Author: oyovaadmin

Sticks, stones, Christian bones (When Christians fight, the reporters catch the action) (March 1982) – Someone once said that everywhere the Apostle Paul went they had a riot or a revival. Now all we do is serve tea and cookies…

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The bookracks of Baal (Why does literature in America resemble Belshazzar’s feast?) (April 1982) – A sad thing is happening in our land. More and more gifted writers are dipping their goblets, once dedicated for sacred use, into the wine of pornography…

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Sinkholes and other ‘acts of God’ (Do we have exclusive clauses for God’s radical actions?) (May 1982) – Down here in Florida we have an interesting underground geological formation which causes sinkholes…

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Thoughts on turning 50 (It’s time to look forward and cooperate with God’s plan) (June 1982) – It’s not death I fear — although I’ve thought about it a lot as I approach my 50th birthday. Rather it’s the possibility of growing old without purpose which frightens me…

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The truth about dog days gospel (July/August 1982) – Hendersonville, NC: Here in the mountains of western North Carolina “dog days” officially begins July 28th. The local folks, many of whom I’ve known since I started spending my summers here in 1939, tell me the season lasts 40 days, beginning when the Dog Star makes its bright appearance over the eastern horizon…

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Must gifted teachers stay home or can the abuses be corrected? (September 1982) – A friend of mine, an extraordinary teacher who travels extensively as well as having local responsibilities, declared last week that he was now refusing all invitations to speak away from home…

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Should Christians endorse every Israeli action? (October 1982) – One Christian Lebanese, whose house had been destroyed by the Israeli army (IDF), likened the invasion of Lebanon to the Allied invasion of France in World War II. Cities were destroyed, blood shed, but it was necessary to rid the nation of terrorists…

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Christians in court make sad spectacles (November 1982) – Is it right for Christians to sue each other in secular court? The Larry Tomczak case is a tragic answer…

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What mystical longing calls us home for Christmas? (December 1982) – I write this aboard a jet liner speeding south from one of the nation’s great northern cities. I am heading home for Christmas. How eager I am to see the face of my wife, embrace my now-grown children who are gathering at the old homestead, grab my little grandchildren and swing them high…

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Practicing the principle of ‘the greater need’ (January 1983) – What happens when a person or church — or a national ministry — receives a gift someone else needs more than they do?…

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A dad remembers and rejoices (February 1983) – Dear Bonnie: Your call from Tulsa, telling us that you are expecting your first baby, has filled the old home place with joy…

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My statements don’t carry as much weight as they used to (March 1983) – For years I’ve watched my fat friends lose weight then condemn the rest of us fatties for not being as spiritual as they are…

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The death penalty. Is it right? (April 1983) – Last fall a young Spirit-filled couple who lived a few miles from us opened their hearts to a lonely Cuban refugee. One morning when the husband called his bride from work she didn’t answer. Worried, he hurried home. He found her naked body sprawled on the floor. There were 17 stab wounds and she had been sexually tortured before she died. An 11-inch butcher knife protruded from her neck…

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The greatest serenade (May 1983) – I’ve missed the song of the whippoorwills in the early morning hours this year. Each year, since we have moved out into the pine trees in the rural section of our little Florida community, the whippoorwills have returned in February. Nocturnal songsters, they have serenaded me with their plaintive calls coming through the tall trees in front of our house, wafting their echoing voices into our upstairs bedroom long before dawn…

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Bibles bound in shoe leather (June 1983) – I thought the fighting had died down, but it seems the evangelicals are still shooting at each other over the question of whether the Bible is “inerrant” or merely “inspired.” It seems to me, though, that unless the Word of God is transferred from book to heart, the question of inerrancy is meaningless. It all came to mind this last week when I was cleaning out my bookcase and found an old Bible with the pages half-missing and the cover chewed away by roaches. The sensible thing was to throw it away, but somehow it didn’t seem right to drop a Bible in the trash can…

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What If My Floppy Disk Flaps (July 1983) – An article in The Wall Street Journal begins “Real men don’t ear quiche. Real women don’t pump gas. And real managers don’t use computer terminals.” The writer is saying that managers should manage people who in turn use computers…..

