The quote in memorable; I do not know when I first heard it, but I have long remembered it. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” My version is shorter, “Family is where they have to take you in.” Unfortunately, in today’s world, …
Monthly Archives: June 2012
Psalm 5: A Morning Prayer
Psalm 5 is known as a morning prayer, perhaps associated with the morning sacrifice in Israel, but also a call for God’s help in the face of false rumors and accusations, implications and innuendos. A part of the Psalm says, “In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my …
Baxter Campaign
As students at Baxter Institute study the Bible, ministry and missions, and related subjects, they spend a lot of time in the classroom and in doing homework. They earn almost 200 semester hours of credits over four years of residential studies. (A semester hour generally includes about 15 hours of classroom seat time and 15-30 …
Greetings in the Lord!
On a recent trip to Honduras, while I was with a group in the Tegucigalpa airport I saw and greeted about a dozen people I have known through my years of work and visits to Honduras. One of the group members expressed her surprise that I could be in an airport in a major city …
Mission Honduras: Final Report
Today is Day 8–travel day to the US. After a full and productive week in Honduras, this is a day of anticipation as we look forward to returning home to routines and family, but also a day of sadness as we leave people we have learned to love in the Lord. The day we arrived …
Mission Honduras: June 2012
The mission group I am with has been here five days. We arrived last Thursday and attended mid-week Bible study at Los Pinos that evening. The building was comfortably filled. Friday and Saturday were work days at the church building, including lots of fix-up, clean-up, repainting metal windows and doors and also repainting the structure …
Worth Sharing: Psalm 23 Paraphrased
[Note: I received this in an email. The author is unknown to me. I thought it worth sharing.] I am your shepherd. You will never have need of anything that I want for you. If you will trust me, and really allow me to be the shepherd of your life, I will give to you …
Francis Shaeffer on “Doctrine”
(Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of the Christian, Downers Grove: IVP, 1970, p. 16) “The church is to judge whether a man is a Christian on the basis of his doctrine, the propositional content of his faith. When a man comes before a local church that is doing its job, he will be quizzed on the …
Analyzing our “Baggage”
Any time one comes to a study or discussion of the Bible, one brings “baggage.” No one begins with a perfectly clean slate. We must be honest about our preconceptions, traditions, pre-understandings. This article suggests five possible pieces of baggage–reactionism, separatism, legalism, misunderstanding how the Bible communicates, and of more recent vintage, increasing indifference to …
Restoring What?
“In every church, in every institution, there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence.” (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 94). If Lewis is right, we would do well to ask ourselves afresh why the church came into existence, how the current …