piety

Bian Yunbo – A Poet for the Unknown Christian When, in 1943, Japanese soldiers occupied a rural area of the province of Hebei, China, eighteen-year-old Bian Yunbo walked over six hundred miles south-east to Yang County, where a high school accepted refugee students. There, he first heard the gospel...
“In the Last Days of Narnia, far up to the west.” This is how C.S. Lewis begins the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle . I reread this book last year, right in the middle of the pandemic lock-downs, and since doing so I’ve found myself more and more referring to the book to help find...
To understand anger and its peaceful Biblical therapies, we make use of the Puritan John Downame’s book, The Cure of Unjust Anger . [1] Downame focuses on Ephesians 4:26 to frame his discussion: Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Downame describes anger as, “…an...
How easy it is for us to become frustrated over our carelessness in prayer and, indeed, the way it all too often ends up with prayerlessness and damages our walk with God. Like Jesus’ disciples, again and again we need to say, ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’ That is, not merely that we need to learn...
Hallgrímur Pétursson – Iceland’s Poet of Comfort The news that Hallgrímur Pétursson was ordained as Lutheran minister at Hvalsnes, Iceland, raised many eyebrows. He had not completed his education and, what was worse, he had fathered a child out of wedlock. But Brynjólfur Sveinsson, bishop of...
Rosa Young – Committed to Serve At the turn of the twentieth century, many civil rights advocates fought to create better communities and lives for Black Americans. They did it mostly through politics, essays, and discussions. Rosa Young – a name still largely unknown– did it through education, the...
A beautiful singing voice is amazing. But then again the whole notion of music can be unfathomable. Maybe you think that is an overstatement or editorial license. But think about it. How can some people with aphasia, a communication disorder, sing with fluency? We see the same phenomenon with those...
Back in the 1980’s when my wife and I were pursuing our Master’s degrees in music at Arizona State University, before we understood Reformed/Covenant Theology, we experienced first-hand a situation similar to what is given to us in the Gospel of John, chapter 9. Seeing a blind man, the disciples...
The fall of mankind began with a lie. “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” This was followed by a second lie. “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil...
First, let it be known that God hates; He hates sin and he hates sinners. [1] And we ought not shy away from this truth for it is really only out of this reality that the Gospel explodes with such wonderful good news. The God who hates sinners also loves sinners and sent his only Son to die and...