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Child rearing: a remembered art (August 1983) – One affliction common among grandparents is the urge to take over. I’ve watched my mother, who is 85, do this to our children. Now, as my own five children grow up, marry and start having children of their own I find myself doing the same thing. In fact, it’s hard to keep from taking over when you know you can do it better — and with my five grandchildren I am no exception…

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Good news is news also (September 1983) – Recently one f America’s leading journalists, George Cornell, ripped into some o his fellow editors at a gathering of the Associated Press managing editors. “Why,” he asked, “do most newspapers carry and entire section of sports events daily, but only one page of religious news weekly?”…

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The deception of divorce (October 1983) – I’ve just hung up the phone after talking to the aged mother of a young minister whose wife had filed for divorce. The old woman was crying. Great convulsive sobs. “But what will become of those two precious grandchildren?”…

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I was scared. I didn’t go (November 1983) – In March of 1975 I received an impassioned plea from an ad hoc committee of missionaries in South Vietnam. The letter was written and signed by a Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary representing a large number of missionaries from many denominations…

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Their roads just stop (December 1983) – Irian Jaya is — quite literally — earth’s uttermost part. Lying six degrees south of the equator in the South Pacific, it makes up the western half of the island of New Guinea. Even the Indonesian travel brochure stuck in the seat pocket of the Garuda Airlines described it as “primitive” with extreme heat in the snake-infested jungles…

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Do Real Men Hug? (January 1984) – In one of his management newsletters, Harry Levinson says, “People benefit from sharing their pain. they find strength in the ability to ask for help, not because they can’t do without it, but because mutual support makes both parties stronger, both lives easier and both lives richer…”

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Flowers with Faces (February 1984) – Roy Disney once told the story of an event that took place when his famous brother was in the fifth grade back in Ohio. The school teacher in that little classroom had given the children an art assignment. She waited as each child took out crayons and colored pencils and went to work with their drawings. After a while, she started down the aisle, looking over the children’s shoulders at their crude drawings…

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Learning to Lean (March 1984) – I was a senior in college before I committed my life to Jesus Christ. But it wasn’t a full commitment. Even though I intended to trust God, I felt I needed to trust my own understanding also — and my ability to work things out. After all, I had never trusted anyone completely, and this was a big step…

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Games Men Play (April 1984) – Last year I almost quit playing racquetball. Almost, but not quit. I’m glad I didn’t. Racquetball is a high priority in my life. By that I mean I play three times a week and often carry my racquet, shoes and shorts when I go out of town…

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Mother’s Narrow Road (May 1984) – Earlier this year my mother moved into the Florida Baptist Retirement Center, across the road from the house where she had lived with my father until he died…

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Expectations (June 1984) – The two stories were side by side on page one of the morning newspaper — both with glaring headlines. One said,”SLAIN PASTOR’S DOUBLE LIFE ALLEGED.” The other: “ACC– USED SHOPLIFTER WAS ‘GOOD MINISTER.’”…

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Breaking Barriers (July 1984) – Although I never placed better than third in any track meet, I spent a lot of time in college practicing the shot put…

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Officer and Gentleman (August 1984) – Old traditions never die — nor do they fade away easily. When I started my college ROTC training to become a U.S. Army officer, I was taught there were three things a uniformed officer never did in public…

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Phony Christians (September 1984) – Aside from disobeying and failing God, the one thing I fear most is becoming phony. Our American world, in particular, has spawned far too many phony Christians. They are easy to spot, especially when it comes to money…

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Endorsement Dilemmas (October 1984) – Several years ago after three candidates for sheriff all showed up at the same Sunday morning worship service, I determined I needed to be mighty careful when it came to endorsing folks for public office…

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Growing Older (November 1984) – Everybody I know, when they consider the only alternative, wants to get older. Well, my daughter Sandy doesn’t want to get older. But she never accepted that we can’t halt time. She thought nine was the magic age. “Daddy, I want to stay nine for the rest of my life.” The same was true with 12, 16, 18 and now 21…

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Know a Man’s Heart (December 1984) – In 1980 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, realizing he was a controversial figure, won over the news media by opening his heart. Reporters traveling with him on the campaign tour aboard his chartered plane felt positive. On board the atmosphere was warm and upbeat…

