wright

Keywords

When we look for larger, broader, more sustainable analyses of evil, we find of course that the major worldviews have all had ways of addressing it. The Buddhist says that the present world is an illu...

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Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 13:13, Titus 2:11-13, Hebrews 11:1, Philippians 3:20, 1 Peter 1:3-4, 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, Romans 8:24-25

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it's one of the great thing...

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The World, a Definition by Eugene Peterson

Author

Eugene H. Peterson

Keywords

Scripture

John 2:15-16, Romans 12:2, Ephesians 2:1-2, John 15:18-19, James 4:4

The world, though, is protean: each generation has the world to deal with in a new form. World is an atmosphere, a mood. It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptations as it is...

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Stories Teach Us about How the World Works

Author

Steven Sloman

Keywords

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

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The Habits that Bind: Sermon Illustration Tuesday

Author

Stuart R. Strachan, Jr.

Keywords

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it this way. Each of us has what he called a habitus: a set of dispositions to respond more or less spontaneously to the world in particular ways, without mu...

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Beauty Will Save the World

Author

Brian Zahnd

Keywords

Scripture

Revelation 21:22-27, Psalm 27:4, Psalm 8:, Psalm 96:6, Isaiah 33:17, Hebrews 10:24-25

I found what I was looking for and purchased a paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The Idiot was published in 1868 and was Dostoevsky’s attempt to create a perfect soul in the character of Princ...

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Author

Dallas Willard

Keywords

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...

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Author

Basil of Caesarea

Keywords

The world is a work of art, set before all for contemplation, so that through it the wisdom of Him who created it should be known …"

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Author

Jerry Bridges

Keywords

Temptation

Our minds are mental greenhouses where unlawful thoughts, once planted, are nurtured and watered before being transplanted into the real world of unlawful actions... These actions are savored in the m...

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My First Experience of Unhurried Time with God

Author

Alan Fadling

Keywords

Scripture

Luke 5:16, John 10:null, James 5:16

I’ve often shared the story of my first experience of solitude and silence at the beginning of 1990. It was led by one of my mentors, Wayne Anderson, as part of a class I was taking at Fuller Seminary...

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Fighting Sleep

Author

John Koessler

Keywords

Scripture

Psalm 4:8, Psalm 127:2, Proverbs 3:24, Job 11:18-19, Deuteronomy 33:12, Proverbs 3:5

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...

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Spiritual Blindness in The Magician’s Nephew

Author

C. S. Lewis

Keywords

Scripture

1 Corinthians 2:14, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Matthew 13:13-15, Acts 28:27, Hebrews 3:7-8, Jeremiah 7:24, John 10:27, Mark 6:52

Jesus is clear that it is dangerous to close one’s ears, eyes, and heart to the leadings of the Holy Spirit. In The Magician’s Nephew , a novel from C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series, Narnia i...

liturgy

Great and gracious God, we have run

Author

Mark Brewer

Keywords

Great and gracious God, we have run after things and others instead of coming home to You. We have lived as though we were the centers of our universe. We have avoided the harder issues in life so o...

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Author

Søren Kierkegaard

Keywords

A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the worl...

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A Toast to a Radically, Perpetually Unnecessary World

Author

Robert Farrar Capon

Keywords

Food

In this short excerpt, Robert Farrar Capon makes a toast to the fact that all of creation, including our food, are in some sense superfluous. That is to say, God did not have to create anything, inclu...

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Author

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Keywords

Let science extend the domain of actual knowledge, and lay bare as it may the secrets of the material world. It only exposes more and more the proportions of the great cathedral, and shows us the lamp...

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Evil and Incarnation: Jesus Enters the World

Author

Thomas H. Troeger

Keywords

Several years ago near the start of Advent, I awoke to a television report of five people murdered in a fast-food restaurant, and later that same morning I opened my newspaper and read that two robber...

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Growing Up in a World that Doesn’t Require Courage

Author

Sebastian Junger

Keywords

Scripture

Joshua 1:6-9

I’d grown up in a Boston suburb where people’s homes were set behind deep hedges or protected by huge yards and neighbors hardly knew each other. And they didn’t need to: nothing ever happened in my t...

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First and Third World Fears & Authentic Worship

Author

Mark Labberton

Keywords

Fear

Scripture

Psalm 27:null, 1 John 4:19

One Sunday I was preaching on Psalm 27. It is a remarkable psalm of hope for God’s- deliverance from fear for those who have faced tough times. With the same candor found in many psalms, this one vivi...

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Cultivating the Garden of Your Mind

Author

Robert A. Emmons

Keywords

In Thanks! I wrote that legendary investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton had posed the question, “How can we get six billion people around the world to practice gratitude?” Not long after Sir ...

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Stuck in the Houses Our Words Construct

Author

Gregory Spencer

Keywords

Scripture

James 3:5-6, Psalm 19:14, 2 Corinthians 4:18, Proverbs 18:21, Romans 12:2

All day long, all of us are framing and reframing our lives. We talk about the memory of our adorable but sexist grandpa. We label ourselves as movie critics or introverts or justice-lovers. We say th...

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