As we near the end of the gardening season, every spring and summer is a beautiful illustration of a rock solid, biblical law that is summed up best this way:  what you sow, you will reap. I mean, wouldn’t you be really surprised to go out to your garden to find okra growing when you…

One of the phrases that my wife Christy and I used over and over again with our five kids was, “If you try it, you’ll like it.” Just picture us there trying to get our toddler sitting in his high chair to open his mouth so that he can feed him a new jar of…

Have you ever heard somebody say that so-and-so “is dead to the world,”? Well, that doesn’t mean that they are actually dead. It just means that they are either so preoccupied or tired or so deeply asleep that the world has no impact on them. Nothing about the world gets their attention. They’re not attracted…

One of the most beautiful words in all the Bible is the word “grace.” Grace means that we get the good rewards we haven’t earned, we get the good things we don’t deserve. And God makes an astounding promise in the book of Romans that there will always be enough grace from God to cover…

When I was an associate pastor in far west Kentucky, I got a call one day from an elderly man in our church who had sprung a water leak under his mobile home. You know, sometimes along with being a preacher, pastors also moonlight as plumbers. So, I headed over to give him a hand.…

In Romans chapter 5, verse 12, the Holy Spirit through Apostle Paul says something rather perplexing. He wrote, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” He’s talking about Adam here. We read in the book of Genesis…

I remember one time as a kid, I had done something really bad, and my daddy took his belt off and was fixing to wear me out, and rightly so. But out of nowhere came my little brother, and he immediately started begging my daddy, “Dad, Dad, I know he deserves it, but whip me…

I wonder, what are some of the things you rejoice in? Your favorite team winning that game. That precious grandbaby being born. Tagging that big trophy buck. Seeing your favorite person win on that TV show you love to watch. Oh, and I bet you rejoice on payday. But you know what typically doesn’t make…

Waiting is incredibly difficult for us, isn’t it? A poet once wrote: Desperately, helplessly, longingly, I cried; Quietly, patiently, lovingly, God replied. I pled and I wept for a clue to my fate . . . And the Master so gently said, “Wait.” “Wait? you say wait?” my indignant reply. “Lord, I need answers, I…

It is deep-seated in and natural for the fallen human heart to think, if I just do these righteous things, I will be righteous before God. Do you know folks that think like that? Maybe that person you know is you. For the Jews we read about in the Bible, one of the most righteous…