Until I learned to trust,
I never learned to pray;
And I did not learn to fully trust
Till sorrows came my way.

Until I felt my weakness,
His strength I ne…

Truth is narrow. If we were hiking and came to a wide river, and we learned that there was one bridge, down the river a mile or two, we wouldn't stomp in disgust and moan about how that was such a narrow way to think and that the bridge should be right there, where we were. Instead, thankful …

A church member was having trouble with the concept of tithing. One day he revealed his doubts to his minister: "Pastor, I just don't see how I can give 10 percent of my income to the church when I can't even keep on top of our bills."

The pastor replied, "John, if I promise to ma…

When Jesus told those early disciples to fear not he was not telling them to seek safety and security. Rather he was telling them to move forward, but to always trust him.

Years ago there was a little comic strip that spoke to this quite beautifully. The comic strip "B.C.," set in cavemen days, had its hero, B.C., sitting in his fur loincloth, opening a box. A letter in the box says, "Congratulations! You have just purchased the world's finest fire-starting kit!" The next …

The story has been told of a man who was crossing a desert in the days of the pioneers. He ran into trouble and was dying of thirst when he spotted a pump near an abandoned shack. He had no water to prime the pump, but he noticed a jug of water near the pump with a note attached. It read: “There is just enough water in this jug to prime the pump, but not if you drink…

I do not come because my soul
is free from sin and pure and whole
and worthy of Thy grace;
I do not speak to Thee because
I've ever justly kept Thy laws
and dare to meet Thy face.

I know that sin and guilt combine
to reign o'er every thought of mine
and turn from good to ill;
I know that when I try to…

One of the main reasons people hold false perceptions of God is our tendency to project onto God the unloving characteristics of the people we look up to. We tend to believe that God is going to treat us as others do. The Gaultieres agree: We like to think that we develop our image of God from the Bible and teachings of the church, not from our relationships, some of which have been painful. It's easier if our God image is simply based on learning and believing the right things. Yet, intensive clinical studies on the development of peoples' images of God show that it is not so simple. One psychologist found that this spiritual development of the God image is more of an emotional process than an intellectual one. She brings out the importance of family and other relationships to the develop…

Dawn Hetland didn't move a muscle. The worship service was over. The choir had filed out. The pastor was at the back door greeting the worshippers. The pews were quickly becoming empty. But Dawn did not move. She sat silently, her hands folded, her head bowed in prayer. Bridget Glass was a life-long friend of Dawn Hetland. As she was leaving the sanctuary that Sunday morning she happened to see her friend Dawn with her head bowed low. Bridget thought something must be wrong. She went quickly to Dawn's side, tapped her on the shoulder, and asked if everything was all right. "Oh, yeah, sure," Dawn replied, orienting herself once again to her surroundings. "I was just praying. I've got an important decision to make and I need all the help and guidance I can get." "What decision is that?" Brid…

If you are comfortable in this world, then I encourage you to ignore Advent. Christmas is the holiday for you. Waiting and hoping are just not worthwhile, so jump to the fun stuff. Advent only makes sense if you want something else to hold on to. If you need to believe that as wonderful as the sun, the moon, and the stars may be, when they fall away it will be because a new, brighter, more perfect light has come and we no longer need those things.

Adv…

I like the story of an unusual account of how the news of the Battle of Waterloo reached England. The report from the battle ground back in those days was first carried by sailing ship to the southern coast and then by signal flags to London. And when the report was received at Winchester, the flags on the cathedral began to spell out the…

When I am conscious of the fear of failure holding me back, I go through a kind of personal checklist:

1. Does this fear come basically from pride, a fear that I will not live up to my own expectati…

Christianity and patriotism have much in common. It is significant to note that:

Our patriotic hymn, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," was written by a Baptist clergyman, Samuel Francis Smith.

The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was written in 1892 by a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy.

The words, "In God We Trust," carried on all of our coins, are traced to the efforts of the Rev. W. R. Watkinson of Ridleyville, Pennsylvania. His letter of concern, addressed to the Hon. S. P. Chase, was dated November 13, 1861. Seven days later Mr. Chase wrote to James Pollock, Director of the U.S. Mint as follows:

"No nation can be strong except in the strength of God, or safe except in His defense. The trust of our people in God …

Sometimes we as Christians need to stop along life's road and look back. Although it might have been winding and steep, we can see how God directed us by His faithfulness. Here's how F.E. Marsh described what the Christian can see when he looks back:

• The…

There is nothing that so takes the joy out of life like unconfessed sin on the conscience.

