relationships and community on Cost

Entering the kingdom is just like this: it’s a thing of great joy and great cost. The cost is clear, but nothing is compared with what is being gained.

God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No ...

Grace is a gift that costs everything for the giver and nothing for the recipient.

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profoun...

While it costs us a lot to adopt children, it cost God the blood of His own Son.

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Inste...

Grace is costly because it compels a person to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

A man went on vacation to the Holy Land with his wife and her mother. While in Israel, the mother-in-law died from a heart attack. The couple went to a local undertaker, who explained that they could ...

A friend once took a car to a mechanic who was able to find several things wrong with it in addition to the original problem. To fix it all would cost about $700. He went to a second mechanic, who sai...

Sam died and left $50,000 in his will for an elaborate funeral. As the last attenders left, Sam’s wife, Rose, turned to her oldest friend, Sadie, and said, “Well, I’m sure Sam would be pleased.” “I’...

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper: Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wa...

[A good host treats his guest so] that everything that is so well arranged at his host’s has not cost him, the host, any effort at all but has come about of itself.”

The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.

Selfless love is always costly. Fear can’t afford it, pride doesn’t understand it, but friends never forget it.

A gift’s value is in the way it makes and reaffirms bonds between people. It’s an expression of a relationship. This isn’t to say that the cost of a gift doesn’t matter, but it certainly isn’t the mos...

Updated for 2026. January 19, 2026 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day— the only U.S. national holiday commemorating a pastor. Under his leadership, non-violent civil rights advocacy achieved leaps f...

When conflict and division are driving both politics and media (including social media), the contrast between the way of the world and the way of Jesus stands out more than ever. How can pastors, task...

In most western societies, what do people think of when you say "armor of God"? I wouldn't be surprised if the image that comes to mind is the kind of plate armor you see in movies abou...

Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord. —Matthew Desmond, E...

Compassionate God—In Christ, you enter our condition; you experience our sorrow and our joy ... and redeem them. By Your Holy Spirit, you carry us along: in crisis and celebration, in despair and acco...

Dear Lord, I pray that You would open my mind to the truth of Your Word by means of the Holy Spirit. Open my eyes to see Jesus. Open my heart to love Him more and more. Open my will to do only that wh...

Conflict in Ministry Have you ever whispered to yourself, “I didn’t sign up for this?” I confess those words have passed through my mind more than once over the years. When I started out in ministry...

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: “If I was saved by my good works — then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through....

In Mendenhall, where the schools have actually integrated, we are seeing real equality form in the hearts of members of this new generation, and it is enriching for the entire community. When the scho...

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today ...

The first language of the church in a deeply broken world is not strategy, but prayer. The journey of reconciliation is grounded in a call to see and encounter the rupture of this world so truthfully ...

Another feature of shame’s presentation is that of hiding. Whether it is the involution into the silence of our own minds or the literal turning away from someone with a downcast facial expression wit...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel reflects on the Biblical doctrine...

Early in the 20th century a London newspaper carried an advertisement that read: “Men wanted for hazardous darkness, and constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success...

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God's kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is ...