Kingdom of God

Our Slavery Bonds Cut Loose

We’ve heard of the North Vietnamese prison camps from the mid-20th century. American soldiers and pilots were kept in small cells, confined without adequate light or sanitation, and unable to get ...

Filling Up Our Barns

It’s a farmer thing. Dairymen, too. We want our barns to be full. Now, to keep a barn constantly full isn’t sensible. We want them full, but to maintain them that way all the time is to have our ...

It’s the Real Thing, Baby

Knockoffs are sometimes pretty good. We can’t afford Calvin Klein, so we scour the shelves for the closest thing. In their fine print, eBay says most Calvin Klein products sold on their ...

Self-Made Gods

What is a god? By most people’s standards, it’s anything that has power over us. Do we give that power to our gods, or do they already have power over us? One of the Ten Commandments entreats us ...

The Lightning Strike of Christ

Lightning can be very frightening. A person can be struck inside his or her home from a storm five miles away. Scary, isn’t it? People in the American Midwest are advised not to stand by a window ...

Clearing Away the Cankers

Boats are beautiful, especially sailboats. They raise their sails, they catch the wind, and they leap forward, masterpieces of perfection. There is something sailboats do that reveals the care ...

The Lion of God

The lion is unequivocally the king of beasts. He stands proudly in the African plain, and when he roars, every other creature runs in fear. There is no beast to equal the mighty lion. Our Savior ...

Heirs to the King

Kings are rich beyond belief. The wealth of the countryside is theirs for the taking. In medieval England, even the deer in the fields belonged to the king. Christians are heirs of the kingdom of ...

Reigning with Christ

We live in a world of power brokers. They are the oligarchy, the privileged few who have the money and the authority to change the world for better…or for worse. After the financial collapse of ...

Our Ever-Increasing Glory

It’s the downcast head that tells us of someone’s depression. They stumble along, unwilling to look ahead, barely finding where to place each footstep. It’s also how we walk when the storm ...

Bunches of Blessings

It’s all about the grapes. Not real grapes, of course, but the blessings that seem to come in times of unexpected bounty, tumbling over us in exceeding excess. That’s how life is, too, a ...

The Truth of the Light

Space Mountain. It’s a Disney ride of thrilling proportions. A roller coaster ride in the dark is both scary as well as exhilarating, because we know what’s going to happen, but we can’t see ...

Our Laughing God

What do we find funny? It’s not the same for everyone. Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick drove people to a mania of laughter, one that made him the toast of the town in the early years of ...