I once heard the late Dr. F.E. Marsh tell that on one occasion he was preaching on this question and urging upon his hearers the importance of confession of sin and wherever possible of restitution for wrong done to others.

At the close a young man, a member of the church, came up to him with a troubled countenance. "Pastor," he explained, "you have put me in a sad fix. I have wronged another and I am ashamed to confess it or to try to put it right. You see, I am a boat builder and the man I work for is an infidel. I have talked to him often about his need of Christ and urged him to come and hear you preach, but he scoffs and ridicules it all. Now, I have been guilty of something that, if I should …

Almost everything hurts. What doesn't hurt doesn't work anymore. It feels like the morning after the night before, and you haven't been anywhere. All the names in your little black book end in M .D. You get winded playing chess. You look …

Johnny Carson told a story about the time when, as the host of the Tonight Show, he made a joke about there being a toilet paper shortage in the city.

The next day there really was a shortage because all the viewers who had watched his show ran out afterward and bought up extra toilet paper just in case. There was no trust in the fact that people, if they chose to work together, could ration out the toilet paper to make sure there would be enough for everyone. People panicked and gr…

In Mark's story it is possible to distinguish two main expressions or applications of faith, which we may call "kerygmatic faith" and "Petitionary faith."

(a) Kerygmatic faith denotes the believing acceptance of Jesus' proclamation of the dawning kin…

If you hired a gardener to take care of your lawn and then went past his house and saw that his own yard was sloppy and unkempt, would you trust him with …

I believe it was the Mills Brothers who made popular the song, "You Always Hurt the One You Love." Fighting is one of the realities of married life. Unfortunately, most of us do not handle it well. Fighting is a negative way of communicating some very strong feelings. If we accept the premise that the point of all communication is to get closer to each other, then we might seek more constructive and positive ways of communicating our strong feelings rather than destructive fighting. Although space doesn’t permit us to consider all the suggestions for what I call "good fighting," let me mention just a few. Discover what you are really fighting about. What’s really underneath it all, then stick to the subject, don’t bring up past history. No name calling. Remember you are fighting with the o…

But there is a fourth kind of soil. There is the seed that falls upon the good earth and takes root and grows to maturity. This crop, we are told, is a harvest that will bear fruit a hundred fold. Jesus mentions this last because itis the thrust of the story. True, there are failures, but the good news is that there is also victory.

Now, here is the hard part. Our efforts in life are not always measurable. Sometimes, you may not see the final product. You may not see the actual harvest. Sometimes all we can do is plant a seed, and trust that God will do the rest. A school teacher works with a troubled child, but she …

I was only seven or eight when one of our small-town West Texas heroes came home from Vietnam. He had lived three doors down from me, was a star on the high school football team, and had been in my father's Sunday school class before going off to Vietnam. He came back with one leg and a message. God told him, he said, that the war was wrong and that our church and our town needed to change our minds and hearts about racial segregation. Since he …

Oliver Cromwell, who took the British throne away from Charles I and estab…

Missionary statesman Hudson Taylor had complete trust in God's faithfulness. In his journal he wrote:

Our heavenly Father is a very experienced One. He knows very …

In God's Smuggler, Brother Andrew tells in the first couple of chapters the story of his early life—one section of which dealt with his hell-for-leather days in the Dutch army in Indonesia. While serving in that area, fighting against Sukarno in the late 1940s he bought a young ape, a gibbon, who took to him, and Andy treated him as a pet in the barracks. He hadn't had the gibbon for many weeks before he noticed that when he touched it in some areas around the waist it seemed to hurt him. So he examined the gibbon more closely and found a raised welt that went around his waist. He carefully laid the animal down on his bed and pulled back the matte…

Deep in the Arabian desert is a small fortress. It stands silently on the vast expanse of the ageless desert. Thomas Edward Lawrence, known as "Lawrence of Arabia," often used it. Though unpretentious, it was most sufficient. Its primary commendation was its security. When under attack, often by superior forces, Lawrence could retreat there. Th…

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in America, started her practice in New York in 1851. Not only was she unable to find patients no one would even rent her a room once she mentioned that she was a doctor. After weeks of trudging the streets, she finally rented rooms from a landlady who asked no questions about what Elizabeth planned to do with them.

