Ecclesiastes 12:10

Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. Romans 13:11   It was just seemly a few years ago when I took some of the youth group to the local fair when one of my young people saw a ride and made an excellent point. The ride was called Starship 2000. It was meant to look all futuristic but the ride itself was well aged. The young man exclaimed, ‘you know that ride is old because when they made it the year 2000 was far into the future’. We laughed because it was 1999.     Now here we are staring down at the upcoming year 2019. That story is over 20 years old. Yet in some ways, the year 2000 still kind of seems far off to me. It can’t be that we this far into a new millennium.  How has time passed by so fast?   That is the funny thing about time. It is constant and runs the same no matter what yet for us it the speed seems ever-changing. Monday...

  When we build our church buildings how long do we want them to last?  Would we be OK with a contractor that only made a structure good for fifteen years? Would we be satisfied if need to do it all over again in thirty years? If the place is crumbling a few years after construction would we feel that it all was a waste?  Now the church isn’t really in the building construction business (thought we do have to do that from time to time), we are more into church building. That is building up the body of Christ.  How long do we want what we build to last?  The Chinese have a proverb, If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain; if ten years, grow trees; if a hundred years, grow people. In essence, this tells us for long lasting things you must put your effort not into things but into people   Therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing. 1 st Thessalonians 5:11   When it comes to our effo...

  When you were in school, how long did you remember something after the lesson was over, especially once you got into Christmas break?  Most teachers will tell you the first couple of week after the break is spent trying to get kids to remember all that they forgot over the holiday.  That is what is so remarkable about the 10-year-old Tilly Smith of England, who not only remembered something during Christmas but used that info to save a bunch of people.     Tilly and her family were on vacation in Phuket, Thailand, when the ocean waves began increasing and hitting the shore a little closer with each wave. Everyone else on the beach was dumbstruck by the change in the ocean, but Tilly knew better.  Only two weeks prior, she had learned about tsunamis in her geography class.  Tilly frantically told her parents that a tsunami was on its way. Her parent began to pack up and leave but not before they mentioned their suspicions to a security guar...