When Jesus uses the Aramaic term mammon to refer to wealth, he is giving it a personal and spiritual character. When he declares, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matt. 6:24), he is personifying mammon as a rival god. In saying this, Jesus is making it unmistakably...
Being spiritual means that we become more than pursuers and purveyors of a system. It requires a total change of heart, a total concentration of mind..... It is the seeking that counts. It's so easy to forget that simple truth in a capitalistic society that teaches us...
Some growth experts…have said those who pursue blended styles merely take turns “insulting different segments of the congregation.” But we believe otherwise; blended styles are the result of shared sacrifice and spiritual maturity. Traditional congregations committed...
"To live without risk is to risk not living," my paternal grandmother used to say. The way of trust is risky business, no doubt about it. To change careers suddenly because one feels fulfilled, to assume the energy-depleting care of elderly parents, to retreat for...
To belong is a vital need based in the spiritual nature of the human being. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need. And, like anger, contempt does not have to be acted out in special ways to be evil. It is inherently poisonous. Just by being what it is, it is...
Believing exceptional spiritual gifts compensate for emotional immaturity in Christian leaders, promoting those leaders to high profile positions, results in deep disappointment and injury to the body of Christ when the spotlight burns through the facade. We gotta...
One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God's arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home. While we wait, we have to trust, to have faith, but it is...
God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one. But we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things. For in prayer...
…And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jesus and Gentiles,...
The real tragedy is that we see people as entities or merely as things. Too seldom do we see people in their true humanness. A spiritual myopia limits our vision to external accidents. We see men as Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Chinese or American,...