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WHAT A WASTE...??
There was a young man who grew up just down the block from my wife Jan. I never met him; I can’t even remember his name. But I know about him. I think about him every time I’m in the neighborhood.
This boy didn’t attract much notice as he was growing up. He studied mostly. He
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Presbyterian/Reformed
IN PHILADELPHIA
My father died in a Philadelphia hospital in 1999. Some weeks before his death, I was able to spend a few days with him. I stayed at the home of some friends in Washington Crossing, just a few miles north of Philadelphia, and each day I would drive into the city.
The first morning
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Presbyterian/Reformed
THE GOSPEL IS OFFENSIVE
There is something about the gospel that is inherently offensive. I don’t like saying that, and you may not like hearing it. But it is incontestable. The gospel puts some people off.
Take David and Roland, two high school friends of mine. David was what you might call a
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Presbyterian/Reformed
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POWER AND "KING OF THE HILL"
When I was a kid, we used to play a game called "King of the Hill." Everyone would get together and choose some place to be the "hill." Sometimes we were lucky enough to have a dirt mound to play on, but not very often. It might be a bed or a sofa, unless, of course,
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Presbyterian/Reformed
WHEN YOU CAN'T FIGHT, PRAY
Nancy told me the other day that, not too long ago, she overheard Graham praying. Here he was, near the end of his life, beset with a failing body more than nine decades old, and what was he praying for? His country. Your country. Mine. He fought for this country. He
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Presbyterian/Reformed
SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE
Back in 1991, I went on a mission trip to the former Soviet Union. Twenty-or-so of us arrived on a snowy November day in Samara, a city of more than a million people located on the Volga River. We were there for about ten days, and our mission was to help start a
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Presbyterian/Reformed
COME IN THROUGH THE DOOR
There's an old spiritual. I'm sure you've heard it. It starts out, 'So high you can't get over it, so low you can't get under it, so wide you can't get around it! You gotta come in through the door.'
That's what Jesus tells us in this passage from John's
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Presbyterian/Reformed
A MOTHER'S EMBRACE
My own mother was a remarkable embodiment of both beauty and duty. She was lovely in appearance, and I think early in her life she turned many a head. But her real beauty was her embrace of duty. She worked hard from the time she was a child until, in her final years, she could
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Presbyterian/Reformed
I WAS THE LAMB
Every summer when I was a child, my family would make the trip from Texas to New Jersey to see my dad’s parents. They lived in a fascinating two-story house in which all the bedrooms were upstairs. The room I slept in had a single bed, and above the bed was a picture of Jesus. You
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Presbyterian/Reformed
COMMON BITTERNESS
When I was in college, I worked as a youth director at a little church out in the country about an hour’s drive away. There were two families in that congregation that didn’t get along. When they came to worship, they would take up their positions on opposite sides of the room
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Presbyterian/Reformed
CALVIN'S HEART AFLAME
We are emotional beings, and it is unlikely that we would check our emotions at the door when we enter the sanctuary. Our great forebear in the faith, John Calvin, chose as his personal emblem a hand extending upward to God and in that hand a heart aflame. And
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Presbyterian/Reformed
A CHILD'S VIEW OF GOD
Many of you know that I did not grow up in the church. My family was not religious, and so, we seldom spoke of God. Still in all, even as a child, I had some conception of God. I don’t know where I got it or how I picked it up, but I had an undeveloped, primitive theology. I
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Presbyterian/Reformed
I THOUGHT WE'D TALK MORE ABOUT GOD
Some years ago, a woman came to me for counseling. Her husband had died suddenly from a rapidly growing cancer, and she was overcome not only with grief but with fear regarding her future. She did not now know who she was or where she was to go. She was beside
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Presbyterian/Reformed
LOOKS GREAT, BUT WHAT DOES IT DO?
I once read about a certain Mr. Wahlstrom who purchased an old bombsight and took it apart to see what made it work. As he began to put it back together, he decided to add to it some spare parts he had from other projects. Over time, friends and neighbors took an
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Presbyterian/Reformed
YEARNING FOR YOUR BELOVED
Hearing God’s voice begins as a matter of affection. We have to listen for the voice of God the way a lover listens for the voice of the beloved.
During the year before my wife and I were married, I lived in a remote city, and what I discovered is that there is no pain
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Presbyterian/Reformed
WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS?
Not long after I got out of seminary, I decided I needed more training. So, I applied for a pastoral residency position at one of the largest churches in our denomination. It was a church in Prairie Village, Kansas, just outside of Kansas City, Missouri. As it turns out, the
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Presbyterian/Reformed
THE IN-LAWS: "ARE YOU A PRAYING MAN?"
Sheldon Kornpett was a quiet, reserved man with a successful dental practice in Manhattan, that is, until he met his future in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Vince Ricardo. Sheldon’s daughter was soon to be married to their son, so Sheldon’s wife hosted a dinner party at
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Presbyterian/Reformed
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