Devotions

This post is written in Easy English. Easy English uses short sentences and simple words. It is easier to read and understand. It can help people who find reading hard. It can help people who are learning English. It can help anyone who wants a quick, clear read. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome, Autumn Dear Friends, Autumn is here. The leaves are turning gold and brown. Something in me feels calm when this happens. Autumn is my favourite season. I think this is partly because I am autistic. Autumn is slow. The light is soft. The world feels quiet. Autumn does not ask me to be loud or busy. It lets me just notice things. I like the smell of wet leaves. I like the crunch of leaves under my feet. I can stand and listen to that sound for a long time. I do not need to rush. The Bible says this: "There is a time for everything... a time to plant, and a time to pull up what was planted." (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2, Easy English Bible) Autumn is a time of letting go. The trees do n...

  A Christian Witness Against War What Christians through the centuries have said about violence, the sword, and the way of Jesus — from the Early Church Fathers to Spurgeon, Moody, Bonhoeffer, and beyond. Resource compiled from christian pacifism blog This post gathers the Christian witness against war from across two thousand years of church history. It is not primarily a political argument. It is a spiritual one. The question it asks is simply this: what does faithfulness to Jesus look like when the drums of war begin to beat? What have faithful men and women said — not just in our time, but throughout the centuries? Their answers are worth hearing. ✦ ✦ ✦ The Early Church: "A Christian Must Not Kill, Ever" Before Constantine, before the church was entangled with empire, Christians held a remarkably consistent position on violence. The earliest believers understood, from the teaching of Jesus himself, that their warfare was not of this world. Their testimony is striking in ...

My nine-year-old son Ezra was talking today about the Greek and Norse gods — Zeus, Ares, Loki and the rest — and how they were famous for killing people, even each other. Gods of power. Gods of war. Gods who took what they wanted and destroyed what stood in their way. Then he stopped and said something that I haven't been able to shake: Jesus was different. He chose to die for love instead of kill for it. Nine years old. Isaiah wrote that "a little child shall lead them," and I think he was onto something. Because in one quiet observation, Ezra put his finger on what makes Christ unlike every other figure in the history of religion. The gods of every empire have always looked like the empires that worshipped them — powerful, armed, triumphant in battle. Jesus looked like a man on a cross, forgiving the people who put him there. That difference is not incidental. It is the whole point. And it turns out that an enormous number of Christians — across two thousand years, from...