the cross on Materialism

Merciful Jesus Give us courage to deny privilege to lay down favor and safety in order to take up the cross of opportunity and justice Too often we fail to do this Merciful Jesus Give us courage to d...

Context This text comes near the midpoint of the Gospel of Mark, and its central narrative position is more than matched by its pivotal thematic content. Jesus has turned from his focus on ministry i...

Context This text comes near the midpoint of the Gospel of Mark, and its central narrative position is more than matched by its pivotal thematic content. Jesus has turned from his focus on ministry i...

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...

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end...

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...

But when the cross is working deeply a believer comes to know himself. He realizes how undependable are his ideas, feelings and desires.

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery. One comes to realize that literally all the wealth and glory of the gospe...

The deep undertone of the world is sadness - a solemn bass, occurring at measured intervals and heard through all other tones. Ultimately, all the strains of this world's music resolve themselves ...

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...

We have been created by God, to be loved by God, and to receive our identity from God. But in our everyday lives, as we go about our work, school, interacting with our family and friends, we don’t alw...

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insi...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me lear...

There’s an aphorism repeated often in the writings of the medieval church: per crucem ad lucem, through the cross to the light. God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but...

Pastor: "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by tak...

At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our humbling, human tendency t...

The inner criterion of whether or not Christian theology is Christian lies in the crucified Christ . . . we come back to Luther’s lapidary statement, the cross is the test of everything:

The fact that a cross became the Christian symbol, and that Christians stubbornly refused, in spite of the ridicule, to discard it in favour of something less offensive, can have only one explanation....

[Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. Tha...

An American businessman went to Oberammergau to witness the famous passion play, just before the outbreak of World War II. Enthralled by this great drama that depicts the story of the cross, he went b...

For reading in unison: Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied him...

If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery. One comes to realize that literally all the wealth and glory of the gospe...

The Cross is the blazing fire at which the flame of our love is kindled, but we have to get near enough for its sparks to fall on us.

Bless Christ through whom all things are made. Join seen and unseen in their praise of One who both creates, sustains who goes before, in justice reigns. Who makes the lion and the lamb, the farthest...

The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought that takes success for its standards.

[Christ] the god-man suffers too, with patience. Evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies. The night on Golgotha is so important in the history of man only bec...

Preaching Commentary At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our hum...

Christ and His cross are not separable in this life; howbeit Christ and His cross part at heaven's door, for there is no house-room for crosses in heaven. One tear, one sigh, one sad heart, one fe...