Ezra 4:7–24, Daniel 2:4–49, Nehemiah 8:1–8, Mark 5:41 , John 19:19–22, Acts 2:1–13
One development of the exile was an additional language for the Jewish people. The Babylonians and Persians spoke Aramaic, and out of necessity the Jews learned it. Some even became more conversant in...
Jonah 1:4, Luke 15:11-32, Matthew 18:21-35, Psalm 34:8, Romans 8:28
Maltbie D. Babcock, author of This Is My Father’s World and a Presbyterian pastor in Brooklyn, introduced a free pew system in his church, upsetting a wealthy woman who found strangers in her us...
As a college student, I was returning to school one year on a Greyhound bus. One of the other passengers was a middle-aged man who seemed to be making the rounds, engaging various people in quiet conv...
1 Peter 2:12, John 15:18-19, Matthew 5:14-16, 2 Corinthians 2:15-16, Colossians 4:5-6
Don: On a recent airplane flight I got into a quite pleasant conversation with the person sitting next to me. He was a businessman from India. Even though I am quite introverted, I always love good, i...
We email, Facebook, tweet and text with people who are going to spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Our lives are too short to waste on mere temporal conversations when massive eternal realities ...
Matthew 6:14-15, Matthew 18:21-35, Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13, John 8:10-11, Psalm 103:12, Isaiah 1:18
The pastor R.C. Sproul was studying in the Netherlands in the last 1960s and randomly struck up a conversation with a Dutch woman. The conversation was a common, enjoyable interaction, but when it was...
There are there a few books that I come across now that I’m officially “retired” from the pastorate that I sincerely wish I had been able to read, digest and act on as a young pastor. David Brook’s la...
There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...
Philippians 2:3-4, Galatians 2:20, James 1:19-20, Romans 12:3, Proverbs 15:1, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Matthew 11:28
Arguments won’t change people. Simply giving away kindness won’t either. Only Jesus has the power to change people, and it will be harder for them to see Jesus if their view of Him is blocked by our b...
John 1:1-5, 14, Luke 4:16-21, Psalm 19:7-9 , Genesis 1:1-3, Exodus 3:4-10 , Isaiah 55:10-11
WORDS. We think words, hear words, speak words, sing words, write words, and read words—all the time. Every day. What do words have to do with Christianity? Almost everything. At every stage in redemp...
E.M. Forster, an early 20th-century novelist, remains widely read across the world. Beyond his talent for writing significant books, short stories, and plays, he was renowned for being an exceptional ...
Romans 12:10, Revelation 3:20, Matthew 25:40, Luke 8:43-48, Song of Solomon 2:14, Psalm 42:7
In I’d Like You More If You Were More Like Me , John Ortberg uses an interesting analogy for an aspect of our relationships. In 2015, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announced the Starshot Initiati...
Romans 12:1, Matthew 5:44, Proverbs 15:1, 1 Peter 3:9, Luke 6:31, Galatians 6:9, Colossians 3:12-13, 1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Genesis 50:20, Philippians 2:3-4, James 1:19-20, 1 Samuel 24:17
Some years ago, the syndicated newspaper columnist Sidney J. Harris shared an interesting anecdote from one of his friends. Each evening, this friend would stop at the same newsstand to buy a newspape...
Have you ever been in a store checkout line and you’re in a hurry and the person in front of you starts gabbing with the cashier? You’ve got a cart full of groceries, the ice cream’s going to melt, yo...
The living human community that language creates involves living human bodies. We need to talk together, speaker and hearer here, now. We know that. We feel it. We feel the absence of it. Speech conne...
To have God speak to the heart is a majestic experience, an experience that people may miss if they monopolize the conversation and never pause to hear God's responses.
Psalm 23:null, Proverbs 10:19, Ecclesiastes 5:2, James 1:19, Proverbs 17:27, Matthew 6:7, Colossians 4:6
I was watching the old Dick Van Dyke Show recently, and he was at a party filled with pseudo intellectuals. Dick got trapped into a one-sided conversation with a self-absorbed philosophy professor. On...
Tradition has it that Jennie Jerome, who would eventually become Winston Churchill’s mother, once had dinner with the British politician William Gladstone. She left the meal thinking Gladstone was the...
It is impossible for a believer, no matter what his experience, to keep right with God if he will not take the trouble to spend time with God. Spend plenty of time with him; let other things go, but d...
In his book Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt , author and professor Arthur C. Brooks charts the rise of anger — and more importantly, contempt — ...
That peoples can no longer carry on authentic dialogue with one another is not only the most acute symptom of the pathology of our time, it is also that which most urgently makes a demand of us.
Susan Pinker, the social science columnist for the Wall Street Journal, gave a TED talk in 2017 titled, “ The Secret to Living Longer May Be Your Social Life .” In her research she discovered that the...
1 Samuel 16:7, Matthew 6:1, John 12:43, Galatians 1:10, Philippians 2:3
In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper shares a short vignette about the comedian Louis C.K.* Louis CK tells fans he meets in pu...
My guess—and I think this will be debated for a long time—is that humans are very communicative, and so the fact that you’re talking to more people with shorter bursts of communication is probably net...
The last time someone said to you, “I need to talk to you,” how did that strike you? Did you think, Maybe she needs to tell me how much she appreciates me. More likely you thought, I’m in trouble. Whe...
Mark 1:35, Isaiah 32:17, Psalm 141:3, James 3:5, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Proverbs 17:28
Archelaus the 5th century (BC) king of Macedon, was once having his hair cut. His barber, quite verbose like many others in his profession, asked King Archelaus how he would like his hair cut. His res...
Our bodies, created in the image of the Triune God, have much to teach us about the virtues of conversation. The human body is a wondrous symphony of diverse parts: 206 bones and over 600 muscles, con...