After years of urban living had ground down my childhood love of nature, I found it suddenly rekindled through my friendship with a young photographer ...

One sleepy Sunday afternoon when my son was five-years-old, we drove past a cemetery together. Noticing a large pile of dirt beside a newly excavated ...

Picking, choosing, and deciding which sins are trivial and which are the biggies is a completely human tendency. A young man once told me, "It's like ...

Fred Winters, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Illinois, was shot and killed during a Sunday service on March 8, 2009, by a troubled young ...

In his book The Divine Commodity, Skye Jethani shares a story from a trip he took to India with his father. While walking the streets of New Delhi, a ...

On the surface, it sounds like a healthy company was rewarding its best and brightest. Over 400 employees recently received bonuses. Three-fourths of ...

Texts: Assorted texts from the Passion accounts of the Gospels and Isaiah 52:13–53:12

Principle: The weight of the sins we have committed and the ...

The gospel message says: "You don't live in a mechanistic world ruled by necessity; you don't live in a random world ruled by chance; you live in a world ...

Someone dear to me once gave me a little cross adorned with roses. It bears the inscription, "Hope raises no dust." I looked at that phrase and tried ...

What one sees depends on where one sets up one's shop. Mine is at the entrance of the empty tomb.

—W. Paul Jones, Roman Catholic priest

Years ago, Bill Hybels shared how he had seen a newscast about a big Vietnam veterans parade in Chicago. Part of the commemoration was a mobile version ...

Many years ago, my wife and I were having a marital "moral discourse," and I was becoming increasingly agitated. In my fury, I yelled at her and aimed ...

Ascension Day is the perfect church holiday because the world can't steal it. The culture around us has quite ruined Christmas and Easter. Of course, ...

A cloud of doubt hangs over home run king Barry Bonds. On August 7, 2007, Bonds hit number 756, the home run that broke Hank Aaron's record. Most of the ...

To embrace the Ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), ...

The doctor said, "If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one."

The doctor was talking about Alcides Moreno. By every law of physics and medicine, ...

Most kingdoms do anything they can to protect their king. This is the unspoken premise of the game of chess, for example. When the king falls, the kingdom ...

As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, Jaroslav Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be ...

The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, ...

Despite our efforts to keep him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin's womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered ...

I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I turn ...

In April 2002, the well-respected Oxford University philosophy professor Richard Swineburne used a broadly accepted probability theory to defend the ...

Let's celebrate Easter with the rite of laughter. Christ died and rose and lives. Laugh like a woman who holds her first baby. Our enemy death will ...

The mother of a nine-year-old boy named Mark received a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. It was the teacher from her son's school.

"Mrs. Smith, ...

Last week my son, Bjorn, got sick.

I took his temperature, and it was 102.5. The Children's Advil came out. He slugged down the appropriate dose for his ...

Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as "the last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). There is a real difference between the two things; ...

The resurrection of Jesus is a hidden event. Jesus didn't rise from the dead to prove to those who had crucified him that they had made a mistake, or ...

[The disciples] had seen the strong hands of God twist the crown of thorns into a crown of glory, and in hands as strong as that they knew themselves ...

Precisely how a man nailed to a cross 2,000 years ago, who claimed to be the Son of God, came to signify reality, in contradiction to the sawdust men ...

At the end of his sermon on Isaiah 9:6, Ken Langley, pastor of Christ Community Church in Zion, Illinois, shared this powerful thought about the life ...

Texts: Passages concerning the sacrifice of Jesus (Leviticus 16, Isaiah 53, Matthew 16:21–28, Luke 18:31–34, John 12:20–36, Philippians ...

After several months of pain in one joint of my right thumb, I went to a hand specialist. I did not remember injuring the thumb, and I didn't want it ...

In the book Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assaya, the lead singer and songwriter for the rock group U2 makes an explicit confession of faith.

"It's ...

Imagine the mystery and delight of not just hearing, but seeing the story of Jesus for the first time, almost as an eyewitness.

That's what happened to ...

In August 2003, New York City's Church of the Holy Cross was broken into twice. First a metal moneybox next to a votive candle rack was stolen. Three ...

Suffering is not evidence of God's absence, but of God's presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic ...

I think the most vibrant missionaries I have met are medical doctors serving in lonely outposts of the Arab world. These physicians and nurses are aware ...

The movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is based on the classic novel by C. S. Lewis about four London children who are ...

The movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is based on the classic novel by C. S. Lewis about four London children who ...

Based on a book by Francine Rivers, The Last Sin Eater is set in Appalachia in the 1800s. When Welsh immigrants settled in America, they brought along ...

...

Wilberforce has made an earlier visit to his old pastor and friend John Newton (Albert Finney). Newton himself was a former captain of a slave ship ...

Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, tells the story of the last 12 hours of Jesus' life. In one scene Gibson uses a poignant flashback to paint ...

In the movie Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS auditor who suddenly finds himself the subject of narration only he can hear. ...

Text: Matthew 26:17–28:20; Mark 14:12–16:20; Luke 22:7–24:43; John 13:1–21:25; Acts 10:1–48Topic: A look at what it means to ...

Text: Matthew 21:1–13
Topic: The new king has come—but do you want what he brings?  

Here's a sermon by Kevin Miller that might ...

Text: Roman 8:1–4, 35–39
Topic: Celebrating the results of Christ's passion

By the close of this sermon, Mac Brunson has masterfully ...

If you had the opportunity, who would you like to meet face to face? Is it someone living? Someone who has already died? A celebrity? Nobility? ...