Bible at Home

We moved into the house that we now occupy on the 8th of December, eleven years ago. It was a frantic sort of Christmas but blessed with children and grandchildren. By Christmas we had met only one neighbor, the very nice man who lived next door. One day, about two days before Christmas I was…

My mother measured a good time by the amount of laughter it produced. When she came home with my father from an evening with friends she might say, “Laugh!” I thought I’d die!” Then my sisters and brother knew that she had had a really good time. It happened most often when she spent time…

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 39) St. Paul, a…

The promise that God gave to Nathan , David’s personal prophet, was a whopper.: “The Lord declares to you that the Lord Himself will establish a house for you. . .’ I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, your own flesh and blood,. . . and I will establish the throne of his…

“If you once get to nature’s God, and believe Him and love Him, it is surprising how easy it is to hear music in the waves, and songs in the wild whisperings of the winds, to see God everywhere, in the stones, in the rocks, in the rippling brooks, and to hear Him everywhere, in…

When you’re old enough to think about human nature, and to wonder about cause and effect, you discover in the Bible some behaviors that could be described as most unlikely. For instance, it was cause and effect that Lot’s wife would turn into a pillar of salt, as she did the very natural thing of…

There was a patch of wild forget-me-nots on the bank of a creek that formed the border of our back yard when I was growing up. It must have been my mother who told me the name of the pretty little blue flowers, and it always interested me. I tried to imagine how they got…

If the Gospel of Jesus could be condensed into one sentence, it would be by someone who never knew Jesus or ever heard him speak. It would be the Prophet Isaiah, speaking God’s own words to the Hebrew people in chapter 43, verse 25: “I even I, am He who blots out your transgressions, for…

A turning point in my faith occurred when I read the words in Nehemiah 8, “The joy of the Lord is your strength,” not for the first time, but with the first listening ears to hear the meaning of the words. Previously I had tucked these words into a category of pretty expressions. One day…

Charles Spurgeon was a famous Baptist minister in England at the end of the 19th century. His sermons appeared in American newspapers the week he delivered them in England. I once worshiped in a Methodist church where the pastor’s brother and father, both Methodist ministers, were named “Spurgeon.” He is still quoted in many denominations,…