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All Things Change (January 1985) – Pasted on the mirror in the bathroom of our little vacation cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina is a Latin phrase: Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. “All things are changing, and we are changing with them.” My dad, who built the cabin many years ago, had taught Latin and English before going into business. Words, he felt, were designed by God to reveal truth. This was one of the truths he wanted his children to grasp…

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Bloodlines are Important (February 1985) – When my father died, my brothers designated me to be “in charge” of the services — a graveside service at the cemetery attended by family followed by a memorial service at the first Baptist Church…

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Worshipping Man is Wrong (March 1985) – Russell Dilday, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the world’s largest seminary with more than 1,600 full-time students, tells of a recent interview with Billy Graham. Graham was asked who would be the leaders of the world in the future. He answered: “The next leaders of the evangelical world will not be individuals, but institutions.” If that is true — it’s frightening…

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Praying for the Doa (April 1985) – Last year I spent three weeks in the uttermost past of he earth — the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya…

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Facing the Sanhedrin (May 1985) – Despite all God has done to break them up, sanhedrins, those religious courts charged with defending the faith, continue among us. In New Testament times the Sanhedrin, a council of 70 scholars with the high priest as chairman, was the supreme Jewish court of justice. Its task: to preserve the purity of the law. The latest Sanhedrin report comes from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the missions committee of the Salem Baptist Church voted to withdraw financial support from one the their missionaries because he believes the gift of tongues is for today…

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It Will Be ‘Neat’ (June 1985) – Little April’s question put me on the spot. She’s 5 years old and wanted me, her granddaddy, to tell her how to get to heaven…

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Truth and Consequence (July 1985) – The staff members of a church I know have vowed among themselves never to listen to charges against any other person on the staff. If there are accusations, they insist that the accusing person talk directly to the person accused…

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Thank God for Extremists! (August 1985) – If the Charismatic movement hasn’t done anything else, it has at least re-instituted the office of the extremist in the kingdom…

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Another Man’s Servant (September 1985) – The letter from my missionary friend in South America was sincere. On the last trip to the United States he had visited Heritage USA, the PTL Club’s luxurious recreational ground. He then wrote me saying he was “appalled” at the extravagance. “How,” he asked, “can Christians justify spending 90 percent of their accumulated riches on themselves and almost nothing on those under the grinding heel of Communism?”…

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Hotheads in the Household (November 1985) – I never heard my father and mother argue. I know they often disagreed. But they considered it bad breeding to argue in front of the children. It was an unreal world for a kid to grow up in…

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Christmas: A Time for Wishing (December 1985) – I sat silently across the room, watching my 3-year-old granddaughter turning the pages of the J.C. Penney Christmas catalogue. Unaware of my presence, she was softly whispering the names of the hundreds of marvelous items pictured in the big “wish book” which lay across her knees…

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The Christian and His Money (January 1986) – Every serious Christian I know struggles with the place of money. In fact, when I meet a Christian who does not struggle with it, I wonder just how serious he really is…

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The Challenge of Excellence (February 1986) – Psychologist Carl Rogers once said, “The older I grow the more I understand those things most private to us are also those things most universal.” Inside each of us is a little person, stretching, striving, looking at the impossible and saying, “I can do that.”…

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A Visit in Exile (March 1986) – Nothing had changed — even though it was all different. We sat up late, talking, just as we had done 10 years ago. My wife, Jackie, Dan and Viola Malachuk, and myself. Outside winter winds whistled through the barren trees on the dark New Hampshire mountains. But inside it was just as it had been in those days when Dan and Viola lived in the big house in New Jersey and Dan’s publishing company, Logos International, was the hottest thing going…

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Against All Odds (April 1986) – Our other four children seemed normal. Their grades were above average; they had good health; they got along fine with their playmates. Tim was different, however. In many areas he excelled. He could run faster, stay under water longer and climb trees higher than all the others. He was remarkably coordinated with amazing reflexes and a deep instinct for doing the right thing. He made friends with every kid in the neighborhood — especially those who were handicapped or had problems. And animals. He could talk to them. When they talked back, he understood. But he couldn’t read…

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The Double Standard (May 1986) – It’s tough, being a citizen of two worlds. When in Rome, some argue, you just do as the Romans do. But I’m not sure that’s what Jesus had in mind when he told us to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…and unto God that which is God’s.” I mean, what do you do when you live in Rome and Judea at the same time?…

