Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

Willie Sutton decided that he would read the gospels as though he had never read them before. With that fresh approach he would see what new revelation, what new understanding he could gain from the gospels. And so, as best he could he washed his mind of all previous ideas, all preconceived conceptions of the Lord. And he went to the gospels and read them as though he...

Have you ever stopped at a motel late at night to get a room and the clerk said to you, “I’m sorry, we have no vacancies”? Overbooked, overcrowded, no room for you. That very well may be what happened that first Christmas. The innkeeper simply had an overcrowded inn and there was no room for Jesus to stay. What Jesus experienced in that first century...

How can a doctor treat a patient if he is not with him? How could you set things in order if you aren’t there? Jesus was often criticized because he associated with sinners. He justified his actions by saying, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32)...

I read sometime ago in Reader’s Digest an article that was encouraging people to be creative in dealing with various problems. And it suggested that if you go to a hotel and the innkeeper says that they do not have any room, rather than just turning and walking away, use your imagination. The article said that most hotels always save a few extra rooms for specia...

In her book One in Seven, Margaret Slattery tells of a young couple who visited the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, and standing on the gorge witnessed the awesome sight of the 50-foot tide, the highest in the world, come swirling in. Watching the water pushing, pouring, pounding in through the Bore, over the low flats, over the banks, over the boulders, they were left b...

The Christian faith is no stranger to skepticism. In fact the very first announcement of the resurrection of Jesus was greeted with unbelief. Luke says, “And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:11). Such doubt still persists today. There are still those who believe that Jesus never lived. Others will concede that...

Several years ago I ran across the phrase “The stormy north side of Jesus.” It stuck in my mind because this is a side of Jesus we so seldom see and so often forget.   We have so long thought of him as “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” that we’ve overlooked the fact that he was capable of anger (Mark 3:5). Jesus has a stormy north sid...

"When I found out Jesus was not a Methodist, it was a shock. And then I discovered he was not even an American.” So said Dr. Horace Williams who was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina from 1890 to 1940. We’d probably all be surprised to know Jesus as he really was. One thing we’d be surprised about would be his friends, for...

Since World War II, the number of American psychiatrists has multiplied astronomically, so as to indicate the disorder of many American lives today. Multiplying the number of psychiatrists is not the answer to our problems. Dr. J. A. Hadfield, one of England’s foremost psychiatrists, once said: “Speaking as a student of psychotherapy who, as such...