passion on Sacrificial Living

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 ...

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...

Preaching Commentary Introduction The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break u...

Suffering is nothing by itself. But suffering shared with the passion of Christ is a wonderful gift, the most beautiful gift, a token of love.

Pastor: Almighty and everlasting God, as Isaac once carried the wood of the sacrifice on his back up the mountain, only to be delivered, so You willed Your Son Jesus Christ to carry the wood of the ...

I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.

Preparation Depending on which parts of the service you will incorporate, you will want to gather the following materials. A wooden cross, paper, pen, nails, and a hammer (or pushpins). Eno...

I was invited to visit a friend who was very sick. He was a man about fifty-three years old who had lived a very active, useful, faithful, creative life. Actually, he was a social activist who had car...

Preaching Commentary What is “Good” about Friday? For the work-a-day world in the United States of America, Fridays are good. TGIF, “Thank God It’s Friday!” is an interjection we use to convey reli...

The lectionary text from John is an exceedingly long passage, but covers the main events that we commemorate on Good Friday. For that reason, I am going to break up the text into manageable chunks. I ...

Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world. Have mercy on us. O Christ, in your humility, your lonely struggle and your agony, you share our suffering. Give us faith to trust your grace....

Gracious God, you have called us to be a unified body, working together that which you have willed for the world. In our apathy, we fail to participate in the work you have called us to do. In our div...

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have go...

[When you were baptized,] you died and were born in one and the same moment. This saving water was both tomb and womb. It is a strange thing, quite out of the ordinary. For indeed, at the moment of Ba...

We gather today to remember To hear again the story of God’s suffering To hear the cry of our lives echoed on Jesus’ lips: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? We gather today to remember That ...

How quickly our loyalties fade, oh God. We proclaim you are our Lord, but lives do not reflect that truth. We pay you homage when it’s easy, but live our own way when we feel like it. We praise you to...

Pastor: Almighty and everlasting God, who willed that your Son should bear for us the pains of the cross and thereby remove from us the power of the adversary, help us to remember and give thanks al...

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 ...

Ministers run the awful risk . . . of ceasing to be witnesses to the presence in their own lives — let alone in the lives of the people they are trying to minister to — of a living God who transcends ...

To just read the Bible, attend church, and avoid “big” sins— is this passionate, wholehearted love for God?

The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of ...

Mount Calvary is the academy of love.

Reflection The television series Alone follows ten individuals who are left to fend for themselves and by themselves in the wilderness. Now, these aren’t everyday individuals plucked from Main St...

Pastor: The grace of our Lord + Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. People: Amen. Pastor: Blessed is He who comes in the name of th...

O God our Father, who sent your Son to be our Savior: renew in us day by day the power of your Holy Spirit; that with knowledge and passion, with courage and love, with gratitude and hope, we may stri...

Lord of all creation, you make us into a new creation, your followers sing new songs of praise to you, and yet we so easily fall into routines as we worship you. Too often we offer you lip service wit...

Dearly Beloved, the ax lying at the root of the trees is not for punishment, but pruning. Therefore, trusting in God’s tender mercy, we examine ourselves, that we may see ourselves clearly...

The problem with making your passion the thing that guides you is that passion can trick you into avoiding tasks that maybe aren’t fun but that are absolutely vital to get you to where you need to be....

The early church fathers named the primary sin patterns “passions,” borrowing a Latin term that could also be translated “sufferings ” As we live out a unique pattern or “face” of sin, we begin to thi...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...