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Mike Harmon cannot tell you how he lost his willpower, but he is certain that it is gone. On a recent Thursday night, sitting in a grungy recliner at the Stop Smoking Hypnosis Clinic of Baltimore County, the middle-aged man shrugs his shoulders. "I don't have it anymore," he says. "It's gone." Neecy…

We are looking this morning at the second sign of the cross. Last week we spoke of Baptism. This week, we will talk about Communion. At least that’s what we Baptists call it. If you were from another denomination, you might call it “The Lord’s Table,” or “The Eucharist.” Regardless of the title, I bet…

In 1863, during the Civil War, General "Stonewall" Jackson was accidentally shot by his own troops in 1863. His body was laid in the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, for two days before his funeral at his home Presbyterian Church in Lexington. Tens of thousands of mourning Confederate people crowded into…

Genelle Guzman McMillan was the last person to be rescued from Ground Zero alive. She had been trapped in the rubble of what remained of the Twin Towers for 27 hours when at last fire fighters heard her calling and pulled her out. This 30-year-old single mother had only been on the job as a Port Authority…

One of my best friends from my childhood illustrates this so well. We sort of grew up together. He was a couple of years older than me, but I spent a lot of time at his house, especially on Sunday afternoons. It was the highlight of my life to be able to go out to his house for Sunday dinner, then an…

[In an article for Decision magazine], Samuel Kamaleson illustrates [the difficulty of submission] through a Christian folk story from South India. There are several versions of it, but here it opens with a young boy who loved to play marbles. He regularly walked through his neighborhood with a pocketful…

Conrad and Felix liked Ulrich. When Ulrich Zwingli led the reformation in Switzerland, his absolute commitment to the authority of scripture attracted Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz to support him. They went a little further than Zwingli went, however. When they read about the early church they noted the…

Your feelings can really deceive and endanger you. Consider what happened to the children of Barneveld Holland. They were playing in the town when they discovered an object they’d never really seen before. They tossed it around in some kind of game. It was so much fun that they returned to play with…

David Livingstone was eager to travel into the uncharted lands of Central Africa to preach the gospel. On one occasion, the famous nineteenth-century missionary and explorer arrived at the edge of a large territory that was ruled by a tribal chieftain. According to tradition, the chief would come out…

I read of one person’s visit to Rwanda. Rwanda is the country in which so many people have recently been killed over religion. When this person went, they said they went looking for monsters. Not the kind that devours New York City in some “b” movie. They said that they had begun to imagine, after hearing…

He was kind of like Paul Vischer. Paul is the co-creator of these characters you see on the screen. If you don’t know who they are, I guarantee you, your kids do. It’s the Veggie Tales. Paul, the creator of these characters, was deeply disappointed some time ago. While nutritionists tell you that you…

Because Ethiopian Christians faithfully ministered to a convicted murderer in jail, God brought salvation to Mohammed Ahmed, who was convicted of killing an evangelist named Tulu on February 2, 2005…. Tulu was the fifth eldest child of eight, but suffered from an unidentified disease that made him physically…

English author H. G. Wells, famous for science fiction novels like The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, once wrote a short story called "The Country of the Blind." It's about an inaccessible, luxurious valley in Ecuador where, due to a strange disease, everyone is blind. After…

If you go to the right website on the internet you can see an amazing video. You see a smoky scene. A building is on fire. There on the ground you see a group of people looking up the side of a building gesturing to someone above who is out of the picture. All of a sudden you see the group rush towards…

And many have tried the “sign” route to faith, only to be disappointed. Oliver Sacks did. He is an author and a Neurologist. He writes of his own religious experience: There had been some religious feeling, of a childish sort, in the years before the war. When my mother lit the Sabbath candles, I would…

Frederick Douglass grew up as a slave in Maryland in the early nineteenth century. For Frederick, slavery was brutal. He was taken from his mother when he was only a baby. For years as a child, his owner would dump runny corn meal in something like a pig trough, then call all the slave children to come…

Pastor Steve Yeschek, Crystal Lake, Illinois, lost his sister, Judy, after a five-year battle with cancer. She was a woman who, as Steve described her, was a party animal—a big drinker with a self-contented lifestyle. She was someone everybody loved, because she exuded excitement and a thrill for life.…

And I tell you, man doesn’t like that! He will go to any lengths to resist that! It was John Lennon who wrote: Imagine there's no Heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or…

On that tragic morning of September 11, 2001, The Brooklyn Tabernacle lost four of its members. One victim was a police officer. The officer's funeral was held at the church building, and Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, had been asked to share a few thoughts. In his book You Were Made for…

And His sacrifice was a suffering sacrifice. Notice He says, “This is my body which was broken for you.” A medical doctor, Truman Davis, contemplated the cross to determine what it was that caused Christ to die. Here’s what he wrote about the suffering of Christ: The preliminary scourging was done with…

Dallas Willard writes about a 2-and-a-half-year-old girl in her backyard who one day discovered the secret to making mud (which she called "warm chocolate"). Her grandmother had been reading and was facing away from the action, but after cleaning up what was to her a mess, she told little Larissa not…

One of the first public acts of our new president was his appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast just a few weeks ago. While other less conservative politicians have seemed uncomfortable in such arenas, President Obama seems to be right at home. He used the occasion to declare that one’s faith should…

There are some secular organizations that are just giving up. They are charged to help people out of bondage, but, apart from the gospel, they are finding it impossible, so they are just giving up. That’s what Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Services Center is doing. It's spending $11 million on permanent…

A little boy named Austin wasn’t ashamed. In the fall of 2005, 9-year-old Austin had his tonsils removed. Before the surgery, an anesthesiologist came in to start an IV. He was wearing a cool surgical cap covered in colorful frogs. Austin loved that "frog hat." When the doctor started to leave, Austin…

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson marvels at what makes up human life: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist. To make a protein you need…