Genesis 16:, 2 Samuel 9:, Jonah 3:4 , Luke 7:36-50, Matthew 9:9-13 , Psalm 146:7-9
In his book Breaking the Rules , Fil Anderson talks about the scandalous reputation of Jesus: He breaks all social etiquette in relating to people. He acknowledges no barriers or human divisions....
The twenties are a time when one asks, What will I do with my life? What is it that I really want in exchange for my life’s labors? Most denied that the key desire of life was for material wealth; t...
The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...
Jesus Christ said more about money than about any other single thing because, when it comes to a man’s real nature, money is of first importance. Money is an exact index to a man’s true character. All...
If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living...
In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
The greatest legacy one can pass on to one's children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one's life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.
Success is a shining city, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We dream of it as children, we strive for it through our adult lives, and we suffer melancholy in old age if we have not reached it....
A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...
Mark 9:35, Matthew 23:11, Matthew 23:11, Matthew 10:24, Luke 16:13
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 ...
Every soul belongs to God and exists by His pleasure. God being Who and What He is, and we being who and what we are, the only thinkable relation between us is one of full lordship on His part and com...
Leo Tolstoy, the writer of some of the most beautiful and complex stories in literature, had this to say on the topic of human nature and qualities that define us: One of the commonest and most gene...
Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...
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...
Our character is not merely the result of our choices, but rather the form our agency takes through our beliefs and intentions. So understood, the idea of agency helps us see that our character is not...
We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a l...
I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...
Proverbs 16:18–19, 2 Chronicles 26:16–21 , Daniel 4:28–37, Luke 14:7–11, Philippians 2:3–8, Psalm 25:8–9
At eighteen, a self-assured Benjamin Franklin returned to Boston, the city he had fled just seven months earlier. Dressed in a fine new suit, with a watch on his wrist and a pocket full of coins, he p...