Pick It Up The paralyzed man’s friends wanted to get him in the Presence of Jesus, but there was no room in the house where He was teaching. So what did they do? They formulated a plan. This plan had a little “redneck” in it, and I can only imagine the conversation and ingenuity that …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
A Moment
We sing a song called “Here I Am,” and one of the lines is, “A moment in Your presence can change my whole direction.” Everything can change in a moment. Any number of decisions made in a moment can have lasting effects. But what about a moment when God meets you? When He turns it …
The Manna Didn’t Keep
Remember how, in the wilderness, when God sent the Israelites manna, they were told to only collect enough for that day? He said he was about to “rain bread from heaven” for them (Exodus 16:4). Each was to bring in enough for their family, so some had more, some less, but everyone had a day’s …
How Does Your Church Grow?
How is your church going, or rather, growing? Human growth and development can be a metaphor for so many things. The formation of an embryo is not unlike church growth. It starts out with a few cells. Those cells begin to differentiate and form organs with different functions – the heart, the brain, the liver, …
Slow Miracles
We recently rearranged the furniture in our living room. We had the television placed above the fireplace and now our comfortable recliners that Mark and I love to sit in to relax at the end of the day, are oriented in that direction. Two large windows on either side of the mantel look out on …
Sacred or Scared?
“Fear not,” or some variation of that phrase, is one of the most repeated refrains in the Bible. Some sources say, depending on the translations, there are 365 such phrases, one for every day of the year! We need those reminders to trust, especially when we look at our circumstances. When we step out of …
The One
There’s a well known quote that says, “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary use words.” While I understand the meaning and intended sentiment – be so radically loving, humble, and kind that people know there is something different about you- I can’t help but think this stops far short of what Jesus commands …
Opportunity
Question: Does prosperity cause you to look more and more like Jesus, or less? I am reminded of the account of the “rich young ruler,” who asked Jesus how he could inherit eternal life. From digging deeper into the text in Luke 18, and the Greek meaning of the words, we know that the man …
Establish Your Hearts
“Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand” (James 5:8). When something is established, it has a definite beginning. Establishment of a business, or a marriage, for instance, sets up a new arrangement, a new way of thinking and being that creates something that was not there before. It implies a …
WHERE THE RIVER FLOWS
I have been in church all my life, and until I listened to a message recently by a young pastor named Tyler Staton, I had never heard anyone tie the threads together that I will discuss in this post. I subsequently ordered his new book, “The Familiar Stranger,” which invites the reader to a deeper …
Life By The Way 