loving your neighbor on Homelessness

Gracious God–Giver of all good gifts: We praise You. You give us the wonder of creation and You give us life. We praise You, Father. You give us forgiveness of our sins with salvation and eternal life...

Almighty God, whose Son had nowhere to lay his head: Grant that those who live alone may not be lonely in their solitude, but that, following in his steps, they may find fulfillment in loving you and ...

If you never left your home and avoided all interaction with other people, you couldn’t be characterized as a loving person. Instead, you might even be unloving because of your lack of concern for oth...

Gracious God, in Christ Jesus, you teach us to love our neighbors but instead we build dividing walls of hostility. You show us how to love one another as sisters and brothers but instead we hide from...

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

Almighty God, we bow before You, humbly able to admit how small, fragile, and dependent we are. Unfortunately, for many of us, it takes a disaster to convince us that we are not in control. Over the p...

[I]f we have compassion without capacity, we have human frustration. If we have capacity without compassion, we have human alienation. If we have compassion and capacity, we have human transformation....

Generous Lord Jesus We confess that we do not receive others with compassion. We object to being interrupted And respond with anger or frustration. We confess that we do not share generously Not trus...

To You, Present Lord—Emmanuel—the One who is with us, we confess: In hearing Your voice, we have closed our ears. In sensing Your leading, we have turned away. In feeling Your presence, we have hidden...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

In 2009 I (Dave) gathered a group of twenty lead pastors in the Denver area so we could think, dream, and pray about how our churches might join forces to serve our community. We invited our local may...

O God who will not let us go, we confess that we have been so wrapped up in ourselves that have not loved You with our whole hearts, and we have not loved our neighbors as we love ourselves. By Your g...

In Christian terms, evangelization and humanization are not alternatives. Nor are the 'vertical dimension' of faith and the 'horizontal dimension' of love for one's neighbor and po...

Father God, you see us; you have compassion; and you care for your greatest creation – people. You have also called us to notice, to listen, and to love others. Yet in our selfishness, we have ignored...

If you have ever watched the President of the United States deliver the State of the Union Address in recent years, you know that at some point in his speech, he will point to the balcony and introduc...

We cannot be closed off to one another and be open to God. That’s not how this works. Do you remember the commercial when the woman says “that’s not how this works, that's not how any of this work...

Holy God, we come before You in humility, for we do not live as we ought. We do not love You with our whole heart and mind and strength. We do not love our neighbor as ourselves. We are sinners in nee...

Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood. *for contrast

Christ was led by His love for others into the world, to forget Himself in the needs of others, to sacrifice self once for all upon the altar of sympathy. Self-sacrifice brought Christ into the world....

When conflict and division are driving both politics and media (including social media), the contrast between the way of the world and the way of Jesus stands out more than ever. How can pastors, task...

Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we win our brother, we win God. If we cause our brother to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.

Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done your will, we have broken your law, we have rebelled against your lo...

Lord God, We confess the smallness of our faith. At those times when our lives seem stormy we worry that you are asleep and don’t care about what happens to us. When things are going well, we are quic...

Our God, we have been slow to stand and slow to act. We have been unmoved in the face of wrongs. Rather than welcoming others, we have put up walls. We have served this god of self-preservation. But y...

Holy and merciful God, we confess to you and to one another, and in the company of the communion of saints, that we have sinned by our own fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and ...

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.

To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighb...

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.