Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

I talked with a businessman this past week who made an investment some time ago. At the present time, he is getting back every month as much as his original investment. Do you know what he said to me? He said, “I wish I had been able to put more into it.” If you ever look at life as the kind of investment that brings back to you according to what you put i...

Some time ago the Baptist preacher Carlyle Marney quoted Herodotus as saying, “The greatest tragedy that could come to any person’s life is to aspire to do much and then to achieve little.” And Marney said, “No, that is not so. The greatest tragedy is to aspire to do something, and to do it, and then to discover it’s not worth doing.&rdqu...

In 1909 Pierre Curie, a man who along with his wife discovered radium, was run over by a wagon and killed instantly. The loss of her husband was a devastating experience to Madam Curie emotionally. Thereafter for months, she wrote personal notes to him daily in her diary. In one of those notes, she described the funeral service and how they gathered by the graveside a...

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,...