Making Life Work

By: John Klassek

    We had almost finished dinner at the restaurant when a man in a black suit approached us and asked whether he could perform a few magic tricks for us. I politely declined his offer.

    He then quite happily made his way to the next table. I couldn’t help but to curiously watch him ply his tricks there, and what he did was quite amazing. He threw a red ball into the air and it simply disappeared! The look of surprise and fascination was evident on the faces of everyone seated at that table. “Is seeing believing?” I wondered.

    A friend of mine once lamented that he had never seen any miracles in his life. He implied that our belief in what really matters might be enhanced by being witness to some supernatural...

By: Hugh Buchanan

    It was on a stiflingly hot day in July that Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain found himself on a wooded hillside in Southern Pennsylvania. Positioned there by his superior officer with 300 men, the remnant of the 20th Maine Regiment, his task was to defend Little Round Top, a small hill that protected the left flank of the Army of the Potomac. To lose this ground would mean the loss of the battle, loss of the army, the loss of the war, the loss of the Union. It was the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War.

    He took stock of his assets and liabilities. The 20th Maine held the superior position. Chamberlain’s men were experienced war veterans and were committed to their cause. On the other hand,...

An Excerpt from The Thread: God's Appointments with History

By: Ronald L. Dart

    One of the great losses to the nominal Christian faith was the abandonment of the holydays of the Bible, their dismissal as merely “Jewish” institutions. And surely, one of the greatest of the Christian holydays is Pentecost, because it was on this day that the church was empowered to do its work. Some even call Pentecost the birthday of the church.

    But on that first Pentecost of the New Testament church, no one even thought of abandoning this festival. They were too high with the experience. Imagine yourself sitting in a room with 120 of the first disciples of Jesus. You have been...

From the Program Notes of Ronald L. Dart

    When you hear the word “Pentecost” do you automatically relate it to what happens among charismatic Christian groups today? Pentecost is actually older than the New Testament church. Considering the significance of what happened on this day, it’s astonishing that so many Christian churches know so little about this most important day, and so few even keep it or take note of it.

    Let’s consider one statement from the Book of Acts. “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they [Jesus’s disciples] were all with one accord in one place” (Acts 2:1). But to do what? It is beyond dispute that they were there to observe the Feast of Pentecost. These were all Israelites. So, the disciples had observed...

By: Ronald L. Dart

Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. "For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:4-5 NKJV)

    It must have been a hard decision for God to make. I don't mean to suggest that anything is really hard for God, but the decision had consequences that even God could not have treated lightly. The decision to put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden had consequences for all of history. By putting that tree there, God effectively created a gate out of the Garden of Eden. He gave man a choice about the kind of a world that he would live in. If Paradise became boring for man, he had an alternative.

By: Ronald L. Dart

"Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from you own steadfastness."

By: Ronald L. Dart

    Is there really an ever–burning hell where sinners are tormented with fire and brimstone throughout all eternity? Is it only for the very wicked? What about the “unsaved”? The Bible tells us there is only one name given in heaven and earth whereby we must be saved–the name of Jesus. What about all those who have never heard that name? Do they go immediately to the torments of a fiery hell at death? What about babies and little children? Surely they don’t go to hell? Churches have an astonishing variety of answers to these questions, but what does the Bible say? How can we really know the truth?

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” intoned the preacher, “the saved and the lost. There is no middle ground with God.”

    Now there is a sobering thought. If indeed there are only two kinds of people in the world, and if I am “people,” I must be either saved or lost. And if I’m not consciously aware of having been saved, then I must be lost. And if I’m lost...

By: Linda G. Gallia

    I received a prayer message from a friend the other day. It was one of those sweet emails meant to give encouragement and make people feel good. It said: "GOD OUR FATHER, WALK THROUGH MY HOUSE AND TAKE AWAY ALL MY WORRIES AND ILLNESSES; AND PLEASE WATCH OVER AND HEAL MY FAMILY. IN JESUS’ NAME. AMEN. This prayer is so powerful. Pass this prayer to 12 people including me."

