One question I love to ask guests on my podcast is: “What do you want your legacy to be?” The illustration below shows what happens when your answer goes astray. A young man was to be sentenced to the penitentiary. The judge had known him from childhood, for he was well acquainted with his father—a […]
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. John 19:26–27 Jesus’ Hour Had Finally Come If you begin with John’s […]
In the first century, Rome executed criminals by crucifixion. It was a humiliating and agonizing experience. There was no concept of death with dignity for the guilty. According to “Roman Antiquities”, after a man was sentenced to die, he was stripped of his clothes and paraded through the streets of the city, so that his […]
“And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” [1] (Luke 23: 42, 43). Crucifixion is perhaps the most demeaning and agonizing form of execution ever concocted, yet Jesus showed no defiance and demonstrated no […]
24 Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his […]
When I talked to a few frustrated rural pastors, at the heart of their frustration was the sense that because there was not a large influx of people coming into their community, there were not many ministries to do. What is needed is an attitude adjustment. Sometimes out of our most desperate situations comes the […]
In his 1983 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] recalled the words he heard as a child when his elders sought to explain the ruinous upheavals in Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” He added, “If I were called upon to identify briefly the […]
Former heavyweight boxer James (Quick) Tillis is a cowboy from Oklahoma who fought out of Chicago in the early 1980s. He still remembers his first day in the Windy City after his arrival from Tulsa. “I got off the bus with two cardboard suitcases under my arms in downtown Chicago and stopped in front of […]
“Can’t see your nose in front of your face “ Idiom Meaning – Being oblivious to something obvious, in clear view. On the Road to Emmaus Jesus had His faithful disciples not recognize him. It is easy to focus on the disciples short-comings. To see the disciples as men with a weak faith or just […]
This story is familiar. In 1972, and after 308 years, the First Church of Newton, Mass., called it quits. It gave its assets to a museum, sold its building to a Greek Evangelical Church, and disbanded. Started in 1664, the church rose to a high of 1,200 members in 1952 but dropped to 325 in […]