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The Happiest Day (June 1986) According to my friend Ollie Swenson, who also lives in the country, the second happiest day in his life was the day someone gave him a goat. The happiest day was when the goat ran away…

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Chiseled in Crumbling Concrete (July 1986) The idea of taking spiritual inventory for the purpose of considering what part of our religious life needs to be changed — or discarded — is distasteful to most Christians. And heretical to others. We like to believe there are some things so sacred they should never be touched, questioned or changed…

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Deliver Us From Sock-Gobblers (August 1986) – After years of theological debate, I have finally discerned we have a sock-gobbler in our washing machine. In short, my machine is possessed by a demon…

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Honor to Whom Honor… (September 1986) – My old friend Frank Gray, small-town Episcopal priest with whom I used to sit over a cup of coffee and crack jokes about pompous bishops, has just been elected to the establishment. He’s just become the bishop of Northern Indiana. I wrote him a condolence letter…

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A Small Tribute (October 1986) – I can take you to the exact place, and re-enact the exact scene where 19 years ago this month, the lights flickered back on in my life…

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The Strike-em-Dead Wave (November 1986) – When U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan stood to give his outdoor commencement address at Loyola-Marymount Law School in Los Angeles last spring, he was interrupted by a low-flying airplane. The plane was pulling a huge banner which read, “Pray for Death: Baby-killer Brennan…”

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Movin’ in a Slow Hurry (December 1986) – I grew up under the tutorage of a wonderful old Southern “black mammy” named Willie Mae McGriff. She was an intimate part of our family for more than 30 years. It was she who taught me the art of being in what she called a slow hurry…

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The Present Crisis (January 1987) – Last October a dear friend had open-heart surgery at a major hospital in Boston. The doctors had forewarned him he could need as much as nine pints of blood for transfusion. He was also told there was no guarantee at least one of those might not be infected with the deadly AIDS virus. Fortunately, Christian friends at the Community of Jesus on Cape Cod donated whole blood to be used during surgery…

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Flaky Ideas (February 1987) – I like to consider myself an intellectual. By that I mean flaky ideas don’t appeal to me. Across the years I have dealt with hundreds of people who have approached me with kooky concepts…

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Church Pecking Order (March 1987) – Michele Buckingham, my daughter-in-law, has just had her first book published. It’s called Help! I’m a Pastor’s Wife (Creation House). Although listed as “editor” Michele spent months rewriting the 30 stories submitted by wives of some of America’s best known pastors…

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A Mighty Tree Falls (April 1987) – I still remember the first essay I was assigned to write in Logic 101 in college. The question: “If a mighty tree falls in the forest, does it make any noise?” It’s interesting how you remember the questions, but forget the answers…

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Accusing the Brethren (May 1987) – Few things bring more terror to a small child than listening to his parents verbally abuse each other. Wise parents settle their personal disagreements behind closed doors rather than attack each other in front of their small children. When sides are drawn the child is caught in an untenable situation. Especially is this true when one or both parents draw the child into the argument, forcing him to take sides…

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Victims of the Massacre (June 1987) – At the exact hour on April 28 that the new board of directors was wrestling with how to salvage the mess at PTL, I was conducting a funeral for a 67-year old grandmother who had been brutally gunned down in what is now known as the Palm Bay Massacre…

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Repeat Performance (July 1987) – Well, it finally happened. I was on the platform during the early service that Sunday morning. Although I was not scheduled to preach, I was directing the service. Jimmy Smith, our soloist, was singing from the piano. It was powerful, moving. “I will pour water on him that is thirsty…”

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Anatomy of a Decision (August 1987) – Although the offer to write THE book on the PTL scandal had not been nailed down, it was there just the same…

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Who’s Outraged? Not Me! (September 1987) – Concerned that the government was trying to indoctrinate his son with anti-biblical beliefs, a Louisiana state senator, Bill Keith, got a law passed in 1981 requiring the state’s public school teachers to tell students both sides of creation theory…

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The Making of a King (October 1987) – The other afternoon it came into focus at the local Burger King. My wife Jackie and I had offered to take our eight grandchildren (ages 1-7) out for hamburgers. Three sets of parents came along. We wound up taking over the entire north end of the fast food restaurant…

