As we close out 2007, many will certainly be saying “good riddance!” to it. As someone once said, “Life is hard, and then you die.” As we recently heard in our Disaster Response training, the mortality rate still hovers somewhere around 100 percent, so basically we are all terminally ill. It is true that life is hard for everyone, but what are the alternatives?

    I’m not trying to end this year on the most depressing note I can think of, but what I am talking about should not be depressing. It is not that we have to die,...

The first principle in bearing fruit that remains, or building that which will remain, is in the Scripture we quoted last week from Ecclesiastes 3:14, “...everything God does will remain forever....” The Lord Jesus elaborated on this in John 15:1-5:
 

We have briefly studied three phases of development, maturity, and operations in the church. For the purpose of this study, “Taking the Land,” I would categorize them:

1) Taking the land
2) Occupying the land
3) Making the land fruitful

As the Coalition nations have found in Iraq, taking the land and occupying it are two different things. I do not fault the Bush Administration for this, as they had requested over 100 million dollars just to study this before the war, and it was cut from the appropriations bill by Congress. Therefore, they went in...

We can and will spend eternity getting to know the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and I don't think we will ever exhaust what can be learned. For all of the increase of knowledge that we have experienced on earth in the last century, one doctor told me that the most we know about the human body is maybe as much as 30 percent. When I asked him how much he thought psychiatrists knew about the mind, he estimated 5 percent. I think we know even less about the spirit of man. Yet, we are told in I...

Since the ascension of the Lord Jesus, He has been working through His body, the church, by the Holy Spirit. This is the new creation that greatly transcends the original creation. In the beginning, God walked with man, but now He comes to dwell in man. This is the greatest of all benefits of the New Covenant, and as Paul wrote in II Corinthians 3, it is better than what Moses had even though he had to put a veil over his face because of the glory. As Paul later wrote in Colossians 1:25-27: