Continuing a short series about the early church: Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; read more

Continuing a short series about the early church: Christians love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If a man has something, he gives freely to the man who has nothing. If they see a stranger, Christians take him home and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God. And if they hear that one of them is in jail, or persecuted for professing the name of their redeemer, they all give him what he needs -- if it is possible, they bail him out. If one of them is poor and there isn't enough food to go around, they fast several days to give him the food he needs... This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them.

Feast of Chad, Abbot of Lastingham, Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary, 672 Devotional poetry... has to do with devotedness, with read more

Feast of Chad, Abbot of Lastingham, Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary, 672 Devotional poetry... has to do with devotedness, with trust merged into faith, with love's steadfastness. It finds men's worthwhileness deep laid in relationship to God's worthwhileness, and this devotion is expressed in communication. It finds this world precious insofar as it... symbolizes God's love and therefore it runs counter to our national sin of distrust in God. (And yet, how can we trust Him without knowing and living unto Him and loving Him?).

It does not make a very great difference what side of Christ's work attracts us and appeals to us most; read more

It does not make a very great difference what side of Christ's work attracts us and appeals to us most; doubtless Christ has many ways of drawing men to Himself. One side of Christ's work will appeal most to one mind, another to another. The mistake that is often made by those who speak most about Christian experience is that they are so apt to insist upon everyone else's experience -- on penalty of its utter worthlessness -- being exactly the same as their own. The great thing is that we should be attracted by Christ in some way, that we should come to God in that spirit of penitence which Christ taught was the one condition of acceptance with Him, and with that steady purpose of amendment which is, as he always taught, a part of true penitence.

Many worthy people, and many good books, with no doubt the best intentions, ... have represented a life of sin read more

Many worthy people, and many good books, with no doubt the best intentions, ... have represented a life of sin as a life of pleasure; they have pictured virtue as self-sacrifice, austerity as religion. Even in everyday life we meet with worthy people who seem to think that whatever is pleasant must be wrong, that the true spirit of religion is crabbed, sour, and gloomy; that the bright, sunny, radiant nature which surrounds us is an evil and not a blessing, -- a temptation devised by the Spirit of Evil and not one of the greatest delights showered on us in such profusion by the Author of all Good.

Feast of Teresa of Avila, Mystic, Teacher, 1582 The love of Jesus is at once avid and generous. All read more

Feast of Teresa of Avila, Mystic, Teacher, 1582 The love of Jesus is at once avid and generous. All that He has, all that He is, He gives; all that we are, all that we have, He takes.

Commemoration of Clement, Bishop of Rome, Martyr, c.100 One can believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and feel read more

Commemoration of Clement, Bishop of Rome, Martyr, c.100 One can believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and feel no personal loyalty to Him at all -- indeed, pay no attention whatever to His commandments and His will for one's life. One can believe intellectually in the efficacy of prayer and never do any praying.

Contemplating this blighted and sinister career, the lesson is burnt in upon the conscience, that since Judas by transgression fell, read more

Contemplating this blighted and sinister career, the lesson is burnt in upon the conscience, that since Judas by transgression fell, no place in the Church of Christ can render any man secure. And since, falling, he was openly exposed, none may flatter himself that the cause of Christ is bound up with his reputation, that the mischief must needs be averted which his downfall would entail, that Providence must needs avert from him the natural penalties for evil-doing. Though one was as the signet upon the Lord's hand, yet was he plucked thence. There is no security for any soul except where love and trust repose, upon the bosom of Christ. Now if this be true, and if sin and scandal may conceivably penetrate even the inmost circle of the chosen, how great an error it is to break, because of these offenses, the unity of the Church, and institute some new communion, purer far than the Churches of Corinth and Galatia, which were not abandoned but reformed, and more impenetrable to corruption than the little group of those who ate and drank with Jesus.

Feast of Matthew, Apostle & Evangelist Wherever God's Word may be preached, His precepts remain a letter read more

Feast of Matthew, Apostle & Evangelist Wherever God's Word may be preached, His precepts remain a letter and dead words so long as they are not received by men with a pure heart; only where they pierce to the soul do they become, so to speak, changed into Spirit.

He challenged the church to rethink its own mission in the radically secular world of the twentieth century... The nonbelieving read more

He challenged the church to rethink its own mission in the radically secular world of the twentieth century... The nonbelieving brave men he met in the anti-Nazi underground, the stark realities of prison life, and his disappointment in the professional churchmen of Germany, all may have influenced Bonhoeffer to see real Christianity as "non-religious" and "worldly"... The opposition between sacred and secular, supernatural and natural, seemed unreal to him -- the apparent opposites are united in Jesus Christ.