behavior on Never Giving Up

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

O Lord God, You have commanded us to believe in Jesus; and I would flee to no other refuge,  wash in no other fountain,  build on no other foundation,  receive from no other fullness,  res...

But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last To basest things.

I know most of us have probably heard enough stories about the Titanic, but it does stand as an amazing monument to the famous saying, slightly altered, “pride goes before the fall/destruction.” (Prov...

Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s how we behave while we are waiting.

Leader: Since we have a great high priest who can sympathize with our weakness, let us boldly approach the throne of grace, confident that there we will receive God’s mercy and grace in our time of ne...

You ought to.” “You need to.” “You’ve got to.” “You’re supposed to.” “You better.” Do these sorts of exhortations sound familiar? Perhaps you have heard admonitions such as these from the pulpit, from...

George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus...

The animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, who achieved significant success while struggling with autism, has this to say on the subject of progress: People are always looking for the single ma...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

The advantage (if you can call it that) that addicts have is that they have their identifiable addictions. Whether you are an alcoholic, a drug addict, a compulsive gambler, or an uncontrollable overe...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

Psychiatrist James Knight describes in graphic detail the experience that members of Alcoholics Anonymous experience: These persons have had their lives laid bare and pushed to the brink of destructi...

Everything that is extreme is destructive. So do not suddenly throw away your armor, or you may be found unarmed in the battle and made an easy prisoner. Our body is like armor, our soul like the warr...

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

It seems that every four years, the American people come through another exhausting political season. No matter who “wins,” there are feelings of frustration and disgust on all sides as we observe the...

Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

The avoidance of pain is the beginning of all unhealthy behavior.

When I was a child, my father brought home a twelve-year-old boy named Roger, whose parents had died from a drug overdose. There was no one to care for Roger, so my folks decided they would raise him ...

I think the hardest thing in life is to forgive. Hate is self destructive. If you hate somebody, you're not hurting the person you hate, you're hurting yourself. It's a healing, actually, ...

One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other ...

One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.

Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children....

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he ...

If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.

A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing...

To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p...

Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that...

In the vast, frozen wilderness of the Arctic, an Inuit hunter used a clever technique to trap a wolf. He took a sharp knife and carefully coated its blade with layers of animal blood, letting each lay...