In a sermon entitled "Courage," pastor and author Mark Buchanan shares a funny story that reminds us how our courage—or lack thereof—can cast God in a positive or negative light to others:

A few years ago at a Willow Creek Summit, Jack Groppel, who works with leaders to hone optimum performance, showed two video clips. The first video was of a group of NFL linebackers. When they showed ...

Most people are afraid of the unknown. Those things we have never seen or experienced can seem overwhelming.

On the old maps, back before the world was understood in modern terms, cartographers, map makers, would put down what they knew, but at the edges of the map, beyond which they had no knowledge or understanding, they would often write, "Beyond here, there be dragons."

In the summer of my 11th year of life, I learned the power and joy of surrender. It happened in Minnesota at the Edina community swimming pool high dive. For five summers I had watched—in admiration and terror—the big kids climb 35 steps into thin air, walk a long concrete diving board, and then jump into the cool water below. For a few agonizing seconds they disappeared in the deep end ...

We must not mind insulting men, if by respecting them we offend God.

— St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople and Church Father (349–407)

In the later months of 1862, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln was angered by General George B. McClellan's inactivity despite superiority in numbers over the Confederate forces. In the end, he wrote McClellan a letter consisting of only a single sentence:

"If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln."

The Discovery Channel recently aired "Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich," a documentary on films found in archives after German reunification. The Nazis had a public relations problem: they wanted to exterminate weaker members of society, but Lutheran Germany had a history of compassion toward the old, infirm, and the mentally ill. In order to change public perception, the Nazis ...