Wisdom for the Heart

Share a comment A clear spine runs through everything we talk about today: make Christ unmistakable. We share how two pastors—E. V. Hill and S. M. Lockridge—held fast to the gospel when culture pulled hard, and why their courage still instructs our pulpits, our neighborhoods, and our daily conversations. Their stories cut through labels and factions, not because they dodged hard issues, but because they put Jesus at the center and let everything else take its proper place. We start with EV H...

Share a comment Soup steaming on a wooden table. Laughter, arguments, and ink-stained notes flying between students and a weary reformer. At the center stands Katharina von Bora, running a 40-room refuge, balancing ledgers, and setting the stage for the conversations that would become Table Talk. We pull back the curtain on the unseen power of Katie’s table and how a marriage that started as a shock proposal turned into a living model that reshaped church, family, and vocation. We walk throu...

Share a comment A single line from Romans shattered a lifetime of striving and set two lives on a collision course with history. We follow Martin Luther’s storm-tossed vow into the study where Romans 1:17 turned guilt into grace, then step through the convent doors with Katerina von Bora as smuggled sermons and a moonlit escape in fish barrels carried her toward a risky freedom. What begins as theology on parchment becomes a home under pressure—fields to manage, walls to whitewash, books to w...

Share a comment What if the church’s most enduring hymns were penned in the grip of despair? We trace the life of William Cowper—bereaved son, bullied boy, failed barrister, relentless sufferer—and watch mercy thread through a story that could have ended many times. A Bible left open to Romans 3 meets him at St Albans. Tears, relief, and faith rise, but the darkness doesn’t vanish. Instead, grace teaches Cowper to walk with it, write through it, and hand the church language for seasons when t...

Share a comment Start at ground level and life looks like a mess of ruts and detours. Step back, and a pattern begins to emerge. We trace that shift in perspective through Romans 8:28 and Psalm 84:11, then watch those promises take on flesh in the story of George Müller—thief turned pastor, skeptic turned intercessor—who opened his home and his heart to England’s most vulnerable children and proved that trust can build a movement. We walk through Müller’s unlikely beginnings, the prayer meet...

Share a comment A snowstorm, an absent pastor, and a layman’s ten-minute sermon changed the course of church history. We follow Charles Spurgeon from that unlikely conversion moment—“Look to Christ”—to a lifetime of preaching that filled halls, stirred headlines, and anchored bruised hearts. What emerges is not a tale of polish and pedigree, but of a teenager seized by grace who kept pointing a restless world to a simple, seismic center: Jesus. We share how Spurgeon’s early barn sermons swel...

Share a comment Storm, lashes, desertion, and a whispered prayer at the helm—John Newton’s life doesn’t just inspire hymns, it interrogates the heart. We follow his journey from a London boy taught Isaac Watts by a devoted mother to the “Great Blasphemer” hardened by cruelty at sea. A brutal court-martial and an ordeal on a West African island left him scarred and starving, only to be found by a rescue ship sent because a father would not stop searching. Then came the Greyhound’s storm, a fir...

Share a comment What if the moment that changes your life is a single line on a forgotten page? Hudson Taylor’s story begins with a teenage skeptic, a gospel tract, and one piercing phrase—“the finished work of Christ.” That realization doesn’t make life easier; it makes obedience possible. From that grounding, he learns to trust through delayed paychecks, slumside porridge meals, and a late-night choice to give away his last coin before any warm feeling arrives. We walk through the crucible...

Share a comment What if the front lines of God’s kingdom run straight through your front yard? We explore the unsettling and beautiful truth that every believer is an ambassador for a conquering King who offers peace to people at war with God—and that this calling rarely respects our comfort zones. We start with a vivid image from American history: Wilmer McLean’s attempt to avoid conflict, only to see the Civil War begin at his farm and conclude in his parlor. That story becomes a lens for ...

