personal development on The Only God

In 1717 when France’s Louis XIV died, his body lay in a golden coffin. He had called himself the “Sun King,” and his court was the most magnificent in Europe. To dramatize his greatness, he had given ...

Leader: For God alone our souls wait in silence, for our hope is from him. People: He only is our rock and our salvation, our fortress; we shall not be shaken. On God rests our salvation and our glo...

Dear Lord, we worship You as our God and King, as the One true God, as the faithful Guardian of our souls. We come to You in this time of worship to stop, to breathe, and to listen. We want to open ou...

Has not the one God made you? We belong to God in body and in spirit And what does the one God seek? To be on our guard and to be faithful. The Lord will send his messenger, The Lord, whom w...

Let us love the Lord God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. Let us love Him with all our understanding, powers, and fortitude. Let us offer to Him our every effort, ...

Lord, only You are significant enough to deserve glory. So why do we desire glory for ourselves? Lord, to know You is to have eternal life. So why are we satisfied with worldly wisdom and living in th...

Dear Lord, we come to You this morning first to give You our worship and praise. You are the King, You are the Lord, You are the one who did indeed create us and give us life. You never leave us. You ...

The God who shares power is a listener. Listening is not something that becomes necessary for God only after the world is created. Listening is who God is. In God’s very being, communication does not ...

If God were our one and only desire we would not be so easily upset when our opinions do not find outside acceptance.

What Eric Liddell Did Not Do Scottish athlete and missionary Eric Liddell, whose story is told in the movie Chariots of Fire , was a favorite to win the hundred-meter sprint in the 1924 Paris Olym...

God invites us into his healing presence with these words: “I am the Lord, who heals you.” Diseased, depressed, dysfunctional, defeated, we come hungering for health that only God can provide. God c...

Most of us have heard of Babe Ruth, but have you ever heard of Babe Pinelli? Pinelli was an umpire in Major League Baseball who once called The Great Bambino (Ruth) out on strikes. When the crowd bega...

The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...

In his book On the Morals of the Catholic Church, Augustine reinterpreted the classical virtues through the distinctly Christian lens of love: I hold that virtue is nothing other than the perfect lo...

The lesson of Genesis is that the first work of rest is to cease from our own effort. All that needs to be done has already been done. The work of God was finished long before we ever came on the scen...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey, M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the Biblical understanding of the process of spiritual formation over and against the “self-help” p...

The church is a community that exists because something has happened that makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God’s truth and mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, ...

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on th...

For the believer in Jesus, every trial of suffering is an opportunity to grow in the faith, to grow in our relationship with the Lord, and to see Him work in our lives in a uniquely personal way that ...

If you are a pastor…this one’s for you. Sabbath. So many things have been written. Most of us have taught our people or preached about Sabbath, and underscored how busy people in our churches re...

Faith consists, not in ignorance, but in knowledge, and that, not only of God, but also of the divine will.

Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in u...

A century ago, men were following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting feverishly for news of the war. And all the while in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think ...

Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.

I Choose Love...No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness. I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves. I Choose Joy...I will invite my God to be the God of circumstan...

God’s dealings with us are always on the order of what he did with Abram and Sarai. He makes his promises, and he will keep his promises; but just how and when he will keep them is something for which...

Myths about Faith and Work Faith is to be lived out 24-7-52. For many Christians this involves living out our faith at work. But several myths about faith and work can prevent us from being effecti...

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

Have you ever known someone so magnetically kind and gracious, so warm and generous of spirit that just a little time spent with them affects how you think, feel and behave? Someone whose very presenc...