Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

I was talking with a preacher one day, and he mentioned the bucket committee. I said, “The bucket committee? I’ve been in Baptist churches for 25 years. I think we’ve got every committee you could possibly have. We’ve got 28 standing committees, three sitting committees, two lying committees, and one dead committee. Surely there are not anymore...

Education is of no avail if the fire goes out. Vance Havner was once talking about the bent toward education, and the coldness that sometimes goes with it when there is a lack of spiritual fire in the church. He said that there never has been a time when the church had so many degrees and so little temperature. We need to be sure that with all of our degrees that the...

Last week I read A Short History of the Baptists by H. C. Vedder. In the book he told of a pioneer Baptist preacher who came into the wilderness of East Texas down around Nacogdoches before this land was ever settled country. Here is what that pioneer said about his life: “Every day I travel, I have to swim through creeks or swamps, and I am wet from head to fee...

Have you learned through the years that what you don’t know can hurt you? I heard some time ago about a Mexican bandit named Jose Rodriguez, who lived down close to the border. He made regular trips across the Rio Grande to a little Texas town and he would rob the banks and then he would go back across the river. He became such a nuisance that finally they alert...

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...

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...