Ecclesiastes 12:10

  It’s a modern-day adage that doesn’t seem to get many challenges, “It doesn’t matter how you worship as long as you worship God”. It is a way we can make all religions equal if not if doctrine or practice at least in result.   Besides God doesn’t care how a person comes to him as long as he comes to him. Right?   Let consider a passage a command given by Moses to the Israelites: "These are the statutes and the judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land which the LORD, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess as long as you live on the earth.   "You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree.   "You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim with fire, and you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.   " You shall...

  He was a good man. He had a good family. He prayed. He gave. He treated those different than him well. He served his country. His community respected him. He was “ a righteous and God-fearing man ”   Yet there was still something he needed to do to be saved. Now there was a man at Caesarea named Cornelius, a centurion of what was called the Italian cohort, a devout man and one who feared God with all his household, and gave many alms to the Jewish people and prayed to God continually . Acts 10:1-2    So when the word of God came to him, he listened. He didn’t just listen, he obeyed. He went searching for the answer he needed. He found it in Joppa in a man named Simon. So he brought him to his house and gathered his family to hear “ all that you have been commanded by the Lord " (Acts 10:33). So Simon Peter told the story of Jesus and the need to believe in him for salvation.   Cornelius knew the words Peter spoke to him would be the ...

  Is it wrong to not use an instrument of music in worship service? Is it wrong to not drink alcohol? Is it wrong to attend every church service?   Now the opposite of these topics often draw many articles and lesson, as people are curious to find out the limits. But one rarely claims fault when one is not on the outer edge.   In the book of Job when the text is describing the righteous nature of Job it says: When the days of feasting had completed their cycle, Job would send and consecrate them, rising up early in the morning and offering burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, "Perhaps my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts." Thus Job did continually . Job 1:5   Did you catch that? Job was as concerned about the things that might have been done wrong as much as what was done wrong. Job wasn’t just counting up to what he had to offer to cover up his and his sons sins.  He wanted to be extra car...

 Theodore Roosevelt was an outdoorsman. He'd rather be hiking in the woods or hunting in the savannah than at some gala.  But as president of the United States it was part of his job to host dignities and do meet and greets.   What Roosevelt hated most about these session is how even when speaking pleasantries and greeting one another, he found most folks paid little attention to what was actually being said. To amuse himself, Roosevelt would greet people with a smile and exclaim “I murdered my grandmother this morning”.  Most people never reacted to the statement.  But one diplomat did. After the remark he leaned in and whispered to the President, “I’m sure she had it coming to her”.   It’s not just diplomats that hear but don’t listen. People do that with the word of God all the time. You can tell because they don’t react to what it is telling them. It might pass into their ears but that doesn’t make any change in their lives. But one who ...

Over all the years of ministry I have done hundreds of Bible studies with people with various different reactions and results.  Some have been joyous, some sad, some frustrating, some comical.  I have at times been at a loss for words for how to respond to a person. Once on a campaign, I studied with a man that has recently had his wife leave him for another man. In spite of being the innocent party, her divorce lawyer had taken him to the cleaners. He was heartbroken and bitter about the ordeal and was looking to find answers for his life. We studied the scripture together, he began to see how he needed to make his life right with God but he was hesitant to obey.  So we set a follow up study for the next day.             The next day we received word he would not be coming to the study or even to the church again. After he got home he read the brochure we had given him about our campaign. It told about the dire...

   You may remember the recent shipwreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship in Italy.  The Concordia captain, Francesco Schettino, is under house arrest, accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship before all passengers had been evacuated.  He apparently took the ship off its charted course to bring it closer to the island to impress some passengers and crew.  That change of course lead to the ship hitting a reef and capsizing off the island of Giglio.       This tragedy is made so much more terrible by the fact that it could have been so easily avoided.  The Captain claimed that the reef was not on his charts, but it known on all the tourist maps.  The information to keep the ship from danger was readily avaible, the course had been properly plotted but it was ignored and tragedy resulted.    Paul uses the metaphor of a shipwreck in 1 st Timothy 1:19, “ keeping faith and a good conscien...

Have you ever been somewhere when a speaker is interrupted by an audience member? Sometimes it is done to heckle the speaker, sometimes it is a show of support, but almost always it just seems to disrupt the speaker. As a speaker, I have had this happen on occasion and it always throws a wrench in my gears as I struggle to recover. Jesus was once interrupted, but used to moment to teach a valuable lesson. In Luke 11:27-28 we read, "While Jesus was saying these things, one of the women in the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, "Blessed is the womb that bore You and the breasts at which You nursed.” But He said, "On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it"." I imagine this outburst was a supportive gesture. The woman's claim was that His mother was rewarded by her son's greatness. Jesus turned this thinking on its head by saying that people will be rewarded not by who they know but what they do. Obedience to God will...