Reflect In the Peanuts comic strip, Linus once said, “I love humanity. It’s the people I can’t stand.” How often have we though this, even if we haven’t verbalized it? Humanity is abstract—people are real. They get in our faces with their demands and their smells and their aches. They interrupt our plans, and they […]
Reflect We see from Ephesians 5 and Genesis 2 that God intended for human beings to be bound closely to each other. Whether we are someone’s spouse or someone’s relative, friend or colleague, our actions affect others as well as ourselves. The decisions we make usually have an impact on those close to us, whether […]
Reflect There is no place on this earth we can go without being in awe of God’s creations. The oceans, the countryside, the mountains. We can sit in our own yards and behold the industry of ants and the antics of our pets and know that they are not mere consequences of a random universe. […]
Reflect How moving is it to know that Jesus, in the hours before his death, prayed for the disciples he loved. He asked God to protect them and keep them in the way of truth. As John 17:20-24 makes clear, though, Jesus prayed not only for the disciples he knew on earth, but for all […]
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” Jesus might have told his followers. “Everything’s going to be fine for you when I am gone. I won’t leave you alone. I will send the Advocate, the Spirit of truth, to tell you everything you need to know in order to live as my people.” Such words must have been […]
Reflect Gardeners know that, in order to grow healthy petunias, dead blossoms must be pinched off (dead-heading) in order to allow the plant’s energy to be directed toward new, healthy growth. In the rich and moving passage of John 15:1-17, Jesus used a horticultural image to lay out a fundamental understanding of the relationship between […]
Reflect Jesus’ example of servanthood makes most of us as uncomfortable today as it made Peter so many long years ago. In fact, many of us would be hard pressed to decide which aspect of that foot washing would pose the greater threat: to be the washer or the washee. To be the washer of […]
Reflect John 12 records Jesus’ effort to explain that death will soon claim him. In an attempt to describe the meaning of his death, Jesus utilized the image of the grain of wheat. He reminded them that the grain of wheat that falls into the earth will die, but spring forth again to bear much […]
Reflect Know the truth and be free. But what truth? What freedom? It was these kinds of issues that left Jesus’ followers and others confused—both then and now. In John 8, Jesus explained in the form of a brief analogy. We are like slaves, only we are enslaved to sin rather than to a slave-holding […]
Reflect A television news magazine some time ago presented a piece about a malady that strikes many adults in the United States: “affluenza.” This social illness is manifested as ever increasing numbers of people spend their lives in a never-ending quest for ever-greater consumption. Primarily a disease of the middle and upper-economic status of society, […]
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