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Would Jesus Drive a Mercedes? (November 1987) – Clarence Jordan was the first and probably only man I’ve ever heard speak who, had he pointed his finger at me and said, “Lay down your nets and follow me,” I would have followed…

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Watch and Pray (December 1987) – When I was a kid the one thing I wanted more than anything else was a wristwatch. My dad was a pocketwatch man. As long as I can remember he carried one of those round, stainless steel watches…

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The Return of the Heresy Hunters (January 1988) – Just when I had begun to believe it was safe to think out loud again, the heresy hunters returned. I had hoped, once the controversial The Seduction of Christianity had slunk back into the murky depths where all back-listed books go to die, that the flurry of heresy-hunting would subside…

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Owe No Man (February 1988) – I bought my first pair of shoes — I mean the first pair I bought by myself without my parents being there to approve — when I was 13 years old…

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Greatness (March 1988) – As an entering graduate student at Ft. Worth’s Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1954, I had virtually no concept of what the term “greatness” meant…

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Free From the Press (April 1988) – The morning after the Swaggart scandal broke I woke to the inner words “Beware of the tumblebugs.” It’s been a long time since I thought of tumblebugs. Lying in bed, I remembered kneeling as a child in our barnyard watching those little beetles at work. A tumblebug finds a pile of manure. With his front claws he pulls out a small amount, mixes it liberally with beetle spit, works it onto a ball, then rolls it across the barnyard in front of him — pushing it with his nose…

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The Spirit of the World (May 1988) – The head of a large missionary organization told me they are being sued by two of their members. These people had earlier dedicated their lives to missions. Now they have various ailments. One man has ulcers. A woman, who lived in the tropics, has skin cancer. A “Christian” lawyer, hearing of their problems, advised them to sue the missionary organization. Their afflictions, he says, are “job related….”

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Confessions of a Hypocrite (June 1988) – Recently I’ve been praying, asking God about my gifts and calling. Then one morning it came to me, very clearly, that I had the unique gift of being a hypocrite…

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God’s Last Hope? (July 1988) – James Dodson and Jerry Falwell raised an incredible furor over the Civil rights Restoration Act in late March. They, along with others, called on Christians to bombard Congress with letters and phone calls, demanding the legislators uphold the President’s veto…

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Reagan and the Stars (August 1988) – Ronald Reagan’s involvement with Star Wars took a different twist recently when we discovered his interest in outer space was apparently not limited to SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative). It seems that the Reagans – and Nancy in particular – believe the stars possibly control their fate. According to the former White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, the Reagans are followers of astrology…

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ORU –“Our” University (September 1988) – Despite what some think of Oral Roberts, there is no denying God has used him in a powerful way. In the early ’60s, saying God told him to do it, Roberts set out to build a university for a church that didn’t exist at the time – the church renewed by the holy Spirit…

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Prophets for Profit (October 1988) – If Arkansas evangelist Edgar C. Whisenant was correct in his calculations, most of you will be reading this from heaven…

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Blacks and Whites (November 1988) – From all outward appearances, this is the most unlikely time in history for revival to break out among blacks. Never has the black church been in such disarray. Never has male leadership been so week. Never have blacks been so anti-church. Yet I believe the next move of the Holy Spirit will be among the blacks in America…

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Wasted Time (December 1988) – Well, it’s the end of another year and I’m looking back on things I wished I hadn’t done in 1988. Especially do I wish that I hadn’t wasted huge amounts of time doing things which later proved to be totally unproductive…

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The Risk Factor (January 1989) – During my senior year in high school a group of women somewhere in the nation started a movement to have all competitive team sports — especially football — removed from public schools. Team sports, they complained, were too traumatic. Children, they argued, should not be led to believe their team could win, then suffer the trauma of losing. They should only play games where everyone wins…

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A Tip Worth Taking (February 1989) – It was Ghandi, legend has it, who said, “I would be a follower of Christ were it not for Christians.” A restaurant waitress from Pueblo, Colorado, struggling with that same problem, asked, “Why are Christians so rude to waitresses?”…

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Hope For All of Us (March 1989) – Eleven years ago, my daddy died. It was Sunday afternoon. We had just come in from church and the phone was ringing. It was my mother in Vero Beach…

