Ecclesiastes 12:10

  I’ve noticed over the last several years that world has started placing a great emphasis when celebrities die.  A famous person passes away and it seems the media and the internet go into mourning.  It is treated as breaking news. Then the tributes, the reflections, the stories about them flood the airwaves for the next few days.  It is treated as a national tragedy.      But why?   Don’t get me wrong, I might have like their music, enjoy the films they stared in or appreciated the talent that they had, but it not as my daily life will be changed now this celeb is gone.  People die every day.  Why is it so important that the person was famous?  We have no real connection to the person, but we mourn as if it were a close personal friend or relative.   I think it has everything to do with the new “god” of our time, fame.  While previous generations might have worshiped money or power, this current one seems ...

   I can't stand the rambling preacher.  That fellow that spends his time talking about everything but his lesson.  The guy whose lesson on the Prodigal Son includes sections on picking peas, the best hitter in baseball and temperature of last night’s dinner.  Maybe it bother me more because I fear that I may just be that guy. Rambling might be entertaining (usually not) but it is definitely not edifying.  For the preacher, his purpose is to build up his listeners with his words not just fill time.   But that qualifier isn’t just for preacher however; “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” Ephesians 4:29   This verse gives us a purpose (edification), a place (according to the need of the moment), and a plan (give grace) for our speech.  It also commands us to limit speec...

  The Judean Desert is a barren stretch of land that extend from east of Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. It’s the wilderness where John the Baptist preached and David fled from Saul.  Not a lot of things grew in that wasteland but up until the 1 st century there was one tree that was plentiful, the Judean date palm.  It was so well know that the Romans even put it on a coin known as the “Judaea Capta”     Yet sometime before the year 500, the Judean date palm disappeared from the area—and, therefore, the world.  The tree would have been lost forever but for Herod the Great.  He built a fortress on top of a mesa called Masada that is still there today. In the mid-1960s, excavators working on the site found some seeds nearly 2000 years old, yet still well preserved in ancient pottery.  The seeds were kept in storage until 2005, when it was placed in a special, hormone-infused soil. Those seeds would eventually sprout, and five years later, there...

    You will often hear from some that baptism isn’t required for salvation since baptism is a work and we are not saved by works (Ephesians 2:8-9).   Since the Bible does say that baptism saves us (1 st Peter 3:21, Mark 16:16, Acts 2:40-41), it must make us reconsider than line of logic.     So is baptism really a work?   Well, it is not a work of the law (Galatians 2:16) because 1 st Corinthians 6:11 tells us that our justification comes from the washing of baptism.  So it not that kind of work, what kind of work is it?  If anything we must do to be saved is “work” then we must not have to confess Jesus as Lord (Romans 10:9) or repent (Luke 13:3). To follow that train of logic we don’t even need to have faith since Jesus called it a work (John 6:28-29).   Oh, course this doesn’t make much sense.  James clearly tells us that works must go alone with faith or faith doesn’t exist (James 2:24-26). So can we then come to a...