Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

This is a day of vast scientific advances. Science has created "test tube" babies and we can now transplant almost all bodily organs. In a day of such spectacular achievements many wonder if science has outmoded religion. The answer is no! It never has and it never will. The reason why is because they deal with two different ways of knowing and two different fields of...

The New York City Youth Board once released a report that attracted a good deal of attention. The board had sent some highly experienced social workers and psychologists into the homes of 500 six-year-old boys. After studying the home environment, the researchers made predictions about the future of each of the boys. For the children from homes with a notable lack of...

I once read an address delivered by Dr. Douglas Freeman at the dedication of the library at the University of Florida. Dr. Freeman was for many years the editor of the Richmond News Leader and the author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Robert E. Lee. At the close of his address he made a rather startling observation that the most important thing ab...

This is a time of moral confusion. There is a fog of uncertainty and doubt that clouds the minds of most people so that they have difficulty in making moral distinctions. Some say there are no fixed moral principles for life’s moral questions. Each situation, they claim, must be judged on its own and they insist that there can be no rules applied apart from eac...

Here is a typical day for any pastor in America today. Received a telephone call from a young lady who recently married outside of her faith. She is now having trouble from both sides of the family.  Worked on a funeral sermon for a dear friend who passed away. Visited with a young couple. They are new here in town. She is lonely. Her parents live in a distant...

A man came to me years ago distressed over his marriage. He had been unfaithful to his wife and she had discovered it. They were trying to put their marriage back together again and I was helping them. At the close of our initial conversation he told me that he had just bought his wife an expensive diamond ring for Christmas. And he wondered if he should give it to he...

I once talked with a young man who had fought a serious alcohol problem in his life for years. He had at one point almost ruined his own life and the lives of the members of his family. As we talked the thought struck me, “If you removed just one thing from that boy’s life—alcohol—his life would have been entirely different.” When I share...

In 1986 Desmond Tutu, an anti-apartheid and social rights activist and Anglican bishop, recounted the story of the whites coming to South Africa. “When they came,” the bishop said, “the blacks had the land and the whites had the Bible.” Then, he said, the whites wanted to teach the blacks to pray. “So we bowed our heads and closed our eye...

Karl F. Schmiedeke, during a visit to Pineville, North Carolina, stopped at the post office for stamps. “May I please have some pretty ones?” he asked. The clerk reached into the drawer, took out 10 stamps imprinted with the American flag, and slid them across the counter. “You can’t get any prettier than that,” he replied. If the astrona...