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Choosing to Obey God (April 1989) – I was fresh out of seminary and the new pastor of a Baptist Church in a little South Carolina town when Martin Luther King led his famous march from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama. We did a lot of talking about racial segregation in our deacons’ meetings those days. Everyone was defensive…

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The Spirit of Murder (May 1989)- One early morning in January the lights in the Florida State Penitentiary flickered and dimmed as the executioner pulled a switch in the death chamber. More than 4,000 volts of electricity surged through the body of Ted Bundy, who was strapped in the three-legged oak chair known as Old Sparky…

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Peace in Israel (June 1989) – The night before I left Jerusalem there was a riot on the Temple Mount. Fifteen thousand Moslems had gathered inside the 40-acre area surrounding the Mosque of Omar, the huge golden dome which dominates the Jerusalem skyline…

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Jesus and Capitol Punishment (July 1989) – On December 23, 1973, a 20-year-old Carl Songer, high on drugs, shot and killed a state trooper who had found him sleeping in the back of a stolen car…

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The Roach Busters (August 1989) – There was a message on my answering machine. Usually my secretary takes these off, but she was out, so I sat down and played back the tape. The accent was “down-South black,” warm and comfortable, the kind I grew up with working with my father’s pickers in the Florida citrus groves…

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A Different Drumbeat (September 1989) – Is Jimmy Swaggart starting a denomination? Is it possible that 20 years from now there will be a sizable group of churches known as Swaggartans? Such as Lutherans. Or Wesleyans…

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A Scout’s Honor (October 1989) – No book influenced my young life more than the Boy Scouts handbook. In it I found a wonderful world of semaphore flags, sheepshanks, clove hitches, lean-tos and reflector ovens. It was my personal guidebook from the time I was 12 until I was 16. It took me from Tenderfoot, through the exciting world of merit badges, all the way to the coveted rank of Eagle Scout…

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Giving Thanks (November 1989) – I stood in my den last August, stunned, watching my TV. There was Jim Bakker being half-dragged, half-led from his lawyer’s office in Charlotte. His hair disheveled, his shirt pulled out at the waist. His face anguished in fear. His wrists in handcuffs. His ankles in leg irons. Federal marshals put him into the backseat of a car where he collapsed. He was later driven to a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, and committed to the psychiatric wing for evaluation…

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My Finest Christmas (December 1989) – I had known for several months that my body could not maintain the pace. The time was December 1979 — 10 years ago. The pressures in our church had brought us to another crisis stage…

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Creativity (January 1990) – I occasionally find myself sitting, staring, at the blank screen of my word processor — the creative juices dried like cornstalks on a winter field…

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No More Schlock (February 1990) – The old German schlockmeister had a stall in a back alley where he sold cheap, shoddy merchandise. Today schlock has become the byword for anything trashy. In recent years the schlockmeister has started selling Christian merchandise…

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Politics, Pastors and Poets (March 1990 – The first trip I made to Czechoslovakia was 18 years ago. I was there with a Dutch Bible smuggler. Besides distributing Bibles, we attended underground prayer meetings. One of these was held in the basement room of a university in Prague…

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Evangelism’s New Leader (April 1990) – Following Billy Graham’s crusade in London last year, British theologian Clifford Hall wrote: “If only someone on the platform had had the faith to pray for the sick, believing that the prayer of faith prevails over sickness.”…

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Healing the Hurts of Life (May 1990) – In his book Some Things I Have Learned Since I Knew it All, Jerry Cook tells the story of his open-heart surgery…

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Holy Kissing (June 1990) – Few things traumatize us real men any more than being kissed by another man. I vividly remember the first time it happened to me. The fellow was a transplant into our church from Ohio. Broad and bearded, he came forward after the service to introduce himself. I tried to shake his hand. Instead he kissed me on the cheek…

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Legacy (July 1990) – Shortly after my dad became a Christian, at age 62, he began looking around for things he could give away. Although he had been successful in his Florida business and in citrus agriculture, and had accumulated many things, giving became more important than getting. He spent the last 26 years of his life giving things away. He once told me his goal was to be like Job, also a successful businessman, who left this world as he entered it — owning nothing…

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I’m Pro-Life By Choice (August 1990) – We have four generations living in our home. Jackie’s mother, Daisy Law, is 82 years old. She has Parkinson’s disease. Some days she is fine, helping Jackie in the kitchen. Other days she can’t get out of bed. We also have Amy Kathryn Buckingham, age 10 months…

