Posts from 2022 (Page 25)

  DISCUSSION:                                We are a funny group of people. We sure are happy. We sue for everything from a hot cup of coffee to hurt feelings. Forgiveness has become a lost art. Now everything is about revenge, getting even, making someone pay. Sadly enough, it’s drifted from the secular world into churches today. When we should love, we are often bitter. As we continue in our journey through the scriptures, I think that we will…

  DISCUSSION:                          Emotions are one of the greatest blessings that God has given us.  However, learning how to control those emotions can be very difficult.  In Genesis 30-31, one can see that Rachel is struggling with some of her emotions.  Rachel is very upset that God has not allowed her to have children and that anger has grown into jealousy and resentment for her sister Leah. Leah is not only…

                                The phrase “like father, like son” has been around for centuries.  I don’t know if it came from some old Chinese proverb or Confucius’ quote, but it could have had its origins here in Genesis 26.  In this story, we have Isaac repeating the same thing that his father Abraham did by withholding the whole truth about their wives.  In the case of Abraham, he lied to Pharaoh (Genesis 12) and Abimelech (Genesis 20) telling them that…

                               A college student had come to take his final exam in his ornithology class (the study of birds). It had been a tough class with a tough professor. The exam consisted of 25 pictures of birds’ feet and he had to identify which birds they were, based solely on their feet. The exasperated student said; “I’m not going to do this. Nobody could pass this test!” The professor replied, “Then I will have to fail…

                              Years ago instead of going “out” to eat, people would invite others over to their home for dinner.  As a child when that would happen I can remember my mother frantically cleaning the house because we had, as she called it, “BIG COMPANY” coming.  She wanted to make sure that she had cleaned the bathroom, dusted the furniture, mopped and vacuumed the floors and prepared the food, so the “BIG COMPANY” would see us at…

                                               As a product of the Eighties, we had our own little language.  The word “bad’ became something that was “good”.  The word “cool” became something that meant “hot” or “trendy” and the word “gay”, which used to mean “happy” became someone who was homosexual.  Every day at school you could hear words like “like”, “gnarly” or “psych”.  Another word that became very popular that you don’t hear much today was the…

                     “God’s Promises are Sure! God’s Promises are Sure! He Speaks, and It Shall Be; God’s Promises are Sure! Those are the words to a song that sister Jewel Kenderick wrote almost fifty years ago that have been sang in elementary chapel for years.  The idea for the song comes from the Promise of Abraham that is mentioned in Genesis 12 and reaffirmed in Genesis 15.  The rest of the Bible…

  DISCUSSION:                                 We have all done it! Some of us more than others, but we have all done it; opened our mouth and said something we wish we hadn’t.  The millisecond it rolls off of our tongue, we wish we could reel it back in.  Then in the following moments we feel embarrassed and humiliated.  Imagine if you had done that to God and then God called you on it.  Within our readings, we have an…

                                 As we come to the conclusions of all of the various speeches from the “so-called” friends of Job, they all offer little insight and do very little to comfort him.  However, this last speech from Elihu offers some wonderful words of wisdom for us to think about.  In Job 37, Elihu proclaims the majesty of God in very descriptive form.  Read it again aloud and slow and see the Awesome Majesty of God.  “Awesome” meaning “to fear or…

                  When I was a young boy growing up at Atlas Church of Christ, I can remember it being a big deal to get to go into Mrs. Selma Wallace’s Bible Class.   I can’t remember what class it was that she taught, but back then, in my eyes, it was “big kids class”.  She was a wonderful Bible Class teacher and in just about every class we would sing a few songs before we got into the day’s lesson. …

                  We all love to reminisce and somewhat embellish a little about the good ol’ days.  Whether it is how great of an athlete we were or how far we had to walk to school in the snow, it seems every generation likes to reminisce about days gone by.  Job is no different. In fact, that is exactly what he does in Job 29. He even uses the phrase, “as I was in my prime”.  He talks about the…

                                        Believe it or not a professional basketball player, Kyrie Irving, stated in an interview, that he believed that it was possible that the world was still flat.  I hope he stated this as a publicity stunt, because no one in their right mind would still believe that the earth was flat.  However, up until the 3rd century BC, that was the common thought.  Aristotle first theorized that…