Bible at Home

Ripe Harvest I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for a harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life. . . (John 4:35-36) Once I asked a class if they believed that the “fields” are still “ripe unto harvest.”…

The Christian holidays bring us busyness unlike any other in the year. It’s as if we know that we need to get on a train to a new destination in our relationship with God, and so we hurry to the station, but when we arrive, there are so many distractions, that we could even miss…

Nell, a Christian friend of mine who had many times been on mission trips, especially to disaster areas, once said to me that she knew that God had forgiven her for her past, before she had been a believer, but she knew that she had sometimes sinned against God Himself, and so she could not…

During my growing up years, our grandmother lived with us periodically. She always tried to make herself useful, but we really loved her for her stories, and some of her most endearing gifts were the cookies she baked in the afternoon just before we came home from school. When my brother and sisters and I…

When I first read in the book of Hebrews that “The law made nothing perfect, and a better hope is introduced.” (Hebrews 7:19), I wondered how “Hope” could in any way be “better. Does “hope” come in “good,” “ better,” and “best”? Is “hope” even measurable at all? But when I read on about the…

The first time that I can remember ever being really, really thirsty was in a gym class in seventh grade. We had had a “work out” involving apparatus and mats, and finally a “few” laps around the gym. We were all sitting on the floor around the gym teacher, and to this day I have…

My great aunt, Vina Fish, once owned and operated a Tea House on main street in a small farming town in upstate New York. At one time or another, virtually all of the women of the family, cousins of mine, as well as my grandmother and my mother, all worked at the Tea House. People…

Katrina was a pre-teen girl living in a Russian orphanage when she was adopted by an American family. They had one daughter, and wanted another for companionship. When they met Katrina, she was bald; her head had been shaved, the cure for lice in the orphanage. Katrina was relieved to know that she would have…

Two of the United States’ founding fathers went together on a vacation tour of England while they wee stationed there on U.S. Government assignments in 1786. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both enjoyed gardening and farming, as well as both being fans of Shakespeare, and so they stopped at Stratford- upon- Avon to visit Shakespeare’s…

At a time when Israel had fallen almost hopelessly away from their God, Jeremiah spoke God’s words to them: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom, or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding…