sacrificial love on Heart Change

O Lord, We marvel that you would take on flesh and blood in order to be crucified, killed, and buried for us. You humbled yourself and submitted to the hatred of sinful men, accepting the thorns, the ...

Preaching Commentary A Clash of Kingdoms Just as with the lectionary passage next week, our text takes place in the temple courts during Holy Week. Jesus’ Kingdom of God is now clashing head on wit...

A Clash of Kingdoms Just as with the lectionary passage next week, our text takes place in the temple courts during Holy Week. Jesus’ Kingdom of God is now clashing head on with the religious authori...

Preaching Commentary Different Levels of Maturity? There is an interesting dynamic I have noticed that often occurs as people begin to mature into adults. In my life it was a stage that took place ...

Merciful Jesus Grant us courage to deny privilege to lay down favor and safety and take up the cross of opportunity and justice Merciful Jesus Grant us courage to deny consumerism to lay down conve...

Different Levels of Maturity? There is an interesting dynamic I have noticed that often occurs as people begin to mature into adults. In my life it was a stage that took place following high school, ...

Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls. When one member of a couple suffers from Alzheimer’s, the other doesn’t just go away. Instead, as Lewis puts it, love says, “B...

An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatibl...

If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it.

What we choose to love is very important for what we love leads our eyes, ears, and hearts on a pilgrimage that shapes the texture of our lives.

There is the story Dan Mazzeo tells about his father, “Pop,” a first-generation Italian American who was struggling with metastatic liver and lung cancer. When doctors gave him less than a year, Pop b...

You shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

If I fear to hold another to the highest goal because it is so much easier to avoid doing so, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Even if people reject the gospel, we still must love them. A good example of this was reported by Ralph Neighbour, pastor of Houston’s West Memorial Baptist Church (in Death And The Caring Community ...

There’s a story (probably apocryphal) about a small dog that had been hit by a car and left injured by the side of the road. A passing nurse noticed the wounded animal, saw it was still alive, and sto...

My weight is my love. Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.

Francis Chan tells the story of Domingo and Irene Garcia: He’s a mechanic. She’s a hairdresser. They have been foster parents to thirty-two children and have adopted sixteen. Domingo and Irene are in...

Where love is the compelling power, there is no sense of strain or conflict or bondage in doing what is right: the man or woman who is compelled by Jesus' love and empowered by His Spirit does the...

We should always remember that love is the highest gift of God. All of our revelations and gifts are little things compared to love.... Settle in your heart that from this moment on you will aim at no...

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 ...

This total self-giving, to which the Son and the Spirit respond by an equal self-giving, is a kind of “death,” a first, radical “kenosis,” as one might say. It is a kind of “super-death” that is a com...

Selfless love is always costly. Fear can’t afford it, pride doesn’t understand it, but friends never forget it.

Cruciform love is welcoming the immigrant simply because they bear the image of God, even if the only thing they bring to us is hassle and possible harm. Cruciform love is praying for those who persec...

To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?

Though Jim was just a little older than Phillip and often assumed the role of leader, they did everything together. They even went to high school and college together. After college they decided to jo...

There is a Gethsemane hid in all love

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as som...

Let us ask God to make us true in our love, to make us sacrificial beings, for it seems to me that sacrifice is only love put into action.