I am not bragging! I’m simply stating a fact. The reason I write about this today is to encourage you with my positive fasting experience. Fasting was taught and followed by the New Testament church—often for extended periods of time. Recently, I felt led to “water...
New Year's resolutions! If you make them, can you keep them? John always gets out his pencil and paper and starts jotting down those bad habits and little shortcomings with a determination that "this time I'm really going to keep my resolutions." His January diary...
There is this saying that “Christmas is the season of giving.” If I can have it my way, there should not be a season for this act. Every day should be a season of giving. I would probably take out the word “season” because it connotes a coming and going. Giving should...
It's December—the twelfth month of the Gregorian calendar. If you live in the northern hemisphere, Jupiter and Saturn are visible at dusk in the eastern sky, and in the southwest sky, a brilliant Venus soars from excellent to magnificent. On the 21st of this month,...
The parol is a unique Christmas symbol from the Philippines. It is a representation of the Star of Bethlehem that shone in the season of Jesus' birth and paved the way for the sages from the East to find Jesus! Traditionally, it is made out of bamboo and Japanese...
We live in a world that is fallen and under the rulership of the evil one, Lucifer. Evil is ever-present. It always has been. It is all around us. It influences us. And at times evil is within us because we live in a human body and a fallen world. The word evil is...
God wants to do something new in our lives! He tells us in Isaiah 43:19, “Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it?” Yet we must be careful not to block the blessings that He has in store for us. While the Israelites were...
Draw a line and then write four words from left to right: optimist, realist, skeptic, and cynic. In so doing you move from sunshine to partly cloudy, to the sodden gray sky, to near darkness. The young woman who is an optimist says, “Hey, there are lots of handsome...
Have you ever faced a situation when you absolutely felt like quitting? You gave it your best shot. You worked, you prayed, and you determined to make something happen; but just when you were ready to give up, someone came by and said something to you. And what they...
If your thinking stinks, your life will follow suit. "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." —Proverbs 23:7. Stinking thinking often leads to stinking living. In today's disrupting, ever-changing, and accelerating 21st Century world, being smart is not enough....