Muckraking is not gospel work. Witch-hunting is not gospel work. Shaming the outcast is not gospel work. Forgiving sin is gospel work.

— U.S. pastor, scholar, author, and poet (1932—)

Ghassan Thomas leads one of the few public churches that emerged [in Baghdad] after Saddam Hussein was toppled. His congregation erected a sign on their building that said "Jesus Is the Light of the World," but the church was raided by bandits who left behind a threat on a piece of cardboard. It read: "Jesus is not the light of the world, Allah is, and you have been warned." The note was signed "The ...

This past summer, a friend of mine named Greg put together a mini high school reunion when he went back to Indiana to visit his parents. He hadn't seen many of his classmates in over 17 years. Needless to say, they had a riot reliving their glory days and finding out what was currently going on in everyone's life.

As the night was winding down, Greg noticed that his friend Debbie was getting teary-eyed, ...

Several workplace-related studies in 2008 suggest that the majority of working Americans aren't all that fond of who they work with.

• When asked if a colleague has ever tried to make them look bad, 50 percent of respondents said yes; 48 percent said no; 2 percent said they didn't know.
  
  
• When asked to identify which causes more stress at work—co-workers or workload—51 percent of respondents said co-workers, while 49 percent said workload.
  
  

In her book Living Beyond Yourself: Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit, author and speaker Beth Moore recalls a particularly insightful moment in her life:

I will never forget watching an evening talk show featuring the story of the parents and killer of a young college student. The killer was his best friend. The weapon was high alcohol content inside a speeding automobile. …

What made this ...

One of my most painful leadership lessons came shortly after I graduated from seminary and began to work in a church as a full-time pastor and leader. I was asked to be on a committee that worked with incoming seminary students who were training for full-time ministry. One of our responsibilities was to determine if students had financial needs.

At my first meeting, this group looked over four requests ...

In the mid-1990s, Hutu extremists killed between 800,000 and 1 million people in Rwanda. Fourteen years later, the many men and women who experienced devastating loss are still trying to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Some have even gone the extra mile toward being reconciled to those they once called enemies.

Consider Iphigenia Mukantabana. In 1994, her husband and five of her children ...

Leif Enger's Peace Like a River tells the story of Jeremiah Land, a janitor for the local school who has been known to perform miracles from time to time. He lives a relatively quiet life with his three children: 16-year-old Davy, 11-year-old Reuben, and 9-year-old Swede, a precocious little girl.

The novel takes a dark turn when Davy kills two teenage thugs who invade his family's home. It isn't long ...

When Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, spent time in war-torn Angola to draw attention to tens of thousands of malnourished people, they were changed forever. "I learned something in one of the rural villages that will mark my teaching and response to the Word of God," Beth says. "As we stood there, trying to absorb the sights and smells of living death, our new friend, Isak Pretorius, said, 'One ...

Max Lucado writes about a big, muscle-bound man named Daniel who was swindled by his own brother. He vowed that if he ever saw him again, he would break his neck. A few months later, Daniel became a Christian. Even so, he couldn't forgive his brother. One day, the inevitable encounter took place on a busy avenue. This is how Daniel described what happened:

I saw him, but he didn't see me. I felt my ...