Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

A young man who recently became a Christian said to me, “I am going home to a non-Christian family—a family that is prepared to laugh me out of the house. How should I deal with that?” Although he grew up next door to a parsonage and there were several different ministers who lived there over the years, no one ever spoke to him about being a Christi...

The motto for every Christian’s life should be, “Thy will, O God, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” Behind this motto is the assumption that God has a will for every life. Both Jesus and the apostle Paul lived their lives under the conviction that God had a will for them, and they died with the satisfaction that they had accomplished it. As...

A minister who was conducting worship services in the White House quoted a maxim of Augustine: “I will work as if everything depended on me; I shall pray as if everything depended on God.” Prayer and work naturally go together. Jesus said, “Men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1). Prayer is important but prayer is not a substit...

I have said for a long, long time that I would rather wear out than rust out. The reason I feel this way is that life was made for a challenge. Most of us are our best and do our best when we are engaged in a meaningful and worthwhile work. It is too much leisure time that fills the bars and places of amusement. Too much time on our hands produces boredom and robs lif...

I was preaching in a church years ago and at the close of the service a man told me that when he was a seventeen-year-old student at the University of Texas, God called him to preach.  But he didn’t answer the call.  He put it this way, “The phone rang, but I did not pick up the receiver because I knew who was on the other end of the line.”...

The English historian Lord Acton once said, “Mastery is acquired by resolved limitation.” It is the man who, like the Apostle Paul says, “This one thing I do” who succeeds. This is the key to success in sports. Ben Hogan was one of golf’s immortals, but he did not become great by accident. He did it by resolved limitation. Jimmy Demaret...

Why do people suffer, especially good people? Why do evil people prosper? These questions are as old as humankind but as current as today. Is there any answer to them? The explanation of the prosperity of the wicked is easy. It is due to the indiscriminate love of God. He loves all people, even those who hate him and he bestows his blessings on all people alike. (Mat...

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...

Victor Frankl, the Swiss psychiatrist and author, said that the primary motivating force in life was not a quest for power but a quest for meaning. Noted philosopher Albert Camus said, “Here is what frightens me. To see the sense of this life dissipated. To see our reason for existence disappear. That is what intolerable. Man cannot live without meaning.”&...