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G. K. Chesterton said the unbeliever is like a man born upside down, standing on his head, his feet “dancing upward in idle ecstasies, while his brain is in the abyss.” Christianity sets a man right side up. His head is placed in heaven, where it belongs, and his feet on the earth, where they belong.…

Blaise Pascal had a kind of born again experience the night of November 23, 1654. A brilliant scientist and intellectual, Pascal met God, as it were, face to face, and wrote what he saw and felt, as it was happening to him. He recorded on a piece of parchment, “From about half past ten in the evening…

EAST INDIAN EVANGELIST K. P. Yohannan says he will never forget one of his first prayer meetings in an American church. He had come to the United States eager to meet some of its spiritual giants and leaders. One man in particular held his interest, a preacher known even in India for his powerful sermons…

Bob Bakke, of National Prayer Advance, tells of churches of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and their experience of this kind of prayer. After the first Great Awakening, three churches in this community covenanted to follow the pattern suggested by Edwards. In each congregation, cell groups would meet weekly…

GEORGE MUELLER, the great Victorian Christian and social reformer, tells a story of persistent prayer in his diary: In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever…

Surgeon Paul Brand tells a story that provides a gripping picture of the work of the paraclete. He was a junior doctor in a London hospital when one day he came into the room of an eighty-one-year-old cancer patient named Mrs. Twigg. Her cancer was in her throat and, as he describes it, this “spry, courageous…

I first began to understand this the summer between my ninth- and tenth-grade years. My next-door neighbor was two years ahead of me in school and a bright and argumentative nonbeliever. Many warm evenings we would argue about the existence of God until late at night. To a stalemate. It was so clear…

God being God, Annie Dillard playfully suggested that along with our Bibles and vestments we should wear crash helmets when we worship.

We tend to want our prayers to be therapeutic, to leave us relaxed. More often than we wish, God would have them leave us stirred up. No wonder we get bored with prayer! No wonder we experience prayer in the same way director Billy Wilder said he experienced a film once. “The film started at 8 P.M. I…

God’s mirth roars in our veins, a loving abandon grips us, and we find ourselves compelled by the vision expressed by Augustine: “Lord, hast thou declared that no man shall see Thy face and live?—Then let me die, that I may see Thee.”

Broken cisterns are idols, God-substitutes. They are the spiritual hot dogs we ingest on the way to God’s banquet. They dull and eventually kill our appetite for the deep and nourishing richness of his holy fare. Like the Turkish delight the witch gives to Edmund in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch,…

The disappointment and exhaustion of ecclesiastical exertions—of endless meetings and gatherings and committees and programs—can dull our appetite for God. Quietly, imperceptibly, we begin to expect less of him, and end up being satisfied with that. Perhaps at the beginning of our ministry we wondered,…

God is like a good father. Or like a good friend. Dr. Leslie Weatherhead liked to tell the story of an old Scot who was quite ill and near death. His pastor came to call on him one morning. When he entered the bedroom and sat down beside him, he noticed another chair opposite him, placed next to the…

Two men were pushing their way through the crowds in New York City’s Times Square. They had to shout to each other to be heard above the din. One man was a native of New York, the other was a Native American from Oklahoma. The Native American stopped suddenly and said to his friend, “Listen! Can you…

A week after these experiences at Hope College, I went to Chicago to attend a National Day of Prayer event. Different pastors spoke on what God was doing in their communities. One of them, a pastor from Texas, had a ministry with street gangs, which in itself was amazing, because he didn’t look like…

The story of the Moravian Brethren is a similar one. When the Christians of various and disparate traditions—Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and many others—gathered together on the Von Zinzendorf estate in Moravia, in the early 1700s, they saw themselves as pilgrims in spiritual unity.…

One spring day in 1993, I was so discouraged I didn’t know how I could go on with my work. I prayed with my wife over my anguish and went outside for a long walk, hoping that the physical activity would renew my spirits. It didn’t. I walked back into the house and heard the telephone ringing; the last…

Rousseau thought this way: I bless God for his gifts, but I do not pray to him. Why should I ask him to change for me the course of things, to work miracles on my behalf? I who ought to love above all the order established by his wisdom and maintained by his providence. In a similar vein, Immanuel Kant…

Select all the text in this box and paste your sermon here... Introduction Sermon text with italics and bold and John 3:16 and Jn 3:20. Heading 2 What one most deeply loves, one most deeply fears. My wife, Lauretta, is the dearest person I know, and apart from Jesus, the clearest, most incontrovertible…

Select all the text in this box and paste your illustration here... Source: Magazine Name, January 1, 2006 Helen Roseveare is a short, no-nonsense Irish doctor, with steely blue eyes and a wry wit. When I met her in 1994, she was a spry seventy and reminded me of a favorite elderly aunt or a grandmother.…

IMAGINE THE MYSTERY and delight of not only hearing but seeing the story of Jesus for the first time, almost as an eyewitness. That’s what happened to a primitive tribe in the jungles of East Asia, when missionaries showed them the Jesus film. Not only had these people never heard of Jesus, they had…

One spring day in 1993, I was so discouraged I didn’t know how I could go on with my work. I prayed with my wife over my anguish and went outside for a long walk, hoping that the physical activity would renew my spirits. It didn’t. I walked back into the house and heard the telephone ringing; the last…

Owens recounts how she decided that after she had laid out her requests before God in her evening prayers, she would then listen for God to say something back to her. She waited in the darkness for something to come, but heard nothing. Finally, tired and dissatisfied, she went to sleep. The night passed,…

But there may be a deeper meaning to our thirst and fatigue. John Sanford paints a picture of this in his description of an old well that stood outside the front door of a family farmhouse in New Hampshire. The water from the well was remarkably pure and cold. No matter how hot the summer or how severe…