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               This week I have been thinking about the number of sermons I have preached from the Berean pulpit. A conservative figure lands around six hundred considering the smaller numbers preached through the COVID years and the times of illness and mourning. While a number of sermons have similar themes, I am happy to say…

Continue Reading “It is better to trust in the Lord than put confidence in man.”

               Yesterday, I started my Saturday morning finishing details on the Sunday sermon and making sure the scripture readings for each part of the service were in order. I checked my weekly list to be sure I marked off all items and since I put in extra time earlier in the week, I finished ahead…

Continue Reading Scattered Saturday Thoughts

               Today I am closing in on the last sermon dealing with Scribal Scammers. As we have noted, I expanded the teachings of Mark 12:38-40 to give us an overview of one of Satan’s most dastardly tricks. He perverts the scriptures and dresses them in Christian clothing to fool the unsuspecting with lies that condemn…

Continue Reading Blood Sport

Only a few short years ago, we were in the throes of the COVID panic with an empty church and the pastor standing in the pulpit delivering Sunday morning sermons to a room inhabited by ghosts. This was no doubt the unhappiest time of my preaching career with all the emotion sucked out of the…

Continue Reading God or You?

               I state the obvious when I say most, if not all of us, remember the campaign for the presidential election in 2024. As usual, the rhetoric that permeated every speech, every pundit’s comments, and the newscasters’ predictions was how this election stood far beyond any election in the past as to its impact on…

Continue Reading A Few Thoughts About Our Fight

               Today’s topic is vital and one that concerns us all. This is no doubt the principal issue of religion which makes it detrimental to the wellbeing and destiny of every soul. The question is authority—who has authority to order and govern us? There are many sublevels to this question but always there will be…

Continue Reading The Branches of Authority

               In these past few weeks, our study in the Gospel of Mark has brought us to the last week of Jesus’ life. As mentioned in the sermons, the four gospel accounts have more to say about this eight-day period than any other time during His ministry. There is so much to learn from it…

Continue Reading The Final Week

[1] But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. [2] And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth…

Continue Reading White Smoke

(This article was originally published for Memorial Day 2025)                Time constraints, meeting deadlines for printing, and the hope my brain is functioning correctly when needed, all make it necessary for me to write bulletin articles weeks in advance. Tomorrow is Memorial Day which helped me choose my topic, and by coincidence or better by…

Continue Reading A Memorial Day Blessing

               When I was 18 years old, our church in Kentucky called on me to teach the youth department. The teaching ministry has not found a truer neophyte and neither given a tougher assignment to the newly initiated. Most would think it radical to have the youth director dating and planning to marry a student…

Continue Reading Never Too Young

Every day I sit in a quiet house mostly alone with my thoughts not concerned too much about disturbances. I regret that health problems keep me from being more active, but this lifestyle is a boon to the ability to study and think things through and make better decisions. You may not see the results…

Continue Reading Ever Learning

               For the past few weeks, we have announced today’s service will conclude with the members of Berean Baptist Church taking part in the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. While I was away in Kentucky for several weeks, our regular time of this observance came and went without the church taking part. It is our…

Continue Reading In Remembrance of Christ

               A few weeks ago in the Sunday Afternoon Forum class, a class member asked a question about 2 Thessalonians 2:7. This verse says, “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.” When I first heard the reference mentioned, I…

Continue Reading Hard Questions

            Three weeks ago, I was sitting in a hotel room in Flagstaff, AZ quite alone because I no longer have my life’s companion. Snow was falling and quickly ruining my chances of getting on the road early in the morning to make my way home. My Bible reading for the week had brought me…

Continue Reading Hidden In the Heart

               Two weeks ago, I mentioned watching a movie about the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was born in Poland in 1906 and died in one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps in 1945. Prior to World War II, he resisted the rise of Naziism both in their genocidal atrocities against the Jews and others and…

Continue Reading Pretended Piety

(written at Pastor’s return to the pulpit in March 2025)             This morning, I am thankful to return to the pulpit of the Berean Baptist Church. Although I enjoy visiting with Christians in other parts of the country and I especially rejoice when I meet others closely aligned with us on the doctrines of the…

Continue Reading Back At Berean

            The past weeks spent in Kentucky have given me opportunity to think about our place in the world and the purposes for which God put us here. Our lives are but a vapor that passes away which leaves us pondering what good we really do. Since recently dealt the blow of my wife’s death,…

Continue Reading The Legacy of Our Lives

I thought how different the preaching styles are of those coming out of independent Baptist colleges today. In the past seventy-five years of fundamentalism, preachers adopted the style of the tent revival circus atmosphere of men like Billy Sunday. Many consider him a hero even though much more is thought of his style and his…

Continue Reading Pondering Preachers and Pulpits

            Since moving to California more than twenty-five years ago, one of the most missed aspects of life in Kentucky is the pronounced and distinct change in seasons. There are times when these changes are only slight because of unusual weather years but this is not what I experienced when I was home in the…

Continue Reading Snow and Righteousness

               This week when I sat down to write the bulletin article, one of my grandchildren asked if I ever had trouble deciding my subject. You have heard me comment on this several times that deciding on bulletin articles is much more difficult than deciding on what my sermon should be. Each week I preach…

Continue Reading Unity of Heart