“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...
Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...
Pastor: Take up the full armor of God, so that standing firm in your faith, you may go out into the world with joy and hope to make known the mystery of the Gospel, through the power of Almighty God...
Pastor: Let us pray for the whole Church of God in Christ Jesus and for all people according to their needs. Almighty God, You have enriched Your Church with the proclamation of the Gospel [...
Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a true friend as a person with whom I can think aloud. This absence of the need to put on a façade is an essential and foundational aspect of all genuine friendships. He ...
Far too easily we settle for holiness rather than wholeness, conformity rather than authenticity, becoming spiritual rather than deeply human, fulfillment rather than transformation, and a journey tow...
Mark 7:24-37, Psalm 103:2-3, Colossians 1:13-14, Ephesians 1:7, John 20:23, Luke 5:24, Isaiah 35:5-6
The One who cast out demons, who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak, has also the authority and power to forgive sins and to make us whole. I declare to you in the name of Jesus Christ that o...
Ephesians 4:32, Colossians 3:13, Romans 5:8, Matthew 11:28-30, Psalm 34:18
Almighty and loving God, all of us here today are hurting. Some of us are hurting as the result of circumstances beyond our control. Some of us are hurting because of our own choices. Some of us are f...
Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than...
Psalm 51:10, Jeremiah 17:9-10, Matthew 5:8, Romans 7:21-23, James 4:8, Ezekiel 36:26, 1 John 3:3, Psalm 73:1, Psalm 24:3-4, Matthew 15:19-20, Romans 12:2, Psalm 139:23-24, Titus 1:15, James 1:2-8, Matthew 12:25
Gracious God, our hearts are often divided between what is good and what is evil. Not one of us is pure in heart yet we long to have a whole heart.
In this excerpt, musician and author Ginny Owens shares a childhood exercise that only makes specific what all of us as human beings struggle with, the desire for wholeness: I wish you could know my ...
We become whole by praying our honest joys and our honest sorrows. We pray our honest praise of God and our honest anger at God; we pray also for honest speech in our words to God.
Deep within there is a glorious and terrible empty space – loneliness. It is out of sight, pushing us to our best and to our worst. Behind every effort to make a friend – Behind ambition – Behind prid...
There have been times, not least the time of the birth of Athenian democracy, when most of the people who thought and wrote about human wholeness concluded that no one could be a whole human being, no...
Neither truth nor peace can create wholeness without the other. A husband’s complaints against his wife may be true. A wife’s complaints against her husband may be true. If they only care about these ...
We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horrible destructive caricature of that image—destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenn...
The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a...
Like me, you may struggle deeply with what it means to live well. We are all seeking to take these scattered moments of meaning and weave them together into a beautiful whole.
But if I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only a...