The text for the morning is complicated, and I do not have time to explicate it in its entirety. (I promise to do so during our ongoing Bible study in 2 Samuel.) Suffice it to say that King David thought it morally correct and politically expedient to hand over to the...

The Bustle in a House the Morning After DeathIs the solemnest of industries enacted upon Earth.The Sweeping up the Heart and putting Love awayWe shall not want to use again until Eternity. Those elegant words of Emily Dickinson contrast sharply with the stark,...

Every century has its own great Christian prophets, and among the most notable and effective Christian spokesmen of the twentieth century was the Russian writer and political prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in a Stalinist prison camp in Siberia. He...

One fascinating aspect of Paul’s letters are his silences, what he leaves unspoken between the lines. We know, for example, that he loved the Philippian church; and they loved him. Yet even in this love letter to them there is that jarring phrase that says, “It is a...

Many years ago I pastored a large, mostly-white, downtown congregation in Charlotte, even as, simultaneously, I was also the Director of Missions for a small but thoroughly multi-cultural Baptist Association. I had a vision: I wanted our little Association to sponsor...