7 A’s of Confession

Living at peace with God, ourselves, and others is essential for our witness for Christ.  Everything God does He does in love. He is always working things out for the good.  Even in the midst of conflict, if we allow Him to, He will work things out for our good.  Acts...

How the Gospel Changes Everything

I will never forget the first time I took a team to Santo Thomas, Nicaragua. We had an amazing medical team, lots of medicine to help the people, and a great VBS team with all the supplies. Everything was pretty perfect. We were the first team to ever go into this...

Stewardship Matters

In the mid-’90s, Paul Powell of the Annuity Board of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a book titled “Taking the Stew Out of Stewardship.” While the book was well circulated, many pastors still find themselves in a “stew” regarding teaching and preaching about...

How to SERVE People

In the book Discovering Relational Wisdom by Ken Sande we are called to serve by living the Acronym SERVE  S is for SMILE. E is for explore and empathize R is for Reconcile V is for Value E is for encourage. We are called to put wind under the wings of every person we...

Send One.

The past year my wife Vanda and I have had the blessing to attend and speak at churches across our great state. Although the churches varied in size, location, rural, or city there was one theme that we would hear at each church over and over again before we headed...

Disruption

I don’t know a person that enjoys being disrupted. I’m not talking about when we speak (although that is annoying), I’m talking about our daily lives, our routines, what we do day to day. We work really hard at keeping our lives as normal as possible and that is a...

The Four G’s of Peacemaking

We live in a world of conflict.  It is on the news every day, nations in conflict with other nations and neighbors living in conflict with each other.  We find conflict in or own families.  We even find conflict within our churches.  Everywhere you turn you find...

Our Greatest Adventure Awaits

If we are honest, I think the majority of us would say we are bored. Not that we don’t have enough to do because we are busy people, but maybe discontent. Maybe it’s the question “what am I doing with my life?” Or, “there has to be more?”  Deep in each of us is the...

A Student like Addi

They call her Addi for short, probably only about 5.1, she can’t weigh more than 100 pounds. Always smiling, humble spirit, she loves people around her well, and she brightens the room because Jesus shines so brightly out of her. She has grown up in the community of...

How to READ Your Emotions

One of the most important things we did as young children was learning to read. We would be severely handicapped if we had never learned to read.  So many things we enjoy doing today we would not be able to do if we had not learned to read words.  Think about it. In...