Devotionals

In future weeks Everything New will include practical advice on how we can be positive spiritual influences in the lives of the people around us or the organizations we are part of. At work and in life. There is an exciting new movement today of believers wanting to be used by God to “make everything […]

On and off over the years I’ve had the pleasure of teaching students in Bible and doctrine classes, and those classes tend to take on different personalities. I remember one class that was dominated by lively, energetic believers who were always pushing me ahead, always asking the questions that were just a step or two

We all know we live in a world that is wrong in so many ways. How can we influence things in order to make things right? Here is the inspiring story of a young man in a position of influence who did the unthinkable, William Wilberforce.

In the past year many thousands of people have been captivated by the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as told in the new biography by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. He stood up to the power of Hitler, he spoke prophetically to the church of his day, he focussed on Christ. We have put together

To be human is to believe, holding in your consciousness a whole galaxy of realities that include the visible and the invisible. Not to believe, or being unwilling to believe, or thinking that believing is far too much to ask, is to tear out the heart of who we were made to be. It is

Here is one definition of faith: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is not a catalog of things we know because we accumulate knowledge of them through our eyes or ears or touch, but it is the knowledge of things that

When faith happened in my life it was like the irrepressible onset of dawn. I love watching the sunrise on the horizon of Lake Michigan, and it always reminds me of the dawning of the new life of faith. The black-painted sky gradually thins and stars lose their sparkle against the graying morning. On the

Over the years, I have been interested in lighthouses, probably because Door County, Wisconsin, where I grew up, has many lighthouses around its 200-mile shoreline. There are treacherous shoals around this peninsula, and in the days of wooden ships, hundreds were lost. A great, great uncle of mine lost his ship on one of the

Cross and tomb go together in the Christian gospel: both were occupied for a short span, both abandoned, both defeated. The apostle Paul, who knew what it was to suffer for choosing to be associated with Jesus, said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in

[continued from last week’s e-newsletter, “The Most Wonderful Tomb” ] Any of us can choose whether to hope that we have enough gold in the tomb to make ourselves comfortable in the coffin, or whether we have the vivifying Spirit of Christ filling the decayed parts of our lives now, and carrying us along with the

Howard Carter and a few workmen made their way down an ancient 30-foot passageway cut into the rock in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. For over 3,000 years, no human had stepped down that corridor. At the end, Carter began cutting a hole in the door until he peered inside and saw “wonderful

In his book, The Cruciality of the Cross, P. T. Forsyth wrote, “Christ is to us just what his cross is. All that Christ was in heaven or on earth was put into what he did there…Christ, I repeat, is to us just what his cross is. You do not understand Christ til you understand

I was walking through the tiled corridor of the history building at the University of Wisconsin, having just finished teaching a class, my mind focused on pressing ahead to the cafeteria for a bite to eat. But my way was blocked by a cluster of twenty or so students who stood motionless and quiet, staring

Jesus in English, Yeshua in Hebrew, is a name that means “salvation.” As Joseph heard from an angel in a dream regarding Mary, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” There are two sides of salvation: the

Ask yourself, just for a moment, what you really believe is going to happen as history unfolds in ever-greater extremes. Charles Dickens’ famous opening passage from A Tale of Two Cities begins this way: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the