The story is told of a monk who lived in a cave in the wilderness. This monk had a great reputation for being a holy and godly man. In fact, his reputation reached hell itself, so the devil sent three of his demons to tempt the monk to sin and thus destroy his holiness. When…
Since today is the first day of a new year, this is a wonderful time for making some New Year’s resolutions. I thought I would share with you my dieting resolutions for the past few years. 2013: I will get my weight down below 200 pounds. 2014: I will follow my new diet religiously until…
Before my lesson this morning, I want to share with you a video about the birth of Jesus. Now, if I were to tell you the story, you’d probably doze off because you’ve heard it a thousand times. So I’m going to let some children tell you the story. And I’m pretty sure you’ve never…
In Acts 17, Paul and Silas were preaching about Jesus in Thessalonica and having some degree of success, so some of the Jews got angry and formed a mob to drag them out and deal with them. Verse 6 says, “And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers…
Throughout Christian history, we have talked about the subject of eternal punishment a lot. And, a lot of times, we have used hell as a way to get people to do what we wanted them to do, to control people’s behavior. We even refer to sermons like that as “hellfire and brimstone”. And my…
Allow me to start this morning by asking you a question — What do you think is the primary goal in life for most Christians? What is it that Christians want to achieve more than anything else? And I think you would probably agree with my assessment that, for most Christians, the primary goal in…
I’ve been reading lately from a book entitled “Heaven on Earth”, written by Jonathan Storment and Josh Ross, and it’s got me looking at some scriptures with fresh eyes. So, for the next several weeks, I’d like to talk with you about heaven, about heaven’s connection to earth, about the kingdom of heaven. And…
In his popular book, “The One Minute Manager”, Ken Blanchard recommends that leaders develop the practice of what he calls “one-minute praising”. The idea is that you try to catch your employees doing something right. Now, we’re all used to bosses who catch us doing something wrong. But it’s rare to be praised when we…