The duty of the branch is to cling to the vine.

Feed your fears and your faith will starve. Feed your faith, and your fears will.

When you teach on a familiar text, you're capitalizing on common knowledge. When you teach on an unfamiliar text, you're having to build a bridge of understanding, and we need to do that as well.

Off to one side sits a group of shepherds. They sit silently on the floor, perhaps perplexed, perhaps in awe, no doubt in amazement. Their night watch had been interrupted by an explosion of light from heaven and a symphony of angels. God goes to those who have time to hear him-and so on this cloudless night he went to simple shepherds.

You see, it's one thing to accept Him as Lord, another to recognize Him as Savior - but it's another matter entirely to accept Him as Father.

Thats usually what I gravitate to, I read The Perfect Storm, then I read Into Thin Air .

For years I thought my assignment or the Church's assignment was to articulate the Gospel and nothing more. Now I believe that if we don't support the verbal expression of the Gospel with physical demonstration of compassion, we are not imitating Jesus.