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For Father’s Day: June 21, 2009

by Johann Christoph Arnold

Many problems in our society will be solved when young men are willing to become good fathers. Of course, they can do this only if they have an example to follow. As fathers, we need to be the strongest role models for children, especially for our sons.

I loved my father. He had a tremendous sense of humor, but he also was strict and set boundaries which I didn’t always appreciate at the time. I always knew he loved me. Once when I was eight or nine, I angered him so much that he threatened to punish me. I looked up at him and, before I knew what I was doing, blurted out, “Papa, I’m really sorry. Do what you have to do – but I know you still love me.” To my astonishment, he leaned down, put his arms around me and said with a tenderness that came from the bottom of his heart: “Christoph, I forgive you.”
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A time will come when everybody will realize that they do not have what they ought to have. They will feel a painful emptiness and crave for something they don’t even know. All of a sudden it will hit them: “How poor and weak we are, how miserable and depraved! How little certainty we have in what we think, believe, and hope!” Then they will look to those who appear to have what they lack. That is how conversion begins. When the time is ripe, it will one day spread through the whole world. Then those who have what is right and true will be inundated by a flood of people yearning to have it, too. Oh, that this time might come soon!
- J. C. Blumhardt

A rare glimpse into how the eternal fight between the forces of good and evil plays itself out in the lives of the most ordinary men and women. Anyone who has doubts about spiritual warfare must read this book.

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Meet an upstart who disarms his wealthy parents by taking in a homeless man (he is robbed, of course); who receives accolades for teaching illiterates to read and write but gets run out of town for telling them about Jesus as well. Meet a revolutionary who spends his last savings on a night at the opera, only to disrupt the performance; a zealot whose habit of exposing hypocrisy in high places lands him behind bars. Meet a visionary who inspires ardor but refuses to accept followers; a counselor who turns souls toward Christ by turning lives upside down.

He’s a failure by most standards, and yet his memory still challenges and inspires. Meet Rachoff.

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Why can people not live together? Why can they not listen to one another?

Here is the story of one man who grappled with these questions in an intensely personal way: growing up in Germany in a Jewish family under the shadow of the Nazis, forced into exile in Siberia, barely escaping with his life from starvation and disease in southern Asia, he finally made it to the land of Israel.

Faced with the horror of the Holocaust, he was determined to fight for the independence of his new homeland. But the inhumanity of war continued to pursue him, along with the question: why cannot men and women live together in peace?

Join Josef on his search for the answers to the questions that in one way or other face us all. Also available in Hebrew and Arabic.

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We can celebrate Christmas in a religious way and yet remain aloof. But when we are gripped by the meaning of Christmas all outward show disappears.

For now, however, we throw all kinds of things into the void we feel; we sense that something is missing and try to compensate for it by all kinds of expressions of love. And this is all right; in a sense it must be like this. But still in our hearts, whether we admit it or not, each of us has a deep longing to be really gripped by the Christmas message: “Christ is born! We have a Saviour!”

Yet too many of us simply don’t realize what we have. Jesus has become remote, and thus we are at a loss to know how to bring the birth of Christ into our lives. We certainly know how to talk about it, but how many of us possess a true feeling for it? Who of us are gripped to the point that we can stretch out our hands and exclaim: “We have a Saviour!” - Christoph Blumhardt

Forty short, pithy readings explore the true meaning of Christmas – the birth of Jesus, the Saviour of us all.

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There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up. Where life is firm we need to sense its firmness; and where it is unstable and uncertain and has no basis, we need to know this, too, and endure it.

We may ask why God sends whirlwinds over the earth, why the chaos where all appears hopeless and dark, and why there seems to be no end to human suffering. Perhaps it is because we have been living on earth in an utterly false and counterfeit security. And now God strikes the earth till it resounds, now he shakes and shatters: not to pound us with fear, but to teach us one thing – the spirit’s innermost longing. - Alfred Delp

Forty short, pithy readings for each day of the Advent and Christmas season.

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How many of us, in our good-hearted way, have ridden past the stable on the high horse of our opinions and convictions, leaving the Child behind, not realizing he was there? How many of us have stood up for what we believed, even in defiance, but were not awake to the fact that we were riding past a miracle – the miracle of life and love?
– Alfred Delp

Forty short, pithy readings for each day of the Advent and Christmas season.

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I have heard people say, “At one time I was very near to God, but he didn’t hear me. Since then I haven’t been so sure about him.” Such people fail to recognize that God wanted to say something to them, namely, that none of us really knows what to pray for. We certainly do not always know what is best. If we want to give God orders according to our will, if we want to dictate God’s direction through our prayers, then such prayers are not under the blessing of God. Rather, these prayers are born of the spirit of darkness, the spirit that told Eve, “You shall be like God.”

True prayer acknowledges that of ourselves we are incapable of striking the right course in prayer. True prayer demands complete surrender and complete confidence, so that we can say, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26-30).

Eberhard Arnold describes the kind of prayer that pleases God, and challenges us to rediscover the prayer that has the power to transform our lives and our world.

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If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

No matter the weight of our bitterness or despair, forgiving is the surest way to get out from under it. But that’s easier said than done.

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These are times of distress. We cannot blindly retreat from the problems overwhelming society. The only justification for turning inward from the confusing, hectic whirl would be that, through unity with eternal powers, we gain a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world.
- Eberhard Arnold

Innerland invites readers to turn from the chaos of a society distracted by violence and greed to that “inner land of the invisible, where our spirit can find the roots of its strength.”

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