Quaker women, who had always been receptive to the goal of equal rights, became Elizabeth's first patients. But no hospital would allow her on its staff. Finally, with financial help from her Quaker fiends, Eliza…

A group of botanists went on an expedition into a hard-to-reach location in the Alps, searching for new varieties of flowers. One day as a scientist looked through his binoculars, he saw a beautiful, rare species growing at the bottom of a deep ravine. To reach it, someone would have to be lowere…

William Willimon, the Chaplain at DukeUniversity, tells of a woman who, with her family had begun to attend his church. Quoting him, he says, "She attended our church when her family vacationed at the coast. She said she had begun attending our church a number of years before because it was the only church on the beach where a black person could feel welcomed. This pleased me. She had had a difficult life and had experienced first hand oppression, tragedy, and hate. One summer she arrived with her family and, when I visited her, she told me the previous year had been tough. Her beloved husband of many years had died a terrible and painful de…

Henri Nouwen speaks of the challenges and rewards of placing our trust in God. Says Nouwen, "The great spiritual task facing me is to so trust tha…

Max Lucado tells the story about the time he was sailing with his son and a church friend of the coast of Miami. They were having a leisurely cruise and the weather was perfect. But out of nowhere a storm appeared. The sky darkened, the rained started and the ocean became violent. Max was terrified and looked at his friend Milt for help.

Milt was deliberate and decisive. He told the men exactly where…

We begin by trusting our ignorance and calling it innocence, and by trusting our innocence and calling it purity. And when we hear these rugged statements of our Lord's (Matthew 15:18), we shrink and say:

"But I never felt any of those awful things in my heart." Either Jesus Ch…

Grace is God drawing sinners closer and closer to him. How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the work, the flesh, and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstance, not yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology, but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely.

This is the ultimate reason, from our stand…

The following is a poem from Tim Hansel's book "Holy Sweat" which describes how we should ride through life with Jesus in control:

At first, I saw God as my observer, my judge, keeping track of the things I did wrong, so as to know whether I merited heaven or hell when I die. He was out there sort of like the president. I recognized His picture when I saw it, but I didn't really know Him.

But later on, when I recognized this Higher Power, it seemed as though life was rather like a bike ride, but it was a tandem bike, and I noticed that God was in the back helping me pedal.

I don't know just when it was that he suggested we change places, but life has not be…

What do we see in the image the gospel writer presents? We are told "they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat". Certainly there is the man, Jesus, exercising a power no human has; there is the storm that presents such peril to those in the boat; there is the location distant from shore.

But what is behind what is told?  What truth is present in the relation of the events?

Karl Barth expresses well what it is in "Der Romerbrief." We all "are encountered" by God.

"That we have found the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth is confirmed because all the manifestations of God's faithfulness are indications or prophecies of what has enc…

A pastor was once asked to define "Faithful Attendance at Worship," and this was his reply: All that I ask is that we apply the same standards of faithfulness to our church activities that we would in other areas of our life. That doesn't seem too much to ask. The church, after all, is concerned about faithfulness. Consider these examples:

Why do people resist surrendering themselves to Christ? For many, the reason they give is that they don't really trust God to handle their lives to their suiting. A young lady stood talking to an evangelist on the subject of consecration, of giving herself wholly to God. She said, "I dare not give myself wholly to the Lord, for fear He will send me out to China…

Here are types of risks we take annually and their respective odds. Your Odds are:

one in 12 that you will have an accident
one in 2,900 that you will die in a auto accident
one in 80,000 that you will die from complications in surgery
one in 250,000 that you will die in a plane crash
one in 1,000,000 that you will die in your bath tub

There was also an article in the newspaper, which spoke to the things that people fear, in light of their probability of occurring. According to this article, one of the fears that people had, was dying in a plane crash, and yet statistically, we are more likely …

William Powell Tuck tells in his book, The Way for All Season, of a church where at the conclusion of a powerful and inspirational service, the congregation joined in singing the hymn, "I Surrender All." At the end of the hymn a young man jumped to feet and shouted, "You people don't mean a word of what you say! You sing, "I surrender all to Jesus," "Where He leads Me I will Follow," "Trust and Obey," and you don…

William Barclay says the verse "blessed are the poor in spirit" means, "Blessed is the man who has realized his own utter helplessness, and who has put his whole trust in God. If a man has realized his own utter helplessness,…

Infatuation is instant desire. It is one set of glands calling to another. Love is friendship that has caught fire. It takes root and grows—one day at a time. Infatuation is marked by a feeling of insecurity. You are excited and eager, but not genuinely happy. There are nagging doubts, unanswered question, little bits and pieces about your beloved that you would just as soon not examine too closely. It might spoil the dream.

