The story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent into the wilderness has as its backstory a great moment in biblical history gone sour. Abraham and Sarah have received a powerful, joyful...

Travel light, but travel with Christ’s authority to preach the nearness of the kingdom and to heal the sick and raise the dead. These instructions to the twelve apostles follow the...

These verses offer a simple description of what Jesus does. He teaches, he preaches or proclaims, and he heals. All these flow out of his love of God and his compassion...

“Christ arrives right on time. . . . He doesn’t wait for us to get ready” (the message). The first movement of the gospel symphony is that God loves us; God makes the first...

God makes us right, gives us peace, brings us into grace, and offers us hope for the future. Despite our own best efforts and mighty struggles, God is always before us...

Though many psalms speak to our personal situation, most of the book of Psalms entered the canon as the songbook and prayer book of the community. If you imagine a procession...

When things seem too good to be true, we doubt them; yet often we have no trouble believing that things are as bad as we are told. Sarah laughs an old-age...

Abraham and Sarah first appear in Genesis 12, and significant encounters with the Holy take place in nearly every following chapter. In our reading the Lord appears as three visitors in...

There probably is no Christian teaching more confusing to us than the Trinity. I have heard people ask a thousand times, “Why can’t we just add a fourth member to the...

The Bible suggests that Paul struggles to exercise authority gently and humbly but also powerfully with the church at Corinth, whose favorite sport seems to consist of serious fighting. The Corinthians...