We All Need Others to Help Us Succeed

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the strange story of Christopher Langan, a genius with a staggering IQ of 195. (For some perspective, Einstein's ...

Is the Church More Like an Old-Fashioned Hardware Store or a Home Depot?

Pastor Kevin Miller writes:

When I was a kid, Saturday mornings were chore day. Often my dad would say, "C'mon kid," and I'd hop in the ...

The True Intention of Prayer

In The Higher Happiness, Ralph W. Sockman describes the true intention of prayer: "We use prayer as a boatman uses a boat hook: to pull the boat ...

A Writer's Reflections on Offering His First Prayer

A. J. Jacobs, a writer living in New York, decided to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one year. To prepare, he bought a stack of Bibles and ...

Prayer Works Even from "Far Away"

Peter Charpentier, a minister in Hammond, Louisiana, shares a story of how God used his youngest son to teach him a valuable lesson about prayer and the ...

Fractured French and a Lesson About Prayer

Timothy Jones writes in “The Art of Prayer:”

We don't like to stand speechless or stammering before God, but that doesn't mean God ...

Eugene Peterson on Prayer as Answering Speech

Prayer is answering speech. The first word is God's word. Prayer is a human word and is never the initiating and shaping word simply because we are ...

How Do We Feel About God's Loving Authority?

John Koessler, in his sermon "Knowing the God Who Knows You”:

I noticed something about my two sons when they moved from childhood to adolescence. ...

Biker Covers Up Dirty Tattoo

Parishioners of a conservative, small-town church in rural Indiana were surprised one Sunday when a biker came to visit. He stuck out like a sore thumb—pony-tailed, ...

Finding God in the Closet

In an article for Today’s Christian Woman, author Jan Struck writes:

As a child, I was captivated by Jesus' words on prayer [in Matthew 6:5–6]. ...