Does this ever happen to you: You are reading about a topic you have studied many times before but a particular phrase or concept seems to jump off the page at you? Often when this happens to me, as I continue to study I realize that I have used my love of language to glean a meaning that isn’t actually present in what I just read. However, those nuggets often become food for thought and further study. That happened when I was studying about all the ways the writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is better. He is a better High Priest of a better covenant, with better promises,…

[NOTE: Rarely do I post my bulletin articles from Central on our blog, but I made an exception in this case. The funeral for Mary Jane Kizer is being held on the day this article is being released and I wanted to share these words as a tribute to a lady who means a lot to Leah and me. I also chose to leave the “cover photo” blank out of respect for this emotional time. I hope this post honors Mary Jane.] Many of you have read the New Testament through. Some have read it numerous times, from Matthew to Revelation. In reading the entire New Testament, you have come across…

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…

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…

Recently we had a group of our members at Central church of Christ travel to Zambia on a mission trip. They were gone for about two weeks and we loved looking at the pictures they sent to us and hearing the reports of their work. After they returned, our Youth and Family minister, who led our group, gave us a report about the work they did there. Some of the best pictures he showed were of the 33 baptisms that took place while they were there. It was so uplifting to see our brothers and sisters in Christ teaching and working with the people in the village of Mumena.  On…

Unless you pay absolutely no attention to current events, you know about the recent attempted assassination of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump. I’m fairly certain that all of us have seen multiple videos and pictures from almost every angle imaginable. While one of those videos was playing (again) and I was watching (again), I noticed something that I had not noticed earlier. For just a few seconds, I could see the upper torso of one man in the crowd assembled on the ground in front of the platform. It seemed to me that everybody else was focused on what was happening on the platform or looking around…

This past Sunday, I had a realization about a concept I had never before considered. It wasn’t that I didn’t know all the individual parts of what I’m about to describe. It’s just that I had never put them together for joint consideration and when I did, I was encouraged. It has long been amazing to me that Jesus, knowing what all would happen to Him while on this earth, was resolute. I love the verse In Luke 9 that reads: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (v. 51). Being equally human and divine, Jesus understood the…

The book of Lamentations is a difficult book to study. The emotions of the prophet Jeremiah are raw as he writes about the forty years he spent prophesying to God’s people and suffering at their hands. God had not promised him success, but had told him that he was born for this purpose and He would be with him (Jeremiah 1). Lamentations comes after Judah is overcome by Babylon and Jerusalem is destroyed by Babylonian forces. In chapter 1 and verse 1 we see a great contrast drawn between what is and what was. The city of Jerusalem (symbolic of the people of God) is described as a lonely widow…

Most who read this will be at least somewhat familiar with the experience that a man who was then known as Saul of Tarsus had as he traveled from Jerusalem to Damascus. If you are not familiar with this, you can read the original account recorded in the ninth chapter of Acts and recounted later by the man who was then known as Paul in the twenty-second and twenty-sixth chapter of that same book. Saul was making that trip in order to imprison and/or punish Christians.  All of that began to change when Saul saw an extremely bright light. The light was so bright that Saul lost his eyesight for…