pray

As I think about my church family, so many older and younger men and women, as well as covenant children, come to mind. I have come to know and love them, and pray for them often. Just like in families, there ’ s a lot that can happen in church families. Behavior isn ’ t always the best, and...

Martin Luther – A Ground-Breaking Translator While living in incognito in the Wartburg Castle (after the Diet of Worms), Martin Luther spent his time translating the New Testament from Greek and Latin into German. It was not the first German translation, but Luther found the others inadequate. Both...

Perpetua and Felicitas – Two Martyred Mothers In A.D. 202, Emperor Septimius Severus tightened his measures against Christians who refused to pay homage to the imperial genius, the spirit of the emperor. Compliance required a minimal effort: a simple sprinkling of a few grains of incense on a...

The Psalms of Ascent is a collection of Psalms in the Psalter. There are other collection or groupings of Psalms. This collection is not unique in that sense. However, this collection was a well-worn collection. This dog-eared collection was taken by pilgrims to Jerusalem three times per year on...

Jennie Faulding Taylor and Her Team of Brave Women In 1875, a serious drought in the north of China gave way to a dreadful four-year famine, with millions of deaths and a huge migration of people. Most casualties were in the province of Shanxi (an estimated 5.5 million deaths in four years)...

Melito of Sardis – Pastor, Theologian, and Poet Melito is not a familiar name today. Until the last century, we could only find a mention of him in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History , mostly in connection with the controversy over the day in which the feast of Pascha (Easter) was to be celebrated...

One of the greatest gifts we can give others is a commitment to pray for them, a commitment that will also bring us great joy. But it’s easy to just pray through a list of petitions instead of first thanking God for their faith and fruitful ministry. Paul’s thanksgiving and prayer for the...

“The guy upstairs.” “The big man in the sky.” These are just two of the more common, modern slang terms for God. Aside from being utterly irreverent, they transgress the Second Commandment of having no graven images of God in that they grossly mistake this important attribute of God: His...

Is your prayer life merely a lengthy list of requests that so often seem to go unanswered? Sarah Ivill never tires of considering the Christian’s privilege to pray directly to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit. Equally amazing is the fact that God initiates that relationship with us,...

For many of us the inability to gather with church family during parts of the pandemic increased our appreciation for our pastors, elders, deacons, and fellow church members. It has not been unusual to hear people testify of how they will not take church gatherings, especially corporate worship,...