relationships on Behavior

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...

When the Bible uses the term heart , it means the causal core of your personhood. The heart is your directional system. The heart is your steering wheel. Your behavior isn’t caused by the situati...

One of the ways we punish ourselves for not being more or better or thinner or stronger is by trying to squeeze ourselves—force ourselves, even—into all kinds of ill-fitting relationships. With other ...

Summary of the Text As a child, I was attracted to the dark recesses of my neighborhood. I was drawn to the dim lit woods that were away from the din of the suburbia in which I was raised. I even rem...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

There has been a paradigm shift going on in neighborhoods in the United States since the end of WWII. For decades before the 1940s, neighborhoods were places where people were known and were active. W...

Preaching Commentary Summary of the Text As a child, I was attracted to the dark recesses of my neighborhood. I was drawn to the dim lit woods that were away from the din of the suburbia in which I...

Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.

“Association breeds assimilation.” In other words, there is no such thing as a casual relationship. All relationships are consequential. They are catalytic. They push us forward or hold us back. They ...

Almost everything we do touches a relationship in some way. Just think about your day. Whether you’re at home or at work, driving your car, playing, exercising, shopping, vacationing, worshipping at c...

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...

I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, whe...

Beholding beauty produces fascination, and fascination is the best way to transform a person. Consider a young man in love. Parents, professors, mentors, and friends can plead with a young man to chan...

Relationships are a large playing field upon which other life contests and struggles get worked out.

The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.

It takes time to build and sustain healthy relationships. Time pressures can erode the quality of relationships and create fragmentation and isolation.

The basis of life is people and how they relate to each other. Our success, fulfillment, and happiness depend upon our ability to relate effectively. The best way to become a person that others are dr...

There is a lovely disarray that comes with attraction. When you find yourself deeply attracted to someone, you gradually begin to lose your grip on the frames that order your life. Indeed, much of you...

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...

Sharan Merriam and Carolyn Clark, in their fine study Lifelines , effectively show that life is fundamentally about two things—our work and our relationships. And maturity is found in having the c...

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...

Hospitality does not entail helping another so much as immersing oneself in a new reality, entering into a new relationship with one who before was unknown or unappreciated. The nothing of “being with...

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

Human sexuality includes more than hormones, organs, and orgasms; it runs through the psychic and spiritual ranges of our lives. We experience our sexuality on the spiritual level as a yearning for an...

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...

I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.

The relational posture of a Christian is anchored in our union with Christ. God dwells in us, by the Spirit, nearer to us than our very breath-Anyone who lives from this depth of intimate relationship...

Lord, help us to be a people known for the ways in which we live out our faith by loving and serving all people, even those who, in the world’s eyes, have little to offer us. By treating them with dig...

For me, a table is a reminder that what really matters in life is relationships. We are hardwired for emotional connection to other people. We want to be known. We crave being loved. We want to be acc...