I was raised in the church. I was born in California on a Monday at 7:00 p.m. My parents took me to worship the following Sunday. My grandfather grew up on a farm in west Texas and was converted to Christ as a young teenager and decided to preach the gospel. He spent approximately 20 years overseas and 63 years in the pulpit. He taught us all a love and respect for the authority of the Bible. When I say, “I was raised in the church,” it simply means I only knew of the church that Jesus built (is there another?) – the church of Acts to Revelation. I was…

I read an interesting and challenging Facebook post recently. I was interested for a couple of reasons. First, the material was posted by a friend of mine.  Secondly, I was also interested because he was writing about something we have in common. Both of us have struggled with our weight.  I read with interest about his significant weight loss during 2015. He has done a magnificent job of combining diet and exercise in order to improve his health. As you can imagine, my friend’s post also challenged me to get more serious about my own health.  However, that was not the greatest challenge  My greatest challenge was to my own thinking. That challenge has absolutely nothing…

I love Bible school. Even though the family is the greatest influence on a child’s Bible education, I believe a great Bible school program can go a long way in building the faith of that child. After all, Romans 10:17 says, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.” If a child grows up hearing the word of God through great Bible classes, his faith will grow. What does this mean for the local church? As I stated earlier, it means that the church should stress the importance of strong, faithful families, but, living in the fallen world that we do, it also means that at times…

One-billion-four-hundred-million dollars. One-thousand-four-hundred-million. It’s a lot of money. A whole lot of money. An amount of money I cannot fathom having. It also is the estimated payout for the winning ticket (or tickets) in tonight’s Powerball drawing. In American history, it is the largest single amount ever said to be the winning amount. And it has a lot of people talking. Sales of Powerball tickets have exploded. Last weekend, when the jackpot was over $900,000,000, lines of people stood to get a ticket. Sales now are going even higher. A lot of Christians play the lottery. Many more will jump in at the chance of becoming an instant billionaire (minus…

Something happened this week that sent me absolutely reeling. My 11-year-old son was sitting with my wife in the den when she asked him what time it was. He looked across the room to the DVD player to see the digital registry. Then he got up and walked over to it to get a better look and told my wife the time. She said, “Son, could you not read that from over here?” (My wife could clearly read the time on the VCR from where they were both sitting). He said, “Well not really, I could read the seven.” More questions needed to be asked immediately. I was called into…