Posts from July 2021

There was a single survivor of a shipwreck who was thrown upon an uninhabited island. After a while he managed to build a crude hut in which he placed the things he had salvaged from the sinking ship. He prayed to God for deliverance and anxiously scanned the horizon each day to hail any ship that might chance to pass by. One day, upon returning from a hunt for food, he was horrified to find his hut in flames. All…

There was an old preacher who loved his children dearly and longed for them to live right. As they grew older, he did not want to browbeat them or make them think he was always “preaching at them,” so he looked for a way to lovingly and gently encourage them. He came up with his own heartfelt catchphrase, “Whatever you do, don’t miss heaven!” As each child graduated and moved out of the house, he heartily urged, “Whatever you do,…

After the battles to conquer the promised land had been fought and won, Joshua gathered the people of Israel together at Shechem and addressed them (Josh. 24:1-2). During his discourse to them he admonished, “And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the river, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you…

The government recently calculated the cost of raising a child from birth to 18 and came up with $160,140 for a middle-income family. Talk about sticker shock! That doesn’t even touch college tuition. But $160,140 isn’t so bad if you break it down. It translates into $8,896.66 a year, $741.38 a month, or $171.08 week. That’s a mere $24.24 a day! Just over a dollar an hour. Still, you might think the best financial advice says do not have children…

How many times have you heard the statement, “Freedom isn’t free!”? It’s a statement meant to impress upon us the fact that the freedoms associated with living in this country, freedoms we hold so dear, did not come cheap. Those freedoms cost the dedication, commitment and a great many lives of people who went before us to secure and insure them, not only for themselves but also for all of us who have come along later. The freedoms we enjoy…