Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

I read about a slave woman, just out of slavery, holding the hand of her little grandson when the body of Abraham Lincoln was being transported up Pennsylvania Avenue where it would lay in state in the Capitol building. And as that body passed by, that old grandmother said to her little grandson, “You take a good look at that man. He died to set you free.”...

A man I knew when he was just a boy lived near one of those old-timey neighborhood grocery stores. As a boy he was in that grocery store every day. He knew the owner and those working in the store very well. One day he stole some pencils. It didn’t amount to very much—maybe 25 cents. Just three, four, or five pencils, and he didn’t need them. It was...

In 1736 John Wesley entered in his journal an account of going to German pastors to ask them some questions concerning his conduct. One of those German pastors said, “My brother, I must first ask you a question or two. The first question is this: Have you the witness of the Spirit within yourself? Does the Spirit bear witness with your spirit that you know the S...

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...

I believe that wherever there is a man who earnestly seeks after God, God somehow someway gets the truth to him. A man does not have to have the Gospel to be lost. He does have to have it to be saved. And if there is a man out there who wants to be right with God and wants to know God, God is going to see to it that he finds out how.

The Holy Spirit is the communicating factor of evangelism. It is more important in communicating the Gospel than this PA system is in communicating my message to you. The Holy Spirit is the PA system to the souls of men. And through the working of the Holy Spirit men are awakened to new life and to conviction of sin and the need of the Savior and they come to him and...

“If Christianity today is losing its influence, the reason may be that the church consists of soft pews, soft music, and soft soap.” So said Pastor John C. Jeske one time in the Presbyterian Journal.  We must never so water down our message as Christians that it loses its cleansing power. We must fight the temptation to be apologetic and even as...