Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 , Genesis 2:18, 1 Samuel 18:1-4, Mark 8:36, Philippians 2:3-4, Psalm 133:1
Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...
Ecclesiastes 2:10-11 , 1 Kings 11:1-4, Job 2:11-13, Mark 8:36, Luke 10:38-42, Psalm 127:1-2
We would do well to keep in mind that Solomon’s words on the necessity of friendship were written toward the end of his life, well after he scaled his own Mount Significance. His accomplishments were ...
Psalm 133:1 , 1 Samuel 18:1-4 , Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, Luke 5:18-20 , Luke 5:18-20 , Psalm 133:1
Any social science study will tell you relationships are key to happiness and well-being. But there’s more. Friendship isn’t just an elective in the course of life, it’s required. In my line of work I...
We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...
Proverbs 17:17 , Ruth 1:16-17, 1 Samuel 20:16-17 , John 15:13-15, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 , Psalm 133:1
It’s been said home is the place where they have to let you in. While it’s a reach to say I’m friends with each of my family members, our relationships thrive because we share a mutual, understood res...
1 Samuel 18:1-4 , Exodus 17:8-13 , Ruth 1:16-17, John 15:12-15 , Philippians 2:19-22, Psalm 133:1
Friends are individuals who are relational assets and not liabilities. Friends are those whom God escorts into our environments because there is something they need to be for us in order to help us be...
Tolstoy’s tale "The Two Pilgrims" describes two Russians on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, eager to attend the solemn Easter festivities. One pilgrim was so focused on reaching the destination t...
There are two ways each of us can approach life: spending our days meeting our needs or looking for ways to meet others' needs. The mystery is that when we spend our life focused on our own needs,...
What is the Kingdom of God, according to the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 8:1-8)? It is a public park! It is a park where old people are no longer cold and lonely and ill and senile, but participants in a...
Years ago Wendy and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After ref...
The Christian life is not a life dripping with personal satisfaction or one of basking in feeling “positive.” It isn’t a life baptized in stimulation or excitement. It definitely isn’t a life of conse...
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfac...
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or. what's a heaven for? " Robert Browning A part of our desire at The Pastor’s Workshop is to help pastors connect the stories in ...
The notion that sexual chemistry is critical to a long-term relationship has led to the “search theory,” which drives people to explore more sexual relationships in order to increase their chances of ...
I’ll never forget sitting in the guidance counselor’s office my freshman year in high school in the Lehigh Valley area between Philadelphia and Allentown, where I grew up. The purpose of our meeting w...
Matthew 23:11-13, Luke 14:7-11, Colossians 3:23-24, Ephesians 4:2, Proverbs 3:34, Philippians 2:13, Romans 12:1
Loving Father, You receive all who come humbly before You. Yet we approach You far too often with much satisfaction and inappropriate pride. We think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think. W...
When we believe that we should be satisfied rather than God glorified in our worship, then we put God below ourselves as though He had been made for us rather than that we had been made for Him.
Your well-being is more dramatically affected by the people you see every day, people who live within a few blocks of your house, people who live within a few miles, than it is by distant connections.
Holy God, we come to You confessing that we never have enough. We are never satisfied with what You have given us. We look at others with envy and we want more, even when our homes are overflowing wit...
The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his o...
Ephesians 4:32, Hebrews 11:1, Luke 6:38, James 1:18-20, Matthew 9:36
Generous Lord Jesus We confess that we do not receive others with compassion. We object to being interrupted And respond with anger or frustration. We confess that we do not share generously Not trus...
Heavenly father, we confess to you that we do not always think or act as the children which you made us to be. You tell us to honour our fathers and mothers, not to murder, commit adultery, steal or c...
All addictions begin in shame. They don’t begin with troubling behavior—a binge on porn, a night of overdrinking–but with a sense of lack or limitation. An addict may be loved deeply, but sense of lac...
When the telegraph was the fastest means of long-distance communication, a young man applied for a job as a Morse code operator. Answering an ad in the newspaper, he went to the address that was liste...
1 Corinthians 15:53-58, Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:20-22, 1 Corinthians 15:53-58
In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson describes one of the keys to understanding the beatitudes: live faithfully now, experience...
If I were making a list of benefits like the one Mike McKinley imagines, only this time using the devil’s actual logic, it might look more like this: Experience the excitement of new romance. Get th...
Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found ...
There has been a paradigm shift going on in neighborhoods in the United States since the end of WWII. For decades before the 1940s, neighborhoods were places where people were known and were active. W...
"What is it you’re looking for in this endless quest? Tranquillity. You think if only you can acquire enough worldly goods, enough recognition, enough eminence, you will be free, there’ll b...
Childhood happiness has become the scorecard by which adults measure their success or failure as parents . . . Constantly striving to please your kids turns them into your boss. Their happiness become...