A couple of days before I left Indonesia for America, my mother threw a farewell party for me.  Present among the guests were two missionaries. After giving his message, my pastor turned to the missionaries and asked if they had a message for me.  One of them, who happened to be a Baptist ...

We all know that money or prosperity is powerful, so powerful that Jesus equated it with Mammon, a prosperity god, and warned His disciples that they could not serve God and Money (Matt 6:24).  It wouldn’t work!  They could only serve one or the other.  C. S. Lewis explains, “Pros...

Firstly, thank you for your prayers for my mother and me.  By the grace of God, she can now walk with assistance.  If God’s willing, she will be on her way to full recovery.  And by the grace of God my trip went well, too; I was healthy and able to accomplish what I had […]...

2 possible results of challenging times Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, keep in mind, bad things happen to all people. Depending upon where we are in our relationship with God, it’s during those times that we typically either move closer to God, or further away from God. Keeping the...

In his devotional, Victorious Living, E. Stanley Jones quotes the words of someone who said that in the field of music, “pauses are music in the making.” We know that songs have pauses; we can’t sing from beginning to end without pauses. But pauses are not only for us to take a breath; it is [...

These past several weeks have been difficult for us as a church. We have lost three dear members: Tante Gwie, Tante Agnes, and Tante Daisy. We know that they are now in their True Home, but we still miss them. You see, death is always personal because each person is always somebody’s mother or fat...

One day a young football coach came to visit John Wooden, UCLA’s basketball coach, whose team won 10 national championships in a 12-year period. Seeing his downcast face, Coach Wooden asked him, what’s troubling him. This young coach, then, shared that he had just lost two of his good players to...

One of the men that God has used to bless me through their books is Bill Johnson, pastor of Bethel Church, Redding.  You may not know him, but you may have sung songs that came out of Bethel Music, one of them is Goodness of God.  Bill just lost his beloved wife, Beni, co-pastor of […]...

A seminary student once asked Eugene Peterson what he liked best about being a pastor.  He replied, “The mess.”  Personally, I would use the word, “The unpredictability.” We will never know what will happen tomorrow.  Somebody, who is healthy today, may get sick tomorrow and s...

Being reduced to a smaller scale—especially to nothing— is not easy to adjust and to accept.  When I asked a friend in ministry who is now retired how he was doing, he thought for a moment before giving me his answer, “I keep reminding myself that I am retired.”  I knew what he mea...