“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…
Death may seem like a heavy topic for Lent but it is, after all, what Ash Wednesday is all about. When the worshipers come, they have a little bit of ash (usually taken from the burning of the palm crosses used in the previous year’s Palm Sunday) smudged on their forehead, sometimes in the sign of the cross. More importantly, the pastor then …
Recently I was asked to give a short quote on preaching for publication later this year. As I thought about it, I kept coming back to one thought about how amazing it is that God takes a human event (preaching) and uses it to produce divine results (salvation, conviction, spiritual growth, transformation). Here is the quote I submitted:When we prea…
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). Think of these simple words. Pure.Heart.See.God.We know what those words mean individually, but put them together and we enter a new realm. How do I know if I am “pure in heart”? What does it mean to “see God”? And how should we put these phrases…