Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

Somebody asked Billy Graham about the many converts who came to his revivals, “Will they last?” He replied, “You might as well go to the hospital in the maternity ward and ask that same question about the newborn babies you see behind the glass.” “Will they last?” The answer is “no” unless somebody loves them, feeds them...

About a year ago, I was visiting with one of our ladies whose husband was in the hospital dying of cancer. He had entered the hospital just four days after she had returned home from surgery herself. She said that when she learned of his illness and his hospitalization, she became a bundle of nerves.  She could not eat; she could not sleep; she could not do anyt...

Jesse Jackson said some time ago that we sometimes allow our children to “eat junk and to watch junk and listen to junk and to play with junk and to talk junk, and then we wonder why they grow up to be social junkies.” To that I would add that we sometimes allow ourselves as well as our children to think junk. If we are continually focusing on junk in ever...

One of the greatest athletes who ever lived was the legendary Bobby Jones, the golfer. One of the things that characterized him was his absolute honesty in playing the game. In fact, on one occasion in a crucial match, he accidentally moved the ball as he was addressing it with his club. Though he moved it just a fraction, and though he was out in the rough and no one...

A Sunday school teacher, a Mr. Kimball, in 1858 led a Boston shoe clerk to give his life to Christ. The clerk, Dwight L. Moody, became an evangelist. In England in 1879, he awakened evangelistic zeal in the heart of Fredrick B. Myer, the pastor of a small church. F. B. Meyer, preaching to an American college campus, brought to Christ a student named J. Wilbur Chapin....

Disciples were called the name “Christian” for the first time in Antioch. In a pagan city, their life was so different as they talked about Jesus that those pagans called them the followers of the Christ. If you and a group of your friends were picked up and dropped in Beijing, is there anything about your life, your witness, your speech, your conviction,...

In the days of the potato famine in Ireland, many Irishmen left the country and came to America seeking a new way of life. And among those thousands of people who came as immigrants to our country there was a young man who couldn’t afford passage on the ship, so he hid himself aboard and became a stowaway. Halfway across the Atlantic their ship hit an iceberg an...

One of these weekend widows met her husband at the door when he returned home from his first hunting trip of deer season and said to him, “I’m sick and tired of sitting around the house on weekends by myself. So the next time you go deer hunting I’m going with you.” That’s the last thing he wanted. And so he tried to talk her out of it. H...

Kim Linehan was one of the greatest long-distance swimmers in the world. She held the world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle competition from 1979 to 1987. According to her coach Paul Bergen, Kim did endless exercises and swam seven to 12 miles a day. The hardest part of her regimen? “Getting in the water,” she said. If getting in the water is the hard...