The Dollar God A missionary in Africa had been witnessing faithfully to a certain individual. Following their conversation one day the unconverted man placed a small statue and a silver coin on the table before him. Then he took two slips of paper and wrote something on each. Putting one beside the

Helen Keller once said, "With the death of every friend I love…a part of me has been buried…but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world."    

C.S. Lewis wrote, "Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your money and so much of your work -- I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and there; I want to have the whole tree down. I

Some years ago a young man approached the foreman of a logging crew and asked for a job. "That depends," replied the foreman. "Let's see you fell this tree." The young man stepped forward and skillfully felled a great tree. Impressed, the foreman exclaimed, "Start Monday!" Monday, Tuesday, Wed

Steve Brown recently observed, "Church becomes the place where a nice, pleasant, bland person stands in front of other nice, pleasant, bland people urging them to be nicer, more pleasant and more bland. Jesus didn't die to create nice, pleasant, bland people. He died so that sinners would find grace

The Great Depression hit Mr. J. C. Penney particularly hard, endangering his very health. Anxious and desperate because of huge financial losses, he felt he had nothing to live for. Even his family and friends shunned him. In the hospital one night, he grew so demoralized he expected to die before m

Spiritual Multiplication Unfortunately most Christians are sterile. That is to say they never reproduce themselves, when God has clearly commanded us to make disciples not just decisions. Consider this: The total offspring of a single pair of flies, if they survived to the end of summer, would

As frightening and foreboding as death may seem, it can neither hurt nor destroy the child of God. In his book Facing Death, Billy Graham relates an experience of Donald Grey Barnhouse, one of America's leading Bible teachers in the first half of the 20th century. Cancer took his first wife, leavin

In Anaheim, California is a piece of property that is nothing short of remarkable. Fifty years ago not a person alive would have ever dreamed that millions of folks from around the world would come and visit that piece of property. But one dreamer, way ahead of his time, shocked his board and a few

On one occasion Michelangelo turned to his fellow artists and said with frustration in his voice, "Why do you keep filling gallery after gallery with endless pictures on the one theme of Christ in weakness, Christ on the cross, and most of all, Christ hanging dead?" he asked. "Why do you concent