Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

Some time ago a man just dropped in my office who obviously was despairing of life. It did not take long for me to know that he had virtually come to the end of his rope. He had no meaning, no purpose in existence. I had just been teaching to our church the Roman road of salvation and I decided that I would use that plan of salvation on him. I took that little book of...

I have a preacher friend who tells this story and I’m not sure that it’s true, but it is a good story and preachers don’t always tell the truth when they have a point they want to make. He said that there was a lady in his church who seemed to oppose him on every issue. It didn’t matter what he said, it didn’t matter what he presented to...

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...

Henry David Thoreau once sat at Walden Pond watching a lineman string wires down the railroad. “What are you doing?” he inquired. The lineman replied, “We are building a telegraph system so the people of Maine can talk to the people of Texas.” Thoreau commented, “What if the people of Maine have nothing to say to the people in Texas or Te...

A friend met another friend after many years of not seeing him. And she was surprised to learn he had left the pulpit to become a medical doctor. When she asked him about this he explained his actions in this way: “I have learned that people will pay more money for the care of their bodies than they will for the care of their souls.” Some time elapsed and...

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...

Divorce is the most shattering blow the human spirit can suffer. When you deeply love your mate and have a strong conviction about marriage, divorce can be worse than death. When you lose a mate through divorce, they are just as gone and you are just as lonely as if they had died. Divorce brings with it all of the shock and the loneliness of death, plus much more. Ho...

A Marxist and a Christian were debating. As they presented their philosophies, a shabbily dressed man passed by. The Marxist said, “Communism can put a new suit on that man.” Then the Christian replied, “Yes, but Christ can put a new man in that suit.”  No one else can make people new like Jesus Christ can. How so? Jesus gives us a new m...

On the surface the argument is plausible: let liquor become part of a child’s life when he is young and he will drink in moderation. Unfortunately it does not seem to work that way. It appears strange that while many countries are cracking down on the abuses of alcohol, we Americans are calling for more leniency. Alcoholism is one of the great social problems t...