Encourage one another and build each other up. —1 Thessalonians 5:11 “She believed in me!” That’s what Henry Ward Beecher said about a teacher who taught in the rural elementary school he attended as a youngster. At the height of his impressive career, he said she was responsible for whatever success he had achieved. Teachers, […]
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Love your neighbor as yourself. —Mark 12:31 All around us are people who are fighting private wars, secret hungers, inner poverty. When Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” he wasn’t tossing out a cliché to slap on the refrigerator door; he was telling us to feel
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I am poor and needy. —Psalm 40:17 This morning’s chilling headline declared: Death of Innocents! The accompanying picture was haunting: starving children with tear-streaked cheeks, bloated bellies, and arms and legs like sticks. Such deprivation is foreign to most of us . . . but emotional hunger may gnaw at us; a craving
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The evil I do not want to do— this I keep on doing. —Romans 7:19 Some things are so routine we shuffle through them without giving it a thought. Others are so jarring they make our teeth rattle. That’s when we know we’re at war. Sometimes relationships hit the skids, and we go
My song leader and I were perched on the front pew, prepared to lead the congregation in song and sermon after communion, which was being served from the platform seven steps up. Beginning his descent with trays of filled cups, our server tripped and launched into a headfirst dive, zeroing in on two petrified parsons
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So Jesus went with him. —Mark 5:24 Mark 5:1–17 journals Jesus’ healing of a demon-possessed man, the drowning of a herd of pigs, and the reaction of the citizens. The citizens couldn’t have cared less about the man who was healed but were so agitated about the loss of the pigs that
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Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! —Philippians 4:4 “How’s it going?” “Not so hot! I’ve had better days. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” You’ve heard these down-in-the-dumps grumbles; maybe even growled them yourself. English churchman and historian Thomas Fuller rightly described many when he said,
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She came up behind him . . . and touched his cloak. —Mark 5:27 Jesus was moving through the crowd on the heels of a father whose daughter was dying. Suddenly he stopped! “Who touched my clothes?” he asked. A woman whose dozen-year illness had the doctors stumped, had reached out a
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. —Psalm 139:14 Bob Hope once said, “According to something I just read: Today my heart beat over 103,000 times; My blood traveled 12 thousand miles; I breathed 23,400 times; I inhaled 438 cubic feet of air; I perspired 1.43 gallons,
As for the saints . . . they are the glorious ones in whom is all my delight. —Psalm 16:3 Today’s newspaper serves up an overdose of hype for bigwig politicians . . . with whom I have no hankering to hang out. I enjoy
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