Church Life
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Taste Your Talk; Tame Your Tone
Many years ago I developed a lesson to present at a Ladies’ Day entitled “Ten Commandments for Christian Women.” I used it multiple times at different places and it was almost always well received. Obviously, it was not all-inclusive because the Bible contains many commandments for both men and women. I simply selected 10 that I thought would be most helpful to women in particular. The title of this post contains two of those commandments given by God. Oh, He doesn’t say them exactly like that, but he does teach the principle. I selected these two to write about in this post because of what I’m hearing (or reading) from Christian…
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When Not to Call It a “Bible School Program”
I suppose one of the most common ways to refer to what some call “Sunday School” is to refer to it as the “Bible school program.” Children, teens, and adults attend classes and, over the years, hear hundreds of lessons. But today I want to give three times when calling it the “Bible school program” is not accurate, and each one provides something to honestly evaluate. First, don’t call it the “Bible school program” if it is not actually a program; in other words, if there is little-to-no organization. A great deal of time and attention needs to be paid to evaluating curriculum, for example. And, by the way, that…
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PTP
PTP. What in the world do those three initials stand for? At times you may hear people (including Donna and me) using these initials, but you may have no idea what we are talking about. While PTP is under the oversight of an eldership of a church of Christ in Alabama and is intended to strengthen and encourage churches of Christ, sadly (in my opinion), even some of “us” may not know that PTP stands for… Polishing the Pulpit. Contrary to what may first come to mind, we are not discussing what I guess could be called a piece of furniture used in some places during worship services. Rather, what…
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Refreshment
I don’t know about where you live, but where I am in Tennessee, it has been HOT! My 3rd graders come in from recess looking like their heads are about to explode from their brief time outside. Yesterday when I had car duty, I could feel sweat on my shins. Shins aren’t supposed to sweat! Perhaps that is why, as I was studying for a Bible class, the idea of refreshment seemed to jump off the page at me. My class is using the materials provided by ValleyBibleStudies.com to study through the New Testament. We are looking at Philemon this week. After appealing to Philemon to receive Onesimus as a…
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How to Study the Bible
If you came to this article expecting some “7-step process” on Bible study, you might as well click away now. Instead, this is based on something I am getting ready to teach and I am really excited about it. But, in some ways, I’m more excited about the process that led to this teaching opportunity. Starting next Wednesday, I will have a class of probably about 10 people and we will be taking the fall Bible school quarter (September through November) to walk through a class entitled “How to Study the Bible.” Here’s the thing: those 10 are our teenage boys…and the teen girls are studying the same thing in…
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Macro – Micro – and Everything in Between
I won’t go into any details, but something I heard recently caused me to do a little research about what is known as The Hubble Space Telescope. Specifically, what intrigued me was some of the things that scientists have learned from this telescope that was launched into what is called “low earth orbit” in 1990. During my admittedly limited research, I came across this information from NASA: One of the most fundamental questions in astronomy is that of just how many galaxies the universe contains. The landmark Hubble Deep Field, taken in the mid-1990s, gave the first real insight into the universe’s galaxy population. Subsequent sensitive observations such as Hubble’s…
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Why We Must “Talk Politics” … in a Certain Way
It started rather subtly a number of years ago, and it seems to have started in the political class. It was barely noticeable to many people, but words mean things, and what was conveyed was intentional and has now spread throughout our culture, and even into the church. It was when people started saying that we have a “freedom of worship” and not a “freedom of religion.” Do you see the difference? To state that we have a freedom of worship confines things, does it not? It says that, if you want to go to a church building and worship, that is fine. By avoiding saying “freedom of religion”–which is what…
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He Did It Anyway
Have you ever read a familiar passage of scripture and, for the first time, have something almost “jump off of the page?” That happened to me recently as I was reading John’s account of some of the events which led up to the Lord’s trial and crucifixion. Specifically, I was reading the portion of John 18 which tells of the betrayal of Judas. As you may remember, when Judas and those who had come to arrest Jesus arrived, the record states: Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to Him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” (John 18:4, ESV) As the events continue to unfold in…
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I Drew You
We had VBS recently and I was blessed to teach the 3rd and 4th graders at “Camp Canaan.” We got to watch as God gave the Israelites directions safely through the Red Sea for “water safety.” We saw God provide (our version) of manna and quail in “wilderness preparation.” And we talked about the salvation God gave the Israelites when they followed His direction to look at the bronze serpent in the wilderness. Each night, I tried to make a New Testament application for my students and we also tried to connect it in a real way to their daily lives. We did fun things like use wind (them blowing…
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Saving Shelf Space
Imagine getting in your automobile in Jacksonville, Florida and traveling west on Interstate 10. According to mapquest.com, after about twelve hours of driving, you would find yourself in Houston, Texas. You would also have driven approximately 870 miles. Now, imagine one more thing (if you can). Try to imagine a bookshelf or any number of bookshelves that would cover that same distance. If you would have stopped about thirty miles before you arrived in Houston, you would have driven about the same distance as the shelf space used by the Library of Congress to hold all of the material it has. The actual number I read was 838 miles. On top…