    I sat for a few moments, gathering my thoughts about why this particular little prayer disturbed me. My concern is that prayers such as these might cause us to believe things about God that could actually hurt us. When people ask God to take away all their worries, illnesses, and trials, and it doesn’t happen, they often lose faith in God. I realized...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Peter was free! The jails doors swung open and he walked right past the guards, out the gates, and to the house of his friends, who had spent the entire night in prayer for this very thing! (Acts 12:1-13) And yet this episode is anything but a shining example of faithful prayer.

    James tells us that the "effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much", and he tells us to pray "nothing wavering", that to waver is to be tossed about the sea, and in such a case we should expect nothing from the Lord (James 5:16, 1:6-7).

    But God in his mercy and love often answers prayers even when we do waver. God sprang Peter from prison by an unassailable miracle in answer to the fervent prayers of the brethren. Even...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    My daughter recently sent me on a rare but rewarding foray into the world of fiction.  The book is The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.   The Hosseini family was granted political asylum in the United States in 1980 after fleeing their native Afghanistan.  Dr. Hosseini’s novel betrays an evident love of his native land, and while the book is fiction, it certainly reflects something of what Hosseini recalls about being a boy in Afghanistan during the upheavals of his youth.

    This is a book about Afghanistan, both warts and diamonds, as much as it is about a young man coming of age.  If you want some insight into Afghanistan and the Afghani way of thinking (and you should), then read this book.   Insights abound, and...

By: Ron Saladin

    I was on my way home from work when I got the page—911. I hurriedly dialed home to hear that five year-old Christopher had a bad puncture wound under his left jaw. He had catapulted off his bicycle into the edge of a log. Lots of blood. I hurriedly asked if he was breathing okay; the answer was yes. I was 30 minutes away.

    When I arrived, I looked at the wound. It was bleeding more from the inside than the outside. My wife, Cynthia, had rolled up a cloth and put it into Christopher’s mouth to absorb some of the seeping blood. The wound looked odd—smooth tissue, almost like the inside tissue of a cheek. We were off to the emergency room at St. John’s in Washington, MO.

    The doctor suspected a broken jaw, and...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Odd as this will sound,  what I am about to tell you is true.  I once fell asleep during my own sermon!  It might be hard to believe (unless you have heard me speak), but this really happened.  Read on, lest you think I am spinning you.

    No one knew that I had fallen asleep at such a time until I told people about it, and then it seemed totally in character.  While speaking, I noticed that the audience was generally losing interest in my remarks, and several had eyelids that seemed unusually heavy.  Some time before our church had begun recording sermons, giving the speaker a copy for purposes of self-evaluation.  I listened to myself a few days later, and ten minutes into it I discovered that my sermon was a great...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Job had lost it all and he knew it, but one thing he never lost was his faith that God is in charge.  He might not have agreed with the way God was doing things, let alone understand them, but he at least knew that God knew.

    Eventually, God blessed Job for a second time.  But before God restored him, the scripture tells us that first Job did something.  Job 42:10:  “And the Lord restored Job’s losses when he prayed for his friends.”  Listen to what this says:  When Job prayed for his friends, God restored Job’s losses.  And he didn’t restore Job’s losses until he had prayed for his friends. 

    I’m not sure we completely grasp the implications of this, but James in his epistle provides a clue.  In James 5:11...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  (James 1:27 NIV)



    Some months ago I wrote an article for this column entitled The Gift of George Bailey.  It was a reference to one of my favorite films, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.  Capra succeeds in reminding each one of us that we all have a part in God's plan whether we see it or not.  The seemingly small things we do daily can have a larger impact than we can imagine, and the world would be a lesser place if we had never been born.

    That story of encouragement is a good one to recall from time to time, for...

By: Lenny Cacchio

The people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery, and mistreated the poor and needy; and they wrongfully oppress the stranger. So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one. (Ezekiel 22:29-30 NKJV)

Then said I, Here am I; send me. (Isaiah 6:8)

In a recent sermon a reference was made to Ezekiel 22:29-30, followed by the lamentation that in our land today there is no one standing in the gap, no one to repair the walls of morality. It’s a point well-taken, and it should have been a point of challenge for the thousand people who heard it. Would they be willing to stand in the gap, or were they...