character on Devil

God of power, love and wisdom: you’ve known us and loved us from before we even were, and extended your grace to us before we knew your name. You save us from ourselves – from our arrogance, rebell...

Pilgrimage is a marinating process. The Bible is bursting with people who traveled to places of retreat where God seasoned and tenderized them, preparing them to take the next step of the journey. Mos...

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Preaching Commentary Summary of the Text As a child, I was attracted to the dark recesses of my neighborhood. I was drawn to the dim lit woods that were away from the din of the suburbia in which I...

When Jesus came to earth, demons recognized him, the sick flocked to him, and sinners doused his feet and head with perfume. Meanwhile he offended pious Jews with their strict preconceptions of what G...

He [God] has a single relentless stance toward us: He loves us. He is the only God man has ever heard of who loves sinners.

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. But often, we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness. By doing so, we lie and do not live out the truth. We too easily claim t...

Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Dry Spell It had been a dry period for “Team Israel,” 400 plus seasons without a shout out from God. Since the prophet Malachi and hi...

Loving and faithful God, You are holy, righteous, and pure; You are compassionate and just; You are perfect in all of Your ways. But we have slipped away from Your will; we have been selfish and self-...

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

One afternoon, I was playing with my son in our living room when I suddenly smelled something burning. I stood up and walked around, nose high in the air, sniffing furiously. My wife smelled it too, s...

Prayer of Adoration Good and Gracious Lord, You hold us in the palm of Your strong hand, working all things for our good and to Your glory. There is no place we can go that escapes your notice and i...

Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as i...

A student of mine, Josiah Brown, oversees the student outreach team. He and some of our students go to youth groups to teach the youth about Christian spiritual formation. They talk about what formati...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.

We are to have a character that invites others to see the goodness of Christ and to be a character that intrigues and compels others to discover what it means to be forgiven and set free to live with ...

Nothing is too big for Him to handle, and nothing is too small to escape His attention.

Leader: Heavenly Father, by your love and kindness, you saved us. Not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of your great mercy. People: Teach us to more fully understand your ...

AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Dry Spell It had been a dry period for “Team Israel,” 400 plus seasons without a shout out from God. Since the proph...

God is light and yet unlike any light that we know.

In this excerpt, the French monastic leader Frere Pierre Marie, shares an interpretation of Jesus as the true prodigal son—bringing all of us home with him: He, who is born not from human stock, or ...

Last week, an atheist came up to me and asked how I could believe in a God who made parents eat their children.  Naturally, I was a little confused. A lot of people have odd ideas about God, but ...

God is the eternal, independent, and self-existing Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute dominion; the most pure, the...

When he [the prodigal son] found himself desiring to be treated as one of the pigs, he realized that he was not a pig but a human being, a son of his father. . . . Once he had come again in touch with...

Following always involves a coming down, a humbling of oneself and a serving of others. Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan theologian, captured this condescension of God in his sermon "The Excellency ...

Father, we confess to boasting in success and security. We have denied you rather that desire you. We have cowered when we needed to be courageous. Jesus, we long to be people who follow you, no...

I spent a considerable amount of time with a guy I’ll call Martin. As a brand-new follower of Christ, Martin felt guilty for having previously embezzled a lot of money from his employer. After discuss...

Several years ago I saw a television show called Caught on Camera . It featured clips of people being secretly filmed doing all manner of horrific things, precisely because they thought they were...

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, mind your own business, and Jesus says, there is no such thing as your own business. The w...