Sermons on Luke

Back in my youth ministry days I embraced a principle concerning teaching teens that I came across at a youth conference I attended in Nashville. It went like this: “Never TELL a young person something you can lead them to DISCOVER on their own.” And I have to say, that principle seemed to click with […]

The journey to the cross was indeed a “Day of Surprises,” as R. Kent Hughes called it. Jesus, in the midst of His suffering, continued to amaze; he left an example for us to follow. “It is finished,” but we are not.

The first time I flew on a commercial airplane was back in the early ‘70’s shortly after I graduated from high school. I flew from DC to Alabama to visit my grandmother. My parents took me to National Airport, which was much smaller back then.  They helped me check my luggage and saw me to […]

In her essay, An Expedition to the Pole, Annie Dillard describes the ill-fated Franklin expedition—an expedition in the mid 19th century that perished because its preparations were adapted to the posh conditions of the Royal navy officers’ clubs in England instead of the harsh realities of the Arctic. Here’s an excerpt from Dillard’s essay: “In […]

As I told you last week my undergraduate degree is from the University of North Alabama, a small school located in Florence, which is in the northwestern corner of that state. The Tennessee River flows right by the edge of town and during the four years I was there I participated in one of the […]

I preached my first “real” sermon at Leighton Baptist Church—in the fall of 1975. I was a junior at the University of North Alabama at the time and was on staff at Leighton. I was the “Associate Pastor in Charge of Music and Youth” — longest job title I’ve ever had. When people asked what […]

I remember my baptism. I was seven years old and the church my father was pastoring at the time was in Seaford, Delaware. It was a church plant—a new church start so we didn’t have a church building and met in the basement of a Walgreens Drug Store. Of course this meant we didn’t have […]

As I told you a while back, those two weeks last fall when we literally walked in Jesus’ steps during our visit to Israel…made me feel led to do a sermon series on the life of Christ. This morning we’re continuing that series. We started it with a four week study of Jesus’ birth during […]

Have you ever felt like you were STUCK in some grief—STUCK in some great sadness or fear? To be more specific, have you ever woken up the day after something bad happened in your life—and at first you FORGOT about that bad thing or you thought it was all just a dream—but then you came […]

These days one of the first thing a new company does once it is started is come up with a LOGO—some symbol that will become indelibly fixed in people’s minds. In fact, companies pay big money for a design team to develop the kind of logos that people will automatically associate it with their product. […]