Life can throw us curve balls. Suffering can come upon us suddenly. We can lose our job. Get sick. A dear one can die. A hurricane can destroy all that we own. And more. With each time of suffering we are thrown into the wilderness, into a place of transition and seeming danger where […]

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”  If Jesus is known as the Prince of Peace [foretold in Isaiah 9:6], then to follow Him means we are at peace with all that He was and taught, that we are at peace with ourselves and with everyone else. There are […]

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” It is not just that they care about righteousness, and are willing to follow the laws of God, they crave righteousness, they are so connected to this need for righteousness that they burn with the hunger for it. These are […]

Two snakes: one in Genesis 3 and one in Numbers 21. Since I’ve spent the last few years knee-deep in the Exodus story, I finally made the connection between these slithery creatures the other day. Aha! I thought, these two snakes are connected. The first snake, the one in Genesis, represents Satan or the Devil […]

We are raised to be “letter of the law” people. We learn to obey our parents. Our teachers. Our traffic laws. The laws of our nation. The trouble is that we’re not very good at following the letter of the law. All one has to do is to drive the streets and highways of our […]

  This spring I’ve been reading a number of biographies and autobiographies of Christian men and women  mostly from the mid-nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries; they have taught me a lot about what it means to depend only on God in every circumstance. From John G. Paton, a Scottish missionary, who stood up to […]

  “Lent leads us to the cross,” preached Rev. John Cleghorn at our church on the first Sunday in Lent. The question for us is this: is it the cross of Jesus or our own cross that Lent leads us to? Of course, the whole passion story leads us to Jesus’ death on the cross […]