Our Daily Bread

Several years ago, a university student who took the gospel of Christ to a rough London neighborhood encountered a group of hostile men. “You rat!” said one of the men, seizing him. “I’ve half a mind to break your jaw!”

When faced with an ugly, unrelenting problem, we often cry, “I need a miracle!” A miracle may come, but if it doesn’t, does that mean God’s goodness isn’t at work?

Samuel was a Mount Everest personality who appeared when the historical landscape was monotonously flat. As God’s prophet, he judged the people. Since Israel was a theocracy (ruled by God), Samuel was virtually a king. He discharged his duties with skill and dedication to both God and the people.

An American philosopher once asked, “If Jesus and Plato should return to earth and were to lecture on the same campus at the same time, which would I go to hear?” He concluded, “Who would choose to go and hear even so great a one as Plato talk about truth, when he might listen to the One who is the Truth?”

Centuries ago, some Roman emperors were known to inflict the hideous punishment of binding the corpse of a murder victim to the back of the murderer. Under penalty of death, no one was allowed to remove the body from the condemned person.

When I was a child, I was taught that the earth is whirling on its axis. Teachers and textbooks told me that a person standing on the equator is rotating with the earth at 1,000 miles per hour. I believed it then, and I do today. But honestly, it doesn’t seem that we are moving at all. Appearances can be deceiving.

Grand juries. Investigations. Accusations and denials. Special prosecutors. News leaks. Criminal trials. Civil suits. Too often the guilty are acquitted and justice takes a back seat. It seems that getting to the truth is just about impossible.

A Christian who was born and raised in a log house visited his boyhood home after being away for 35 years. As he walked up to the now-deserted cabin, he remembered that as a youngster he had planted some walnuts along a stream that ran through the farm. When he went down to the creek, he discovered a beautiful row of stately walnut trees.

In 1931, Jane Whyte felt she was nearing the end of her life. Her husband Alexander, the famous Scottish preacher, had died 10 years earlier. As she looked at the world around her, she was depressed by the moral and political chaos. There seemed to be no reason for her to go on, nothing for her to do.

Kerri’s grandpa was having health problems and hadn’t been himself lately. To cheer him up, Kerri visited him to recite a Bible passage she had memorized for a speech contest.