Woody Hayes, the former football coach of Ohio State once spoke to a service club in Memphis, Tennessee. In his speech he gave what he considered to be football’s three great lessons: “When you get knocked down, you get up and go again. When you go again, you go as a team. And there is nothing that comes easy that’s worth a dime. I never saw a footba...
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Great men are born out of hardship. If you read enough biographies you will get to thinking that there can’t be a great man except he who suffers. God knows that you can’t develop strong men in easy places. The man who has never had his faith tested doesn’t know whether he has faith. God wants to make you and me into men like Christ and he allows us...
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A few years ago I returned to our old home place, deep in the piney woods of East Texas. I can’t remember living there, but I lived there when I was just a baby. And I had to get directions out to those woods, down a little sandy road and had to stop and walk up a trail and finally was able to identify the place by a great big oak tree that my dad had planted be...
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The preacher was told that he had cancer, just a little while to live, and he went back to his cabin and one moonlit night he looked out the window and saw the mountains that he loved so much. And that mountain stream that flowed down. He looked up at the stars so clear and bright in the winter sky, and he said to the mountains, “Mountains, when you are no more...
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God left Titus in Crete because he wanted to use him as his instrument to change the world. Paul tells Titus that he was left in Crete to “set in order” things that were wanting. The term set in order is a medical term that means to “set in joint.” It describes what a doctor does when you go to him with a broken bone. Because the parts of that...
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There are some things in life that are priceless. Money cannot buy them and poverty cannot take them away. One of these is a virtuous woman. Proverbs 31:10-31 describes such a lady. The writer asks, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.” Rich indeed is the man who has a virtuous wife. Fortunate beyond measure is the child who h...
Devotional
Everyone needs to know how to deal with other people’s sins. Daily we are affected by them and they cause us many a crisis and much misery. We are never free from the wrongs caused by others, and they are never free from the wrongs caused by us.
Sometimes the sins of others touch us directly. A business partner turns out to be dishonest; your husband is unfaith...
Devotional
During the last few decades, a small number of “radical” theologians have received worldwide publicity from their announcement that “God is dead.” Some members of the secular press, hungering for headlines, raised these men to a level seldom afforded a philosopher or theologian.
While there is nothing new about such claims, we who are Christia...
Devotional
1 Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness;
2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;
3 But hath in due times manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me according t...
Sermon