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Looking Ahead (September 1990) – The last Friday of June I sat in the office of a strange doctor and listened as he gave me news that has radically changed everything in my life…

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Healed! (October 1990) – The diagnosis of cancer catapulted me into a new dimension of life. Suddenly I was helpless, face-to-face with a reality that was bigger than I. Some evil force was trying to direct — to take — my life. I seemed caught in its inescapable power, no longer able to plan my future, no longer master of my body nor captain of my soul. I was wrenched and torn by a force greater than anything I had ever experienced…

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Learning About Pacing (November 1990)When I was a child, our family made an annual pilgrimage to visit our “kissin’ cousins” in the Bluegrass state of Kentucky. I loved the beaten biscuits and fried chicken for breakfast. Most of all, I loved to watch the race horses training…

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Praying For The Forgotten (December 1990) – The late-night phone call was from David McKemy, a young evangelist with the United Pentecostal Church. David grew up in our church and still checks in with me on a regular basis. “I’ve been praying for Jim Bakker,” he told me…

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Living on Borrowed Time (January 1991) – Jackie and I spent a week in our little cabin in western North Carolina in October. One rainy morning we got up to drive across the mountains to meet friends for lunch. Coasting slowly down the steep wet driveway, I heard an inner voice. “This could be your last trip. you could be killed on that slick mountain highway.”…

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Encouragement (February 1991) – When I was in high school, I had a football coach who met every player at the sideline as he came off the field, shook his hand and said, “Good job!” I remember very little else about him — but I remember that. No matter how badly I had played, he shook my hand when I came off the field…

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Intercession (March 1991) – The summer after I graduated from high school, my father had surgery for a double hernia. The operation was performed in a small hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, near my parents’ summer cabin in Hendersonville…

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Quiet Time (April 1991) – Every year for the past 15 years, a group of us — dressed in old clothes, carrying shotguns, rifles and sleeping bags — have gathered in a little hunting cabin deep in the swamps of South Florida. We come from different towns and states. Each year we add or subtract someone, but the core group had remained the same. The four days are spent in the woods southwest of Lake Okeechobee on the edge of the Florida Everglades — 30 miles from the nearest phone…

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Mother’s Prayer Book (May 1991) – Several years after my father’s death, I had the heart-warming task of moving my mother into a Baptist retirement center in Florida. My father had donated the property to the center before he died. Dad never got to live there, but Mom stuck to the plan. She moved only a few things with her, urging us children to divide up the rest…

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God Will Do It Again (June 1991) -The pain turned out to be my friend. It began about the first of the year. Lower back. then down into my hip and thigh. Finally below the knee. My doctor, suspicious that the cancer might return, ordered X-rays, a bone scan, then a CAT scan of my abdomen. All were clear. Yet the pain persisted…

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Wrestling With God (July 1991) – One of the modern Greek playwrights wrote of the novice who went to stay on an island with an elderly priest. One afternoon the young cleric, eager to learn, walked with the venerable man along the craggy shore. As their robes swirled in the wind, he finally asked the big question. “Father, do you still wrestle with the devil?”…

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Lizzy’s Miracle (August 1991) – Back around Christmas, 10-year-old Lizzy Gross told her mother, Lestra: “Mommy, I’m seeing double.” That night Lestra mentioned it to her husband, Johnny, who is minister of music at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. They prayed…

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Following Jesus (September 1991) – A quiet pebble beach is located on the northeastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. It is under the shadow of the Golan Heights, not far from the ancient village of Bethsaida. It was here, early one morning, that Jesus stood and shouted across the water to His friends in a fishing boat…

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What is Masculinity? (October 1991) – The new emphasis on men, while encouraging, is not all good. Poet Robert Bly’s book Iron John stayed on the best-seller list 30 weeks this year. Bly has been the one to inspire many men to head off into the woods on weekends, where they stand around campfires, pounding on their chests like gorillas and uttering primordial screams in an effort to regain their lost masculinity…

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Using The Name (November 1991) – I arrived at the Founders Inn on the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) campus on a Thursday afternoon. I was to be Pat Robertson’s guest on “The 700 Club” Friday morning, then speak that night at the CBN Partners’ banquet in the hotel ballroom…

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