Sermon Illustrations on god's nature

In the Critically acclaimed 2018 horror film A Quiet Place , Earth faces an alien invasion unlike any other. In the movie, the aliens behave like merciless monsters, using their lightning-fast sp...

Robert Burns was a widely heralded poet and lyricist (1759-1796), considered by many as the National Poet of Scotland. Burns’ poems continue to be read around the world and many have been put to song,...

Last week, an atheist came up to me and asked how I could believe in a God who made parents eat their children.  Naturally, I was a little confused. A lot of people have odd ideas about God, but ...

Have you ever heard of the Greatest Books of the Western World collection? Published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1954, this comprehensive series was edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer J. A...

The great African-American preacher Gardner Taylor, preacher of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn for over 40 years, begins one of his sermons with a paean to the God revealed to us in the 66 boo...

Julian of Norwich was a fourteenth-century mystic-theologian who maybe understood the belovedness of creation and new creation better than anyone. In the fifth chapter of her book Revelations of Divin...

Imagine what Adam and Eve learned about God’s generosity from their first impression of him on their first day. Their first knowledge of God and the world God had made was that rest was not an afterth...

Before I knew God, I knew nature. I knew the feeling of warmth from the sun on my skin. The crunch of leaves on the sidewalk. The sparkle of the fresh powder snow. It was not until I was a teenager th...

After finishing a major project, have you ever stood back, taken in what you have accomplished, and said to yourself, “That’s pretty good”? I’ll admit that I have on numerous occasions, especially aft...

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

In his book The Mystery of Christ , a series of fictionalized pastoral counseling sessions (based on actual events), the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon shares a number of helpful ways of unde...

Two Hebrew words deeply inform and enrich our understanding of meditative prayer: haga and siach . Our English Bibles most often translate both of these words with the simple word “meditate...

Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an int...

The lesson of Genesis is that the first work of rest is to cease from our own effort. All that needs to be done has already been done. The work of God was finished long before we ever came on the scen...

The God who shares power is a listener. Listening is not something that becomes necessary for God only after the world is created. Listening is who God is. In God’s very being, communication does not ...

The South African politician Nic Diederichs—a prominent leader during the apartheid era—once made a rather provocative observation: God, he said, dislikes deadly uniformity. I hate to admit that I lik...

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 ...

And so we arrive at autumn, the conclusion of our ordinary time in the land. The seeds planted at the start of our pilgrimage have produced a harvest in fields, homes, and towns. Farms display God’s a...

If God wanted to remain silent about His existence, He wouldn’t have bothered creating the stars; He wouldn’t have made the Milky Way, or Betelgeuse. In fact, He wouldn’t have made the majestic Rocky ...

This capriciousness of the gods is diametrically opposed to the biblical view. The God of Creation is not at all morally indifferent. On the contrary, morality and ethics constitute the very essence o...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

On the day I was born, the doctor who delivered me inscribed my birth records with a firm hand: seven pounds, eleven ounces, twenty-one inches. It was the first legally attested evidence that I was no...

We humans may say, “Let there be light in this room,” but then we have to flick a switch or light a candle. Our words need deeds to back them up and can fail to achieve their purposes. God’s words, ho...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

James Nelson describes sexuality as the central clue to what God is up to in the world. While this might seem a little over the top, when you think about it, sexuality factors integrally in our relati...

What we call “nature” isn’t the same nature our great-grandparents knew. Even if they lived as far south as Baltimore, they could cut eighteen-inch blocks of ice off ponds in the winter to cool their ...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...