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Wednesday, September 16, 2015

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She was only one woman; an inmate on Death Row. And she became the center of a public opinion hurricane. Karla Faye Tucker was her name. She was convicted of a brutal pickax murder in Texas, sentenced to die, on Death Row for almost 14 years. Reporters from across the country and around the world descended on Huntsville, Texas in the days and weeks before her scheduled execution. And millions of us actually heard Karla Faye speak for herself as she explained the dramatic change that had taken place in her life. Karla Faye explained that she had trusted Jesus Christ to be her Savior, believing that the sin He died to forgive covered even the heinous things she had done. The way she lived in prison, the way she seemed to speak from deep in her heart lent credibility to the story of the rebirth that she told about.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

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I hope your world map, if you have one, is one you bought recently. Because the map is changing so rapidly! I remember when our daughter went on a Gospel music team a few years go - some years ago now - to Estonia, right after the breakup of the Soviet Republic. We didn't know a lot about it then. But it was one of the Baltic Republics that had become part of the Soviet Union and now was part of a great independents movement within the Soviet Union and then a country of their own. Well, then we were hearing about Estonians, and Latvians, and Lithuanians, and Palestinians, and Armenians, because the world isn't necessarily being defined any more by those national boundaries that somebody set up after a war sometime. The world is having an ethnic explosion! It's supposed to.

Monday, September 14, 2015

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I've lived long enough to see a lot of crashes. Not cars or planes - people. Actually, we see it in the news all too often don't we? Sometimes it happens to our teams that we root for. My football team, for example in the NFL went one year from the Super Bowl to a very embarrassing losing season. They had been at the top of the heap and they ended up at the bottom the next year. But we've watched heroes crash haven't we; pastors, Christian leaders, politicians, judges, athletes? We see it all the time. In fact, maybe you've heard some crashes in your own life.

Friday, September 11, 2015

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Well, depending on what generation you might be from, there's a bunch of us who would have never imagined we'd get a telephone call from a computer. But here we are, and we've all at one time or another answered a call and there was a computer on the other end. But it's really not a meaningful communication experience. The computer does all the talking. You ever tried to say, "Hello! Hello! Who is this?" There's no answer. Don't even try to talk to that computer caller. He only does one-way communication. You know that God gets a lot of calls like that?

Thursday, September 10, 2015

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I was a pretty little guy, and my dad thought I should meet Paul Bunyan. You know, the legendary giant lumberjack. We were vacationing in Minnesota and there was this tourist attraction there, in Brainerd. Inside was this huge animated figure of Paul Bunyan. I mean, he's massive! He's sitting down with his giant ax and his giant ox next to him and a little log cabin at his feet. My dad paid for our tickets and I walked in unsuspectingly, and suddenly Paul's voice boomed out across the park, "Hellooo, Ronnie!" Man, you talk about unsettling! This guy knew my name. It took me a lot more birthdays to figure out that the man at the ticket booth had gotten my name from my Dad and then relayed it to the Paul guy in the cabin. Yeah, he was hiding in the little log cabin.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

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Well, with a whole lot of people who want to be President of the United States in an upcoming election, I was looking back at something that happened years ago. Actually it was the 1996 election, and a very interesting issue arose. It was called character. At least the Republicans tried to make that the issue of the campaign - the President's character. They thought they had enough troubling questions about the Democratic leadership that character questions could help turn the tide in the race. Well, to the surprise of many commentators, it was not an issue that many Americans consider decisive. In fact, during the campaign, here is what a front page article in a major news paper had to say about the "Character Counts Campaign". They said, "The message voters are sending back is that they don't care." Interesting! I think that's true many times when there's a fall in church leadership, or when there's a problem with a presidential or congressional candidate, or a governor candidate. Voters kind of go, "It's the performance that gets our vote, not character." Well, not everyone votes that way.

Monday, September 7, 2015

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It was Fall, and my wife and I were making our annual pilgrimage to go "Falling" in northwest New Jersey. We had our cider, we had our donuts and our eyes were filled with God's great autumn art show. We were headed home, and of course, I wanted to make the return trip as short as possible. That's why I wasn't very thrilled when I crested the hill and saw this long traffic jam. What is this bumper-to-bumper stuff doing in my country paradise?

Friday, September 4, 2015

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We had this van. It was a great van. It got us where we needed to go. It had been a reliable vehicle until this one trip. The van decided to take up heavy smoking. We had just arrived in this town where we would be staying, and suddenly the van began to smoke! Some good friends of ours directed us to a mechanic that we could trust. And he gave us the exciting news that our engine had blown and we needed to replace it. Well, after investigating all our options, we decided that those dollars would do more repairing our vehicle than replacing it, except we didn't have any dollars to put toward it.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

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It's been over 100 years, but there's something about the sinking of the Titanic that fascinates us. The latest evidence, newly unearthed photographs and stories, the incredible success of the blockbuster movie, "Titanic". I mean, they've kind of refocused us on it. I've always found the story of the last hours of this supposedly unsinkable ship to be a haunting story. The people on the Titanic represented just about all the kinds of people that there are. Then I start thinking about how most of them died. At best, only a few hundred of them got into lifeboats. Many more of them went down with the ship only wearing life jackets. And, you know, there were different ways people handled those terrifying hours on that sinking ship, and it tells us a lot about what we're really like.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

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If you've been to Disneyland or Disney World, you've probably experienced an attraction called Small World. You get in this little boat and you're propelled along this winding canal where you're surrounded by animated dolls from every conceivable area of the world. They're all children: French children, Eskimo children, Arab children, Indian children, American children, children from Mexico. You get the idea. And these animated children are singing to you It's a Small World After All. Don't you want to sing it with me? I'm not going to. You say, "Ron, those lyrics are monotonous." You're right! You hear it about fifty times! It's really cute when they first start singing. And those songs are okay for a little while. But by the time you hear it over and over, you're sick and tired of a small, small world.

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