Seasonal
What Kind of Older Man Will I Be?
I first heard pastor and author Alistair Begg talk about T.S. Mooney when I was in college. He gives some details about Mooney’s life in his book Made For His Pleasure: Ten Benchmarks of a Vital Faith (Moody Press, 1996, pp. 55-57). Begg first met Mooney...
How to Encourage Your Pastor This Summer
Attendance, and unfortunately enthusiasm, is significantly lacking in most local churches during the summer months. Vacations, reunions, camps, and other activities take people out of town, leaving even the main worship service of the week with gaps in the pews wider than a dump truck. A...
John G Paton’s Father: A Key to His Courage
John G. Paton was a missionary to the New Hebrides, today called Vanuatu, in the South Seas. He was born in Scotland in 1824. I gave my Pastors’ Conference message about him because of the courage he showed throughout his 82 years of life. When I...
What They Did Before TV
My mother was the youngest of fourteen children growing up on a farm in the first part of the last century. The old home place burned down when she was a girl. It was a typical Southern house divided into a boys’ room, a girls’ room,...
Influential Fathers, Captive Kids
A businessman with a hectic schedule took a day off and went fishing with his son. This father and son talked and fished all day, even though the dad couldn’t stop thinking about the growing mountain of work that awaited him back in the office. Both...
A Father’s Spiritual Advice
On his 20th birthday, I gave my son a copy of the letter I had written him when he was just one year old. The challenges I set out for him at age one are unchanged 19 years later. I’ve excerpted portions of that “spiritual yardstick”...