11.14.22     “Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in the spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing […]

As I wrote last week, forgiveness brings us back into the kingdom of God, where everyone is equal, a child of God. Over time, as we give up all that stands between us and God, and as we live into love and forgiveness, we become aware that our attention is less and less on ourselves […]

The greatest change in our lives as we follow Jesus is in developing true humility. As we give up the issues that consume us and the values the world insists that we live by, we find that the focus of our lives goes from total self-absorption to being God-oriented and other-oriented. As we follow what […]

  Humility for us human beings is an accurate appraisal of where we each stand before God. If we are truly humble, we know that God loves all people, that we are all made in His image (Genesis 1:26-27), so that none of us stands out above the rest no matter his or her education, […]

The last fruit of the Spirit that Paul writes about in Galatians (5:22-23) is self-control (NIV, NRSV) also translated as temperance(KJV).  That sounds like an outward control of bad habits, but it’s more an attachment to Jesus’s teachings and His leading us to the kingdom of God than us controlling our own behavior.  Priorities change […]

When we have acknowledged our poverty(poor in spirit) and chosen God to be our redeemer, when we have mourned all the losses and pain and suffering we have endured, then the next step is to be meek. Meekness or humility is not a quality that we Americans seek, so this is the third countercultural move […]

We yearn. Pant. Thirst. Long. Faint. Cry out. In the Psalms in Job and in Isaiah we cry out to the Lord with desire, with aching, with hunger. “I will see him with my own eyes.” [Job 19:25-27] “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” [Psalm 42:1-2] “I long to dwell in your […]

  If we want to know the purpose of the pain and suffering in our lives, we might look to the story of Job, who was a devout believer in God, also a wealthy man with a great family and property and friends. As the story goes, God boasted to Satan that Job was a […]

      “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Whether our life circumstances have left us meek or humble or gentle or we have been “gentled,”[1] as Cynthia Bourgeault would put it, that is, healed and transformed by our surrender to the arms of God, the result is the same: we […]

  “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” [KJV] Today I am starting a nine-week series on the Beatitudes, looking at each one from several different points of view. I’ll be referencing the works of Dallas Willard, Cynthia Bourgeault, Neil Douglas-Klotz, Jean-Ives Leloup, Jim Forrest and the Message. Let’s […]