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On a recent forty-five-minute drive, I listened to a talk radio conversation on the pursuit of happiness. The personalities bounced around questions such as, “What is happiness? How does one find it? Once found, how is it kept or maintained? Can happiness be found in this life?” A couple of “Happiness Experts” jumped in with their two cents. Some years back, sociologist Christian Smith coined “moralistic therapeutic deism” to describe the beliefs of Christian young people. Their beliefs were the…

When people ask me, “What do you do?” I have to work up my courage to say, “I’m a preacher.” Responses vary, depending on the context and any previous interactions. Usually it is, “Oh!” and they back away with all manner of throat clearing. What I should say is this: “I am a minister of the Word of God, a steward of the Gospel, an ambassador of God, one who makes known the message of reconciliation, and I tell people…

In our local congregation, we are praying for several people to find jobs. In this calendar year, we’ve seen record employment and record unemployment. Our prayers for these usually sound like this: “Lord, please provide work for so-and-so. Give them work that utilizes their skills, allows them to serve their neighbors, provides for their own needs, and let them earn a little extra so that they may support the church and help the poor.” Our prayer is rooted in the…

1 – Because God designed us to work, Satan will use work to destroy us. We are prone to live to work instead of work to live. We will work but ignore marriage, neglect parenting, fail to serve the church, fall short of neighborliness, become addicted to our gadgets, and spend time doing what God has not called us to do. If we aren’t careful and thankful, we can find ourselves dissatisfied with our lot in life. 2 – Spend…

I’ve had a couple of run-ins with barnacles. A faint scar on my leg serves as a reminder of an unhappy slice while climbing rocks on the Georgia seacoast. Then there’s the barefooted island adventure which did not end well. An eye surgeon friend sat me upside down in his chair and performed surgery on my inferior end. A skiff we had for a time on the coast required routine scraping and painting on its hull to remove these unwelcome…

In a small house church in China, two families stood before the congregation for the weekly Bible ceremony service. This congregation possessed only two Bibles. One was reserved for the pastor’s daily preparation to feed the congregation from the Scriptures. The other copy was sent home each Sunday with a different family for their use. With tears, one family passed the Bible to the next, who received it with joy. They anticipated what the previous family had experienced—a week of…

“Some people say a man is made out of mud, a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood, muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.” These are the lyrics of a song made well-known by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the 1950s. It tells of the plight of the coal miner, working and working, only to “owe his soul to the company store”. A man is made out of mud (Genesis…

You’ve likely seen Lucy hold the football for Charlie Brown to kickoff at the annual thanksgiving day game, only to pull it away. His backflop, pain, humiliation, and despair have been felt by many. Once after completing her gag play on our poor comic friend, she states, “Isn’t it peculiar Charle Brown, how some traditions just fade away?” While she meant the tradition of a successful kickoff, we may think of the disappearance of our own observances. Do you remember…