Topic(s): Children, Father, Mother

God’s Little Devotional Book for Couples tells the story of a ten-year-old boy who lived in Abilene, Kansas at the turn of this century. On Halloween, his older brothers were heading out to go trick-or-treating, but he was not permitted to go. “You’re too young to go out,” his father told him. The boy burst into tears, ran into the yard, and began punching the trunk of an apple tree.

Moments later, his dad had him by the collar and he got a good tanning. Afterward, he was sent to bed. As he lay sobbing in his room, his mother came in to offer this advice from the Bible: “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city” (Proverbs 16:32).

Those words, coupled with the spanking, stuck with the boy. Sixty-six years later, General and President Dwight Eisenhower wrote of that childhood talk with his mother. Ike said, “I have always looked back on that conversation as one of the most valuable moments of life.”

Parents, spank your children when they need it (Proverbs 13:24). But make sure the spanking is controlled and is more than punishment. Make it a lesson in behavior that your child understands clearly. Make sure your son or daughter knows why you are spanking him or her, and what it is that you want them to learn from the experience. That lesson remains long after the pain of the spanking has been forgotten.

Congress Gives Away Bibles!

Topic(s): Bible Study

In 1777, our Continental Congress voted an expenditure of $300,000 (think how much that would be now!!) to buy and distribute Bibles throughout the country. By contrast, a few years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the Gideons could not even give away Bibles on public school property.

In this country, a rape, murder, or assault is committed every 2.5 minutes. More than 15 million copies of porn magazines are sold every month. Three billion copies of salacious literature are sold annually—enough to fill five buildings the size of the Empire State Building. Much of this ends up in the hands and minds of our youth. Too many marriages end in divorce. The annual profit to bookmakers and others on the receiving end of gambling is more than the combined profits of U.S. Steel, General Motors, and ninety-seven other large corporations. There are five million alcoholics in America. A leading group of educators in Alabama colleges (the conservative, Bible-belt South) estimated that 83 percent of their students had been sexually promiscuous.

Think of how things have changed since 1777! Maybe Congress ought to think about giving out some more Bibles.

“The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalm 9:17).

Finish Well to Win

Topic(s): Wisdom

Robert Clinton has done extensive research in the area of biblical leadership. He has determined that there are approximately three hundred leaders chronicled in the Bible. In 1990 he studied one hundred of the most prominent of them. To his dismay, he discovered that less than one in four of these leaders finished well. Leadership in any arena is difficult, but it is especially rough among spiritual leaders because of Satan’s attacks which accompany the job. The odds of finishing may be against those in ministry, but with God “all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). —Seven Habits of Effective Church Leaders

False Doctrine Stinks

Topic(s): Denominationalism, Jesus

Jemima Wilkinson was born in Rhode Island during 1752. Her Quaker parents provided a religious education, but she later became a religion unto herself. She was a very capable speaker who convinced a following of 250 people that she had been raised from the dead at age twenty. They thought she was the Messiah. At one point in her ministry she took her flock to a lake and begged the question, “Do you think I can walk on this water like Jesus did?” They affirmed she could, so the “spiritual leader” said, “Then there is no point in me doing it.” When she died in 1820, the sect followed her strict orders, “Don’t bury me, because God is going to raise me from the dead.” As Wilkinson’s body decomposed, her following died off as well. False gods give false hopes, but Jesus Christ is the Truth that can set you free.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” — John 14:6

Looking to Him

Topic(s): Jesus

A ninety-year-old man approached the preacher after worship. The man had been blind from birth and told the preacher he wanted to “see” him. He ran his fingers over the minister’s face, then began to cry. He asked, “When I open my eyes for the first time, you know who I will be looking at, don’t you?” The preacher said, “Yes, you will be looking at Jesus.” The man then cried out with joy, “It is worth being blind for ninety years to know that the first time I open my eyes, I will be looking at Jesus!" —Proclaim, July-Sept. 1994, p. 15