Sermon Illustrations on beyond understanding

I’m a huge advocate of catechisms, for example, having used this approach with my kids. I even wrote one. The strength of a catechism isn’t in memorizing the questions and answers of the catechism; th...

A Lutheran pastor friend—the Reverend Bill Vaswig—and I once were discussing Galatians 2:19 and wondering what it means to be crucified with Christ. I mean, what are we actually talking about? Bill sa...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

I have a nagging sense that when we read the word blessed , we either feel indifferent or suspicious. Both of these responses are likely the result of the way the term is (over)used in our day-to...

We are people of desire. We want things. We long for things. It is primal to our nature to yearn. As Saint Augustine reflected, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing. . . . That is o...

In February 2011 human brainpower faced off against Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, in a battle of knowledge and processing speed on the popular TV show Jeopardy. Who would win? Ken Jennings and Brad Rut...

Prudence is a form of wisdom. The ancients distinguished between two kinds of wisdom: speculative wisdom (sophia), related to the world of abstract ideas, and practical wisdom (prudentia), related to ...

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

Dan DeHaan, talked about man’s quest to grasp a full understanding of God’s character being like a boy following a trickling brook as it flowed downstream. Step by step, as he followed each babble and...

Apologetics (from apologia in Greek) is a “word back,” a reasoned defense mounted on behalf of the one we love who is innocent but has been falsely and unfairly accused. Faith desires to let God be Go...

One day when St. Augustine was at his wits’ end to understand and explain the Trinity, he went out for a walk. He kept turning over in his mind, “One God, but three Persons. Three Persons–not three Go...

Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular:  There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible — until we manage to get so used to it that we ...

Famed pastor and educator A. T. Pierson (1837–1911) lamented his own human inadequacies in communicating to his congregation the depth and levels of the “unsearchable riches of Christ:” “Unsearchabl...

My friend Mike Metzger of the Clapham Institute once used the following example to demonstrate how important frames are if we are to make sense of reality’s puzzle. This may seem like a head scratcher...

Martin Heidegger said that being is presence. Whatever else this means, it suggests that in some way presence is a basic property of simply being. Everything that exists has presence by virtue of its ...

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts a...

In the Bible, this [The Mystery of Christ] concept is referred to not only as the mystery of Christ, but also as the mystery of God (or of God’s will), the mystery of the kingdom, and the mystery of t...

If you’ve been around a kid who’s just learned to ask “why?”, it can be a bit much. You’ll be asked, “why is grass green?” “Why do birds fly?” “Why do I get hungry?” and much, much, more.  Pa...

In the sixteenth century the Reformers declared their total confidence in what they called the perspicuity of Scripture. What they meant by that technical term was the clarity of Scripture. They maint...

We artful dodgers act as if we do not understand the New Testament, because we realize full well that [if we let on that we did] we should have to change our way of life drastically. That is why we in...

One discovery was a time-released revelation to me. On my way to classes each week, I had been passing Emerson Hall, the building that houses the philosophy department at Harvard. The enormous inscrip...

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

Writing to his parents while imprisoned on the day of Pentecost, the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this: At the tower of Babel all the tongues were confounded, and as a result men could no longe...

Karl Barth wrote that, “God is always a mystery. Revelation is always revelation in the full sense of the word or it is not revelation” ( CD  I.8.2). God’s revelation, to Barth, always exists in a dia...

The man who prosecuted the infamous Manson family for their murders later wrote a book titled Helter Skelter. This phrase was taken from a song performed by a well-known rock music group. Manson...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

Becoming a teachable person has two prerequisites: There must be a teacher and a person willing to be taught. Increasingly, Western culture has become an environment that celebrates and platforms the ...

Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy….We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism...It is difficult to undo our own damage and to recall to our presence that ...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...