The Football Association Challenge Cup (commonly called the FA Cup) is the English soccer equivalent of our American Super Bowl. It's played annually each May in Wembley Stadium before 90,000 frenzied soccer fans. It has been a century-old...
Food can assume exaggerated importance in our lives. Fasting is one way to bring these appetites under control. People in the Bible fast from food for all sorts of reasons. David fasts for the health of his gravely ill son. Esther fasts before she...
Peter Kreeft (1937-) has been a professor of philosophy for thirty-eight years at Boston College. Among his forty books, he wrote A Prayer for Beginners. It is, as advertised, a simple, direct treatment of prayer for novices. Peter admits, after...
The Thirty Years War from 1618-1648 was one of the most destructive wars in European history. It started as a religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics over religious freedom and escalated into a major political power struggle. Not quite...
Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) was raised in a Christian family. His father and grandfather were both pastors. When he was fifteen, he decided to visit every house of worship in Colchester, England, to learn the way of salvation. On Sunday morning,...
You can make the Bible say most anything you want. Here's how it works. Extrapolate a passage from its immediate context, ignore its original intent, and exploit it to suit your own agenda. The practice is called proof-texting, and it's lethal in...
When our children were young, they loved watching Sesame Street. True confession: I enjoyed watching it with them. The puppets are simply the best. Forgetful Jones, dressed in cowboy attire with his girlfriend Clementine, were among my favorites....
Doubt gets a bad rap in church circles. To my way of thinking, unbelief is the antithesis of faith, not doubt. Doubt is somewhere in the middle, suspended halfway between belief and unbelief. Doubt can go either way. There are two kinds of doubt in...
It may be the most widely distributed sermon of the twentieth century. Robert Boyd Munger (1911-2001) first preached his "My Heart--Christ's Home" sermon at the Berkeley Presbyterian Church in California in 1949. It was published a few years later...
Let me take you back to an evangelistic meeting in the early 1920s at Trinity Evangelical Church in Shamokin, Pennsylvania (yep, it's an actual town). A man who, in the opinion of those present at the meeting, "was under the influence of alcohol"...
George MacDonald wrote a prayer for every day of the year in Diary of an Old Soul in 1880. His entry for July 16th begins:“The house is not for me—it is for him. His royal thoughts require many a stair, Many a tower, many an outlook fair Of which I...
A woman approached the famous evangelist Billy Sunday after he preached a sermon on anger. She attempted to rationalize her anger by saying, "There's nothing wrong with losing my temper. I blow up, and it's all over." Billy Sunday replied, "So does...
It was the last few months of World War II. Stuttgart, Germany, was in ruins, the result of frequent Allied bombing raids on Nazi strongholds. There was one church left standing. Soon, it would be reduced to rubble and the congregation forced to...
When our son Andrew was young, he was strong-willed and cautious. He was hesitant about trying new things. My wife Chris and I had to coax him into taking swimming lessons, going to summer camp, and trying new activities. It often became a battle...
I'd love to tell you about Peter Taylor (P.T.) Forsyth's (1848-1921) fascinating life, but I'm more intrigued by his observations on prayer. Here is but a sample from his book The Soul of Prayer: ...
The Bible asserts two things about us as people: 1. we are deeply flawed, and 2. we are deeply loved. Both things are simultaneously true about us. Some of us were raised in churches that were all about the flaws, a steady drumbeat of guilt and...
What are we to make of Jesus' frequent encounters with the devil and his legion of demons? Evil spirits don't seem to have the same prominence today as they did in Jesus' time. Here is my take on things. When God comes to earth in Jesus Christ, the...
Idolatry seems so Old Testament. I don't see anyone today bowing down to golden calves, as they did in Moses' day. It seemed that every time Moses turned around, people were paying homage to gods of their own making. Martin Luther said, "An idol is...