living on Ideals

In The Hiding Place Corrie ten Boom tells of the time she and her father needed to find a safer place for a Jewish mother and child they had been concealing from the Nazis. A local clergyman cam...

In Soul-Making , Allen Jones shares an intriguing visit to the Coptic Monastery of St. Macarius out in the Egyptian desert. There, he meets Father Jeremiah, a monk who spins tales of the desert fathe...

It was this…intention that made the primitive Christians such eminent instances of piety, that made the goodly fellowship of the Saints and all the glorious army of martyrs and confessors. And if you ...

Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing. One l...

Ancient lens? What can we learn from the historical context? Context and Tone Paul was writing from prison to a Christian community that he didn’t establish. Rather, it was his co-laborer, Epaphr...

Gracious Father, too often we base our worth on our performance. We believe if we do well, your love grows, and if we falter, your love lessens. Our God, how far this is from the truth. We confess our...

Like the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at all. While we are looking at God we do...

Almighty God, we take pride in our self-sufficiency while we look down on the weak who cannot provide for themselves. We praise others for their efforts, yet we demand perfection from our own families...

We cannot be true Christians without being original. Nothing gives us personality like prayer. Nothing makes man so original. To be creative, we must live with the Creator. Prayer places man in direct...

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau received a letter from poet William Ellery Channing. “Build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive,” wrote Channing. “I see ...

The priest Henri Nouwen learned humility on a mission trip to South America. He went expecting to pass on his wisdom to the poor and unenlightened. During his six-month stay, Nouwen concluded that a d...

Our mission is the mission of Jesus Christ.  He lived as an ordinary human being. We will care for the common life of humanity. He served men and women. We are committed to working for human wel...

Gracious God, our decisions are often rooted in keeping comfortable. We keep quiet in order to protect ourselves. We give just enough to look good in front of others. We hold back to avoid pain. Yet y...

Do not scrutinize so closely whether you are doing much or little, ill or well, so long as what you do is not sinful and that you are heartily seeking to do everything for God. Try as far as you can t...

The hymnwriter and theologian F. W. Faber writes with beautiful prose the challenges that each one of us faces when it comes to living a life faithfully according to the truth that is within us: M...

I personally get some inspiration for getting at the nature of this work from a story told by one of my favorite spiritual writers, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse was born in 1873, to a devout Cath...

Introduction Easter stands out from every other day. It’s time to celebrate and to reflect: how will you “preach the resurrection” and proclaim the new life we have in Jesus Christ? How do we invite ...

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything abo...

Introduction Hard Sayings These hard sayings of Jesus come at the end of a section spanning two chapters (Luke 13:10-14:35). In it, Jesus’s actions and teachings are set in parallel structure: hea...

The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profoun...

A few years ago I led a two-day retreat for some Christian men. …We agreed that we don’t want to be a bunch of dudes , allowing American cultural images of masculinity to shape our hearts. Nei...

Living for what gives or maintains the greatest amount of personal comfort is our long-established habit. At the core, that’s what comfort is—it’s a habit, a way of life. Comfort has become the defaul...

I preached my first sermon at National Community Church on January 14, 1996. The only thing I remember about that message is my opening illustration. I can’t remember the original source, but I think ...

We just philosophize, complain of boredom, or drink vodka. It's so clear, you see, that if we're to begin living in the present, we must first of all redeem our past and then be done with it f...

After twenty years of listening to the yearnings of people’s hearts [as a counselor], I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God.

In the Greco-Roman world of Paul’s day, humility was a despised trait. They viewed it as a sign of weakness. And our culture today is no different from that world of two thousand years ago. Maybe it’s...