Category: Uncategorized
Should I Expect to Be Pastored?
I attended a conference years ago and stayed in the home of some local church members. The church hosting the conference had grown extremely large, with Sunday attendance in the thousands. The family I stayed with spoke of former days when their main teaching pastor wasn’t...
The Christian’s Marital Conflict Resolution Triangle, Part 3
The three equally important qualities that will facilitate healthy conflict resolution in marriage are truth, humility, and love. We are considering these three as a triangle. In Parts 1 and 2 we began discussing the first side of the triangle — truth. Now we will discuss...
Understanding Suffering: Insights from Job
Where does suffering come from? Doesn’t God promise to protect us from suffering? The Book of Job provides divine wisdom meant to help us wrestle with these difficult questions by exploring the moral complexities of one godly man’s suffering. Here are five observations from Job’s suffering...
The Best Conversation I Ever Had
I am surprised that after so many decades I still remember one remarkable conversation as the best I’ve ever had outside of my immediate family. I’ve often reflected on it with amazement. A cousin by marriage met me in a restaurant in a suburb outside of...
Division — More Harmful Than You Think!
We don’t create unity among God’s people. That was already accomplished at the cross when Jesus died to “create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:15). In the Ephesian context, Paul was speaking of the unity that comes...
The Christian’s Marital Conflict Resolution Triangle, Part 2
Remember the “triangular” conflict resolution strategy we are discussing in this four-part series, with the three equally important sides being truth, humility, and love. In Part 1 we began discussing the first side of the triangle — truth — with two points: First, marriage must be...
Who is Affected By Sin?
The beginning of my loss of innocence came the day I discovered that a toy plastic disk fit nicely into a gumball machine — never mind that the toy disk was worth more than a penny. The value of the theft was small, but the resulting...
The Hole to Hell
Some time between 1950 and 1952 I saw the hole to hell. I was three or four years of age. We were living in Fordyce, Arkansas where my father pastored the First Baptist Church. The hole to hell could be seen on the main road leading...
What if They Found the Bones of Jesus?
Are Jesus’ bones buried somewhere in Israel? Does it really matter? If archeologists definitely demonstrated that they had found the bodily remains of Jesus, what difference would that make? In 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul was responding to some people who were denying that there...
Christ’s Resurrection: The Dawning of the New Creation
Two ladies named Mary went to Jesus’ tomb early Sunday morning (Matthew 28:1). They weren’t expecting to see a risen Jesus, but to anoint his dead body with spices. First, they would have to figure out how to get that giant stone rolled away from the...
