vulnerability on Poor in Spirit

We don’t believe our ability to bless others might result from our poverty. Our need might be the thing that most blesses the body of Christ.

Your Inner Life Matters While I have long recognized the significance of a pastor’s inner life, I hadn’t pondered the relationship between our inner life and the act of preaching until recently. Our ...

Lord, you came among us, not in a way we expected, but as a baby. We had great difficulty seeing you in so small a form, so vulnerable an incarnation. Lord, you came to us where we least expected. Yo...

God’s love for the vulnerable is beautifully portrayed in the beloved animated classic A Charlie Brown Christmas . The climactic moment, when Linus walks into the spotlight with his blanket and r...

When we see how God is able to show his power in our weakness, not in spite of our weakness but because of it, we are no longer ashamed or afraid. When we see the expansive task at hand and instead of...

Lent 2021: A 40-day Heart Restoration Destruction No More Bonus Content: Video prep session with Scott Bullock on Genesis 9:8-17 . Password: fHUk*p2* AIM Commentary Ancient Lens What can we ...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

The weaknesses we see in the people of the Bible are the very weaknesses we ought to recognize in ourselves. Like Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit, we are vulnerable to temptation when we act on our o...

We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own.

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders and several centuries later by St. Ignatius of Loyola are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but inste...

Do we honestly believe that the best witness we can have as Christians before a watching world is to show moral perfection? While that might convince some, our odds of pulling it off seem less than sl...

The vast majority of violence oppressing the poor is not driven by the overwhelming power of the perpetrators—it’s driven by the utter vulnerability of the victims. Give the poor a strong, consistent ...

Leader: We are people of the resurrection. Witnesses to God’s glorious victory in Jesus Christ, which brings peace and transforms the power structures of this world. But we also know that we live in ...

Prayer is descending with the mind into your heart, and there standing before the face of the Lord, ever present, all seeing, within you…It is only when our hearts appeal to God that our reading praye...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? How did we get here? When relationships disintegrate and fall apart it is a fair question to ask. The question may come on the brink of...

Holy Trinity, Community of Love, Draw us together in your creative light Root us in the ground of your being, Vulnerable before one another, Unashamed in your presence and each other’s Make us joyfu...

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other...

Introduction Psalm 121 is the second in a collection of Psalms referred to as the Psalms of Ascent. Scholars surmise that these Psalms were likely read or sung as pilgrims made their way “up” to Jer...

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...

Let him into the mire and muck of our world. For only if we let him in can he pull us out.

Read with a vulnerable heart. Expect to be blessed in the reading. Read as one awake, one waiting for the beloved. Read with reverence.

C.S. Lewis indicated that if he wanted something easy and pain-free, he would have chosen a bottle of wine over Jesus. There is no question that biblical love leaves us more vulnerable. But this will ...

This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic fea...

I was teaching an English class in a high-rise apartment complex full of low-income families in Minneapolis—mostly immigrant and refugees from East Africa. The tenants’ association paid for me to come...

Above all is the centrality of love at the heart of vulnerable faith. Vulnerability will thrive only where love abounds—a love that is generous, gracious, patient, compassionate, humble, curious, joyf...

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with...

O Come, O Come Emmanuel You who are flesh Vulnerable and Lowly and Small Come, O Come Emmanuel You who are Great Holy and Powerful and Forever Come, O Come Emmanuel The Fullness of God with us Make ...

When my eldest son, Drew, was a toddler, bedtime was a battleground in our house. I think he felt cheated by the prospect of sleep. He hated the thought of going to bed while the rest of the world con...

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wo...

Pharaoh viewed the Hebrews as a growing threat to the Egyptian way of life, so he ordered all Hebrew baby boys killed. King Herod feared that a future king would arise from Bethlehem, so he ordered al...