There they are on top of a mountain praying with Jesus. Mount Tabor in lower Galilee? Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel near Syria? Some other mount? No one knows. Suddenly, Jesus is transfigur...
Luke 9:28-36, (37-43a), Luke 9:28-36, Luke 9:37-43a, Mark 5:35-43
Preaching Commentary There they are on top of a mountain praying with Jesus. Mount Tabor in lower Galilee? Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel near Syria? Some other mount? No one knows. Sudden...
Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator...
Story is the primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit’s literary genre of choice is story. Story isn’t a simple or naive form of speech from which we graduate to the ...
Introduction During my time in seminary (and the year after I graduated) I spent a lot of time at a church in southern New Jersey. It’s actually how I met Scott Bullock, TPW board member and creator ...
Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to G...
Nothing makes one so dizzy as human reasoning, which sees everything from an earthly point of view, and does not allow illumination from above. Earthly reasoning is covered with mud. Therefore, we hav...
It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.
O Light eternal, surpassing all created brightness, flash forth the lightning from above and enlighten the inmost recesses of my heart. Cleanse, cheer, enlighten, and enliven my spirit with all its po...
Preaching Commentary Rediscovering the Wonder of Jesus’ Birth It is said that familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes familiarity breeds something far less intense, but equally as destructive—co...
John 1:1-14, Proverbs 8:22-23, 30-31, John 20:28-29
Preaching Commentary Introduction John 1 contains some of the richest Christological passages in all of Scripture. It rewards deep meditation on its meaning. Its use as the Christmas gospel text is...
John 14:27, Philippians 4:7, Ephesians 1:17-18, Isaiah 26:3, Colossians 3:15
May the Spirit of God bless you with insight and revelation as you take this journey toward peace. May you be led by Jesus to glimpse a new world where love is the language we speak and shalom binds...
While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C. S. Lewis describes this...
Revelation is a hard gift to receive. You must give up everything else to receive it—like finding a treasure in a field and selling everything you have so you can get that treasure.
Christ has fully revealed Himself. It was the love and divine compassion of the Son. But the Holy Spirit has not done so. It is His saving faithfulness to meet us only in the secret place of His love.
If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at...
Every awesome thing in creation is designed to point you to the One who alone is worthy of capturing and controlling the awe of your searching and hungry heart.
1 Kings 17:8-16, Daniel 6:16-23, Matthew 14:25-31, Luke 4:33-36, John 2:1-11 , Psalm 77:14-15
It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracl...
In 1961 the Russians put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian premier, and he said that when Gagarin went into space, the cosmonaut discovered that there was no Go...
If man tries to grasp at truth of himself, he tries to grasp at it a priori . But in that case he does not do what he has to do when the truth comes to him. He does not believe. If he did, he wou...
Rediscovering the Wonder of Jesus’ Birth It is said that familiarity breeds contempt, but sometimes familiarity breeds something far less intense, but equally as destructive—complacency. As a child,...
Karl Barth wrote that, “God is always a mystery. Revelation is always revelation in the full sense of the word or it is not revelation” ( CD I.8.2). God’s revelation, to Barth, always exists in a dia...
In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at th...