On the afternoon of May 2, 1990, I heard holy things. I was visiting Larry Hildreth, a father and husband from our church in Pennsylvania. He was in his thirties, but he was near death from cancer. I was at his home to serve him Communion, because he was too weak to come to church.

Larry was a deeply thoughtful man, and as he spoke that day, slow and deliberately, I realized I was hearing extraordinary ...

The Bible says of Jesus the Messiah, "A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out." To understand an idea like this, sometimes we need to see its opposite. What does Jesus not do?

In May of 2009, on the Haizhu bridge in Guangzhou, China, a disturbed man in deep financial debt was poised on the edge of the bridge contemplating suicide. Because of him police had closed ...

Jack Handey, known for his odd sense of humor frequently expressed in an old Saturday Night Live segment titled "Deep Thoughts," wrote an equally odd book entitled Fuzzy Memories. In it Handey relates the story of a bully who demanded his lunch money every day when he was a child. Because Handey was smaller than the bully, he simply gave the bully his money.

"Then I decided to fight back," Handey ...

Many of us act as if repentance is a matter of the will. [But] we can't "will" ourselves into change. We can't "will" ourselves into feeling contrition or remorse. Repentance isn't doing something about our sin; rather it means admitting that we can't do anything about our sin. We cannot woo ourselves into anything but the most external form of repentance.

All our effort, striving, and willpower have ...

[In an article for Decision magazine], Samuel Kamaleson illustrates [the difficulty of submission] through a Christian folk story from South India. There are several versions of it, but here it opens with a young boy who loved to play marbles. He regularly walked through his neighborhood with a pocketful of his best marbles, hoping to find opponents to play against. One marble in particular, his ...

The power of temptation is not in its appeal to our baser instincts; if that were the case, it would be natural to be repulsed by it. The power of temptation is in its appeal to our idealism.

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.

—Miroslav Volf, Croation theologian (1956—)

The first time I visited Rwanda, I went looking for monsters, albeit a different category of monster—the kind that isn't relegated to B movies. I had heard about the 1994 genocide that had left one million people dead—tortured, raped, viciously murdered—and somehow I thought it would be easy to spot the perpetrators. I naïvely assumed I would be able to look men and women in the ...

The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well. Some cancer patients recover; some don't. But the ordeal of facing your mortality and feeling your frailty sharpens your perspective about life. You appreciate little things more ferociously. You grasp the mystical power of love. You feel the gravitational pull of faith. And you realize you have received a unique gift—a field ...

Why didn't any changes occur or any love or help come when I accepted you as Lord and Savior?

—Matthew Murray, in a letter addressed to God that was found in his car after he shot and killed two people at a Youth With a Mission training center and then was himself killed by a security guard at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in December 2007