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Imagine you were to build a house. Hopefully, you would first think it out. Then you would set a foundation and erect the building. When you were done you would have an empty building with rooms or chambers inside. Next, you would fill those rooms. “Through wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.” (Proverb 24:3-4) Our foundation as Christians is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is VERY important that our foundation be Jesus and nothing else. I know that when I was born again the faith of the man who led me to Him basically became my own faith. Or, better put, my brand new faith was overlain with his fa

His name was not Dan, but for the sake of confidentiality it will be for this article. Dan was barely 55 years old and he had been sick for the previous 5 years. Just before I met him he had come to the realization that he would die soon, the consequence for living a hard drinking, heavy smoking, “everything to excess” life. Dan held the dubious distinction of having had the most drunken single vehicle car wrecks on a local stretch of highway…without dying. First responders would approach the smoking remains of his wrecks and, recognizing it was him, would greet him with an enthusiastic “Hey Dan! You made it again!” But, when I met him, the hard living had caught up with him and he wouldn’t

I am helping to write an epistle. It’s called the Epistle of Mike. The word “epistle” means “a written message” and is often found in the form of a letter. Sometimes an epistle is identified in terms of the person who wrote it as in the epistles of James, John, Peter and Jude. Others are named in terms of the recipients of the letter as in Paul’s epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians or individuals like Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. There is a third sort of epistle mentioned in the Bible. I’ll use the NASB here because it uses the more familiar word “letters” instead of “epistles”. In speaking to the Corinthians about whether or not he and his team needed letters of recommendati

Roll Up Your Mat “And Peter said to him, ‘Aeneas, Jesus the Christ heals you. Arise and make your bed.’ Then he arose immediately.” (Acts 9:34) Aeneas obeyed the Lord through Peter. Why did Jesus, through Peter, tell him to pick up his bed? The Lord didn’t want him to be lying back on it because he no longer needed it as his workplace. There is something for us here. A beggar’s mat is a symbol; it is his mark that identifies him as a paralytic. Truly, who else in the marketplace has a bed with him? Only the lame do. Jesus tells him to get up off his old identity and roll it up and put it away. In the same way, Jesus met us somewhere. (I think He does this for us repeatedly.) He addresses thi

“Then the churches throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and were edified. And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, they were multiplied.” (Acts 9:31) The churches, referring to the ONE body in each town (because they didn't have over 150 separate and competing Christian groups like we do in our little sparsely populated county) had peace. In other words, THE Church in Judea, Galilee and Samaria was not splintered by people like it is here where I live…and is pretty much all over the world now. The term “had peace” doesn’t mean they weren’t actively or in stealth warring with one another or that they weren’t all having a VBS the same week of t