Share a comment What if the story behind your hardest wound is the clearest window into God’s work? We start with John 9, where Jesus rejects the blame-laced question of who sinned and reframes a man’s lifelong blindness as the very stage for God’s power. Then we follow that thread into the life of Fanny Crosby, the blind poet whose 8,000 hymns carried the gospel into revival tents, cathedrals, and living rooms around the world. You’ll hear how Jesus intentionally breaks suffocating Sabbath ...

Share a comment A young man asks a father for his daughter’s hand with a promise most would never make: expect hardship, insult, and maybe a violent death. That stark beginning sets the course for Adoniram and Ann Judson’s life of conviction, where truth outran comfort and a clear call survived the loss of money, safety, and applause. We follow their voyage where long hours in Scripture reshaped their beliefs, cost them their support, and sent them to Burma to start from nothing—no grammar, n...

Share a comment A door splinters in Rangoon and chains bite into a young missionary’s ankles, but the story starts years earlier with a valedictorian who traded faith for fashionable doubt—and then spent a sleepless night listening to a dying friend through a thin wall. That shock sent Adoniram Judson home, back to Christ, and forward into a calling that would test every conviction he held. We walk through the unlikely steps: a proposal that reads like a martyr’s oath, a voyage that turns a C...

Share a comment What if prayer isn’t about prying blessings from a reluctant heaven, but receiving the Giver himself? We follow Oswald Chambers from a teenage surrender on a country path to a wartime awakening in Cairo, then turn to Luke 11 to rethink how Jesus taught us to approach the Father. Along the way, we meet Biddy—his brilliant stenographer wife—whose shorthand preserved sermons that would outlive them both and disciple millions. We open with the unsettling simplicity of Jesus’ prom...

Share a comment Fires, riots, and a mother praying under an apron—this is the untidy ground where a spiritual movement took root. We step into the world of Susanna Wesley, a pastor’s daughter who faced poverty, public hostility, and staggering loss, yet stitched her home together with steady practices and an unshakable trust in God. England sat in a moral fog, pulpits droned without conviction, and even executions sold like theater. In that setting, Susanna’s daily choices created a quiet cou...

Share a comment A street sermon in Akron. An attic prayer. And a life that wouldn’t make peace with a low view of God. We follow A.W. Tozer’s journey from a teenage conversion to a ministry that challenged the church to recover holiness, embrace lordship, and set our minds on things above. Drawing a line from Peter’s invitation at Pentecost to Colossians 3, we explore why a towering vision of Christ changes everything—from the way we worship to how we preach and live. I share Tozer’s fierces...

Share a comment The story starts with a stubborn five-year-old asking God for blue eyes and ends with a sanctuary where hundreds of children found a new birthday. Between those moments lives a fierce kind of obedience that refused to bow to fashion, caste, or fear. We trace Amy Carmichael’s arc from an Irish home marked by loss to a calling forged by Scripture—especially Paul’s warning that our work will face the fire—and a conviction that “go ye” is a command with a name on it. You’ll hear ...

Share a comment A God who cries at a graveside and prays through sweat and sorrow isn’t distant from our pain—and that truth frames one of the most breathtaking true stories of mission and redemption. We start where many believers secretly live: wondering whether tears are wasted and whether apparent failure means God has gone silent. From the compassion of Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb to the anguish of Gethsemane, we ground the journey in a Savior who validates grief and transforms it into hope. ...

Share a comment _____ Stephen's latest book, Legacies of Light, Volume 2, is our gift for your special donation to our ministry. Follow this link for information or to donate: https://www.wisdomonline.org/mp/legacies Support the show

Share a comment _____ Stephen's latest book, Legacies of Light, Volume 2, is our gift for your special donation to our ministry. Follow this link for information or to donate: https://www.wisdomonline.org/mp/legacies Support the show

Share a comment _____ Stephen's latest book, Legacies of Light, Volume 2, is our gift for your special donation to our ministry. Follow this link for information or to donate: https://www.wisdomonline.org/mp/legacies Support the show