Jesus' "About Face!"

Quite unlike Hitler or the Stones or Hefner--who also changed the world, simply by intuiting which way the parade was heading and getting in front of ...

Success after a Fall

Success doesn't mean everything in our lives has turned out well. You can be successful in coming back from a fall.

Perfect Words for the Contrite Heart

For the following part of his Book of Common Prayer, [Thomas] Cranmer drew on a number of medieval sources and yet composed something greater than their ...

Valueless Grace

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack's wares. Cheap grace is the preaching of ...

You're Forgiven Already!

Garrison Keillor spins another tale:

"Larry the Sad Boy ... was saved 12 times in the Lutheran church, an all-time record. Between 1953 and 1961 he threw ...

Be Doers, Not Hearers

A salty pagan, full of the juices of life, is a hundred times dearer to God, and also far more attractive to men, than a scribe who knows his Bible ... ...

Two Kinds of Grace

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, ...

Secret Sin Blocks Prayer

In his book Why Prayers Are Unanswered, John Lavender retells a story about Norman Vincent Peale.

When Peale was a boy, he found a big, black cigar, slipped ...

The Point of No Return

Evildoing has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers ...

Admitting Failure to Family

When the family knows you don't pretend to have it all together, that you admit failure, that you're sorry and want to do better, they can handle ...