Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

It is never wise, nor is it ever profitable to try to argue with people about spiritual things. We never argue a person into the kingdom of God. We simply share with them out of our own experience. We try to meet them at the point of their need and keep the conversation centered on Jesus Christ. In this experience with the woman at the well, the Lord keeps talking to...

There was a time when I thought that all churches wanted to grow. In fact, I had grown up in a church that was progressive and dynamic. I thought that my church was typical of all churches. Then I went to be the pastor of a church. I was meeting one night with the long-range planning committee, and we were discussing a new building. I said to that committee, “Me...

I read some time ago that one of the directors of the Rockefeller Foundation said that the members of that organization are either patrons or they are partners. A patron is a person who lends his name and his support to an organization. He occasionally will attend one of the annual meetings. There is some kind of slight attachment to that organization. A patron intend...

I had the privilege this week of meeting Stanley Tam, the president of US Plastics in Lima, Ohio. He is a Christian businessman. I would have said a few years ago, and he would have said too, that he was the owner of US Plastics. But now he is only the president of US Plastics, because he has given his business to God. In fact he has written a book about his life enti...

In his book Life Sentence, Chuck Colson tells about trying to win a Jewish lawyer friend to Christ. He had tried again and again to find an opening—a way to introduce the subject of Christ so he could share the Lord with this Jewish lawyer friend. Finally one night at a dinner engagement the opportunity came, and much to his surprise, the lawyer friend by the na...

I’ve been impressed as I’ve studied Christian history to see God so very oftentimes use ordinary people—those people who seem most unlikely to be used—to do his great work. All of us have heard of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great preacher of another generation. He spoke to 5,000 people every Sunday morning and 5,000 people every Sunday night....

The Holy Spirit convicts people of sin and awakens them to a newness of life. The Holy Spirit is the communicating factor of evangelism. The Holy Spirit is more important than a PA system is in communicating to your physical ear—he is the PA system of the soul. Dwight L. Moody, the gifted evangelist, once went to London and the entire city responded to his prea...

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...

In his book This Way, Please, Roy McClain tells the story of an old Chinese man who was healed in one of the hospitals of the China Inland Mission started by the missionary Hudson Taylor. The old man had been blind for 50 years. For more than five decades he had not seen anything. Medical examinations at the missionary clinic revealed that he had acute cataracts on bo...