CHRIST OUR REFUGE: “You have been…a refuge from the storm…” (Isa 25:4). The steamer Empire State scarcely caused a ripple that autumn evening. It was 10:30 pm. Most passengers had retired below deck when suddenly a deafening blast rocked the ship. A boiler had exploded! Panicking, everyone rushed toward the upper deck; the melee that […]
“I will pray to the Lord for you” (1 Sam 7:5). Howard Hendricks’ father was not saved. He had tried many times to share the gospel, but his father would reply, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll work it out with God.” One day a Christian in Detroit handed a cassette to Butch Hardman: “Here’s a […]
Charles Finney writes: “I once labored in a village in New York where Universalism prevailed. The leading man among them had a sick wife who sympathized with his views. I called to see her, and endeavored to expose the fallacy of her delusion. After I left, her husband returned, and his wife, her eyes being […]
Cinderella has nothing on Esther. This young woman will change the whole course of history! As the king scanned the bevy of beauties gathered for his appraisal at his winter palace in Shushan (Susa), one young lady stood out from the crowd. “Now the young woman pleased him, and she obtained his favor” (Est 2:9). What was […]
CHRIST STRONGER than the STRONG MAN: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own palace, his goods are in peace. But when a stronger than he comes upon him and overcomes him, he takes from him all his armor in which he trusted, and divides his spoils” (Lk 11:21-22). Is it true that one […]
“So we fasted and entreated our God for this, and He answered our prayer” (Ezra 8:23). What was the issue? Exposed to “the enemy” on the long journey from Babylon to Jerusalem, they humbled themselves before God “to seek from Him the right way for us and our little ones and all our possessions” (vv […]
The authors of the Epistles, writes J.B. Phillips, “had a tremendous sense of the overwhelming Moral Perfection of God. The insistence on the only safe approach to God being through Christ is due to this acute sense of the peril of a sinful being coming within range, as it were, of the blazing light and […]
Parties and drinking and divorce and beauty contests and murder plots and…God turned it to good? Seven days of partying, one drink-fueled whim, followed by one brash decision. “After these things, when the wrath of King Ahasuerus subsided, he remembered Vashti, what she had done, and what had been decreed against her” (Est 2:1). History is replete […]
CHRIST OUR FOUNDATION: “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). Sir William Dobbie was the heroic governor of Malta (biblical Melita, scene of Paul’s shipwreck) when, in 1940, it was bitterly besieged. But “the most bombed spot on earth” did not fall. He […]