The darker the night, the dimmer the day, As embers of memories flicker away, When the brightening goodness of life seems long past, When the worst from the best of us leaves us aghast, This truth I continue to settle upon, My choices are mine and I choose to shine on.   I know I

We live in a strange age of short cash, easy credit, and out-of-control covetousness.  Confusing wants for needs, too many of us race through life in a mad scramble for more and more of less and less, leaving us never never fully satisfied, never completely content.  Ours has become a world governed by greed. Jesus

Some folks just can’t seem to get along with anybody.  And more than a few of these trouble-makers are proudly wearing the name of our Lord.  Forgetting or ignoring Peter’s admonition to “love as brothers,” these Christ-less Christians continue to cause “divisions and offences, contrary to the doctrine which (they) have learned.”  (1 Peter 3:8;

I understand that when General Eisenhower was running for the presidency in the early 50’s, he often told a story of an old farmer who was trying to sell a cow.  The farmer was asked about the cow’s pedigree.  He replied that he didn’t know what a “pet-er-gree” was.  The farmer asked about the butter-fat

Artemus Ward, a well-known humorist during the time of this country’s Civil War, once playfully boasted, “I have already given my two cousins to the war, and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife’s brother.”   Needless to say, Ward is not remembered by historians as playing a major role in that conflict. According to the

“Hold fast the form of sound words which you have heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.”  (1 Timothy 1:13.) The church designed and built of heaven was never meant to be an envoy of compromising diplomats, but rather an army of battle-ready Christian soldiers.  The spirit of compromise may be

Today’s flippant attitude toward marriage is nothing new.  According to Edward Gibbons, the renowned historian, the divorce problem was one of five underlying causes contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire.  Seneca spoke of Roman women as married to be divorced and divorced to be married.  Many citizens of Rome were said to have

     In their consuming desire to wake the sleeping member, many denominations have transformed the worship service into a three-ring circus.  We understand a preacher in England has started delivering his sermons through a ventriloquist’s dummy.  Another minister recently planned an all-church dance in the graveyard adjoining the meetinghouse, explaining, “We want to show that

How long has it been since you slowed down, sat down, turned off the television, and spent a bit of time reading the Bible? You say you just don’t have the time?  You’ll have to invent a better excuse that this one.  Did you know an average reader can complete reading the entire Bible in

Daniel Boone once asked if he had ever been lost.  His reply?  “No, but I was once bewildered for three whole days.” Like Boone, most of us are reluctant to admit our mistakes.  We offer semantic substitutions.  We insist on changing the subject.  We make frantic attempts to obviate the obvious.  We rationalize, we trivialize