Search Results

Priority of Love A wife once asked her husband, “What do you think the Bible means when it says that Ezekiel’s wife was ‘the desire of his eyes’? Looking at her tenderly, he answered, “I think it means that every time he saw her, Ezekiel experienced the same thrill he felt when he first saw her on their wedding day!” Jesus also used the language...

Spiritual Sleepwalking A man walking home at 2 a.m. in Dulwich, England, happened to notice a girl asleep at the top of an inactive crane. It turns out she was a sleepwalker and had climbed 130 feet up and 40 feet across to get there. Sleepwalking is more common than one might think. According to one recent study, 8.4 million Americans—nearly...

Worthy is the Lamb Every Easter you can find lambs in the shops—cute chocolate lambs or stuffed animals. They bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Lamb described in today’s chapter. The Lamb that John saw was not cute but scarred. It looked as if it had been slain. It also had seven horns and seven eyes. In the books of Daniel and Revelation,...

The Power of an Unrepentant Heart After terror attacks on September 11, church attendance spiked. “People thought this type of crisis of national significance would lead people to be more religious, and it did,” Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at Duke University, observed. “But it was very short-lived. There was a blip in church attendance...

War in Heaven After the August 1945 surrender of Japan, which ended World War II, a number of Japanese soldiers refused to stop fighting. Some did not believe that the news of the surrender was accurate. Others simply refused to accept it. The last known holdout did not surrender until 1974. In the same way, the announcement of the kingdom...

The Lamb's Victory Before software, newspapers set their type manually, reserving the largest type for momentous events such as the outbreak of war. This style was called the “Second Coming” typeface. The momentous event depicted in today’s passage makes all others pale in comparison. Christ is standing on Mount Zion with the 144,000 who...

The Measure of God's Wrath Many churches today want to give people a good experience. They want visitors to feel at home. The music is catchy and the sermon upbeat. This is understandable—we want visitors to return and members to stay involved. But if this is all we care about, we will rarely talk about God’s wrath. Today’s text offers a...

New Babylon Filmmakers don’t tell stories with words, though dialogue and narration are often included. Film is a visual medium, and one common visual device used by cinematographers is the zoom shot, which offers the viewer a different perspective. The chapters we will study today and tomorrow give us a zoom shot that sheds more light on...

Introduction: A Time for Silence One Square Inch of Silence is a research project in Olympia National Park in Washington State. It’s a small red stone on top of a moss-covered log three miles down a hiking trail, at a spot identified as “the quietest place in the United States.” The purpose is to highlight differences between human noise...

Human Silence: Let All the Earth Be Silent According to Ross W. Muir in Canadian Mennonite: “Silence was a part of biblical worship and was held in high esteem by the early church. . . . Silence needs desperately to be recovered in our worship services if the words that are spoken and sung are to have any depth or ring of truth to them, in...