Love is quiet understanding and the mature acceptance of imperfection. It is real. It gives…

A little girl had somehow received a bad cut in the soft flesh of her eyelid.  The doctor knew that some stitches were needed, but he also knew that because of the location of the cut, he should not use an anesthetic.  He talked with the little girl and he told her what he must do… and asked her if she thought she could stand the touch of the needle without jump…

The main message of these 72 workers is the simple declaration "The kingdom of God is near." Dallas Willard once said that when he was a young boy, rural electrification was taking place throughout the United States. For the first time ever, tall poles popped up across the landscape of the countryside with huge electric wires strung from pole to pole to pole. But initially at least, not everyone trusted electricity and so not many rural families opted (for a time) to not hook up. They heard the messages of…

We too often forget about poor Joseph. Every year, we tend to focus on the story of Mary. But this year, it's Joseph.

Now, if the angel can appear to Mary, and then also appear to Joseph, there's a lesson in that. That means that the angel can appear to you and me, too. In the Bible, the annunciation does not occur only once, but twice-not just to a woman, but also to a man.

The Bible, then, carries…

February 15, 1921. New York City. The operating room of the Kane Summit Hospital. A doctor is performing an appendectomy. In many ways the events leading to the surgery are uneventful. The patient has complained of severe abdominal pain. The diagnosis is clear: an inflamed appendix. Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane is performing the surgery. In his distinguished thirty-seven-year medical career, he has performed nearly four thousand appendectomies, so this surgery will be uneventful in all ways except two.

The first novelty of this operation? The use of local anesthesia in major surgery. Dr. Kane is a crusader against the hazards of general anesthesia. He contends that a local application is far safer. Many of his colleagues agree with him in principle, but in order for them to agree in practice, th…

The following incident is vouched for by a Church of England clergyman who knew all the circumstances:

A young woman, who had been brought up in a Christian home and who had often had very serious convictions in regard to the importance of coming to Christ, chose instead to take the way of the world. Much against the wishes of her godly mother, she insisted on keeping company with a wild, hilarious crowd, who lived only for the passing moment and tried to forget the things of eternity. Again and again she was pleaded with to turn to Christ, but she persistently refused to heed the admonitions addressed to her.

Finally, she was taken with a very serious illness. All that medical science could…

The following survey took place in 2018 and the results for clergy are not that great. There are 7 people Christians trust more than their pastors. Fewer tha…

In the summer of 1990 Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons, retired eight colors from their 64 crayon box and replaced them with eight brighter, bolder colors. The colors inducted in the Crayola Hall of Fame include raw umber, maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, violet blue, green blue, orange red and orange yellow. The new shades introduced include such postmodern colors as Cerulean, Vivid Tangerine, Royal Purple, Teal Blue, Fuchsia, Jungle Green, Dandelion, and Wild Strawberry.

The reaction on the part of adults to the change was swift, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always objecting. The "Save Raw Umber Societ…

In the year 1873, Horatio Spafford, a Christian lawyer from Chicago, placed his wife and four children on the luxury liner Ville de Havre sailing from New York to France. Spafford expected to join them in about three or four weeks after finishing up some business, but with the exception of his wife he never saw them again. The trip started out beautifully. But on the evening of November 21, 1873, as the Ville de Havre proceeded peacefully across the Atlantic, the ship was suddenly struck by another vessel, the Lochearn, and sank a mere thirty minutes later, with the loss of nearly all on board.

On being told that the ship was sinking Mrs. Spafford knelt with her children and prayed that they might be saved or be made willing to die, if such was God's will. A few minutes later, in the conf…

On the television show M*A*S*H, Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester III made it clear what separated him from everybody else. "I'm a Winchester," he was heard to say more than once. For him, it was his family name that made him superior to everyone else. Other people carry other burdens. One woman received her education at Harvard and found a way to work Harvard into every conversation. Congregations fall victim to the same problem. Churches become satisfied with their pasts to the point that they do not make the changes necessary to live in the present with the same degree of faithfulness shown in prior years…