It was an important college football game. The winner of this particular game would play for the national championship. One would think that every imaginable detail would have been addressed by coaches and players and that there would be no room for what some call a “bonehead” incident. However, such an incident did, indeed, occur. Somehow there was enough confusion to cause the team with the ball to take too long between plays.   The referee threw the flag. He made the appropriate signal. He turned his microphone on and announced what everybody already knew. The penalty was for “delay of game.”   The head coach was not happy. That was to be expected. What was not…

As I was worshiping this last Sunday and listening to B.J. Clarke preach from 2 Corinthians, I thought about how one word in a passage of Scripture sometimes makes all the difference. In Paul’s opening remarks to the Corinthians, in the third verse of chapter one in this second letter the apostle writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort.” Concentrate on that word “all.” Paul did not say that God was the God of comfort. He said God is the God of all comfort. For me personally, that passage means so much more because of that…

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do wicked people seem to thrive? These are just two of the hard questions people ask when they are hurting. It often seems that faithful servants of God are hurting while wicked people of the world are enjoying all the pleasures of sin. This has been a question for hundreds of years. Consider that even the psalmist in Psalm 94:3 asked, “Lord, how long will the wicked, How long will the wicked triumph?” As I was recently reading 2 Peter it struck me anew that while our human perspective frames these situations this way, nothing that happens surprises God and He is fully aware of who deserves…

I am writing this shortly after the death of President George H. W. Bush. As one might expect, people whose names are easily recognizable are remembering him. World leaders, family members, people who worked for him in his various roles in government, people from the various news media, and others are sharing their memories of a man who one prominent news reporter regarded, until Mr. Bush’s death, as (in his words) “the greatest living American.” I am, in no way, a prominent person. As far as I know, the closest I ever got to president Bush was a few feet away from a television screen – and there was no telling where he…