Grandpa's Reflections

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death…

The word glory occurs 485 times in the Old Testament, 416 times in the New Testament, and I counted 12 of these occurrences in these 11 verses. The words that I found associated with glory in the lexicon are brightness, radiance, splendor, and majesty. Earlier this year we had the opportunity to experience a total…

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death,…

There are several types of suffering and many sources for that suffering. We know families who have recently experienced the sudden and unexpected loss of loved ones. These families are grieving their loss. Paul tells us that losing fellowship with a Christian brother or sister should cause us to grieve. In his first letter to…

I wanted to visit you on my way to Macedonia and to come back to you from Macedonia, and then to have you send me on my way to Judea. Was I fickle when I intended to do this? Or do I make my plans in a worldly manner so that in the same breath…

It is said that men never read the manual. We would rather struggle for hours with a task than admit that we don’t know what we’re doing. YouTube has made it a little easier because now we can watch someone else do it rather than trying to sort out those exploded diagrams and cryptic directions….

We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves…

“I am telling you all this because I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love. The great message that…

I also came to see that I should not worry about tomorrow, next week, next year, or the next century.  The more willing I was to look honestly at what I was thinking and saying and doing now, the more easily I would come into touch with the movement of God’s Spirit in me, leading…

To help us remember that persecution is very real in the early church the writer lets us know that Timothy has just been released from prison. The writer closes with a prayer and I think it is important to note what is not requested. There is no mention of persecution or request to remove it….