“Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days” (John 11:6).Think about that for a moment. Jesus is the Son of God with power to heal the sick, yet when he hears about Lazarus whom he loved, he did not rush to his side to heal him. It does make sense on the surface. If you love someone, and if you can hel…
For me it started yesterday afternoon, when I realized that I had two more messages to give and then I could go home. There is always that moment on any trip when you realize the work is almost done, and if you just press forward and keep going, you’ll cross the finish line and be done with whatever it is you are doing. In my case that usuall…
Lent feels like a long journey, and it is meant to feel that way. We often start in late February when winter still has a firm grip, and it seems like the promise of Easter and the coming of spring are a long time away. And the very nature of Lent, with its emphasis on introspection, repentance and confession, can weigh upon us, especially in the e…
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God” (Matthew 5:8).Peace never just happens. You have to go out of your way to make peace. That’s why Jesus said, “Blessed as the peacemakers”—not the peacewishers or the peacehopers. In a world torn by strife and fueled by hatred, we need Christians w…
“Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me” (Luke 8:46). That’s what Jesus said when the sick woman fought through the crowd to touch the hem of his garment. In some way that we don’t fully understand, Jesus was conscious of God’s power flowing out from him into the body of the woman. Power that had be…
“Conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).How does the Father shape us into the image of his Son? A new Christian gave the answer with unusual insight. I pass it along for your consideration.I can see now that when I prayed for tolerance, God handed me a seemingly intolerable situation. When I prayed that God would show me …
Charles Hummel’s classic booklet called Tyranny of the Urgent begins with a simple question. “Have you ever wished for a thirty-hour day?” Heads nod all round. When Hummel first wrote his classic essay in 1967, he identified the telephone as among the chief offenders against a peaceful life. What would he say today about the Inter…
In the traditional reckoning of Lent, Sundays are not counted as part of the forty days because they are considered a sort of “mini-Easter” leading up to Easter itself on April 12. So instead of being Day 5 in Lent, this is the first of six Sunday “interludes.”It happens that I am writing this at a conference center no…
Legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey died today at the age of 90. Besides virtually creating his own medium that combined reporting with news commentary, he also knew how to tell a story. He gave the tease, paused, told a bit more, paused, let the story unravel a bit at a time, pausing along the way, then he would hit the punch line. He was a ma…
In an article about John Henry Newman’s Lenten sermons, Edward T. Oakes said that Newman had one theme that he returned to time and again:No one sins without making some excuse to himself for sinning. Somehow when I read that, my mind drifted back to a volleyball game more than thirty years ago. I remember that it happened after a churc…