High Achieving Fathers!

 A father said to his son, “When Abraham Lincoln was your age, he walked twelve miles to get to school.” The son replied, “Dad, when Abraham Lincoln was your age, he was President.” Very few fathers become President, but every father who has faith in God has potential to be a high achiever. A faithful father is a partner with God in turning little hearts and minds toward God as they “bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4b). This has always been a huge task because the devil always has other designs for the young people among us. That is certainly the case in contemporary American culture. It requires much love, time, patience and effort to be a father.  More than some men who see themselves as fathers are willing to give. According to the U. S. Census Bureau (2021), 18.4 million children, one in four, live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home (enough to fill New York City twice or Los Angeles four times over). This information likely won’t stick in your brain, but each of those numbers represents a real person with a real life and a real need for an involved daddy to teach them things a daddy ought to teach them. Research shows that father’s absence affects children in numerous negative and hurtful ways, while a loving, involved father’s presence makes a powerful and positive difference in the lives of both children and their mothers. There are no perfect fathers or mothers. And there are no iron-clad guarantees that a child / children will “turn out right” even when father and mother faithfully and intentionally play their God-designed and God-assigned, complimentary but not identical, roles in the lives of children under their care. God was a perfect parent to His first two children, and still they chose to disobey. They and their children paid a very high cost. The fact of the matter is, while many children overcome disadvantages and hardships associated with an absent or non-involved father, many don’t. That’s not preacher talk. The proof is in the data if you care and dare to look. Children need a daddy who cares enough to stay connected and present and involved enough to influence and educate them morally and spiritually.

General Douglas McArthur is credited with this prayer – “BUILD ME A SON, O’ LORD, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory. BUILD ME A SON whose wishes will not take the place of deeds, a son who will know THEE – and that to know himself is the fountainhead of knowledge. LEAD HIM, I pray, not in paths of ease and comfort, but under the spur of difficulties and challenges. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail. BUILD ME A SON whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will reach into the future yet never forget the past. AND AFTER ALL THESE THINGS are his, add, I pray, enough sense of humor that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom; the meekness of strength. THEN, I, HIS FATHER, will dare to whisper, ‘I have not lived in vain.’ ” Mark it down – any father who seeks to lead, train, and influence his children to love God IS a high achiever.

By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN     

Character – Not For Sale!

Three thousand years ago Solomon reminded readers some things are worth more than money. He wrote: “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, Loving favor rather than silver and gold” (Proverbs 22:1). Allow me to quote that verse in the Amplified Bible which reads: “A good name [earned by honorable behavior, godly wisdom, moral courage, and personal integrity] is more desirable than great riches; And favor is better than silver and gold.” That statement by an inspired man reminds me of a more recent quote attributed to Antonin Scalia (an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016) — “Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character.” David Kaplan apparently understood that principle. Kaplan was a sports talk host on WGN Chicago Radio for many years. According to Chicago Tribune writer Skip Bayless, back in 2001 Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, offered WGN Chicago Radio David Kaplan $50,000 to change his name legally to “Dallas Maverick.” When Kaplan politely declined, Cuban sweetened the offer. According to Bayless, Cuban, a multi-billionaire, would pay Kaplan$100,000 and donate $100,000 to Kaplan's favorite charity to take the name for one year. After much thought and bombardment by e-mails from listeners who said he was crazy to turn down the money, Kaplan refused. He explained to Cuban: “I'd be saying I'd do anything for money, and that bothers me. My name is my birthright. I'd like to preserve my integrity and credibility” (“Radio Host Prefers Cash Over Crass,” Chicago Tribune, 1-10-2001).

 Kaplan demonstrated a sorely needed character trait in America – the trait of integrity. Integrity is defined as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.” Those who follow Jesus are to display integrity in their lives and with their lips. The apostle Paul admonished and encouraged his preaching friend Titus in Titus 2:7 with these words: “in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works; in doctrine showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility.” Wayne Jackson writes that the Greek word translated “integrity” (New King James Version * King James Version “corruptness”) suggests “purity of motive, without the desire of gain.” Purity and integrity was lacking among even some (false) teachers in and around the church on the island of Crete where Titus was serving in the first century. Titus 1:11 declares they were “teaching things they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain” – and Christ’s apostle tersely said [their] mouths must be stopped.” Simply put, these people valued cash more highly than character. Actually, they had character – but it was bad. Titus 2:8-10 goes on to teach integrity is expected of Christians – even those who were slaves, directing them to not steal but to “show all good fidelity” (or honesty). The reason is clearly stated: “that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior in all things.” What a striking and sobering thought – by the way I live I can make God and His gospel look attractive to people – or unappealing. Christian character can’t be bought and it’s not for sale, for any amount of cash. It’s an inside job that begins when I surrender my life to the Lord Jesus Christ who can give me a godly character (Ephesians 4:21ff). Think about it. 

             By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN  

The Hope That Holds Us!

 There’s a story about a man who arrived at a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked   a boy in the dugout what the score was. The boy responded, "They are beating us 18 to 0.” The spectator said, Boy, aren’t you discouraged?” The boy replied, "Discouraged? Why would I be discouraged? We haven't even gotten up to bat yet!” Hope always lives in the heart of a little leaguer even when things look bad! But it’s not just little leaguers that have undying hope. Christians literally have an undying hope! The apostle Peter described this hope at 1 Peter 1:3 as a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Two thousand years ago, the Gospel tells us, sinful people crucified Jesus until He was dead as a doorknob. They buried Him and used every    political, military, and religious means humanly possible to make sure He stayed dead and in the grave (Matt.28:62-66). But God raised Him from the dead (Acts 2:23-24, 32). But when some women showed to visit His tomb Sunday morning after His crucifixion the Friday before, they were told by an angel of the Lord, “He is not here; for He is risen” (Matt.28:6a). They were instructed, “Go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead” (Matt.28:7a). Verse 8 goes on to tell us these women “ran to bring His disciples word.” Mark’s account of the Gospel records that when they told the apostles, at first “...they did not believe” (Mark 16:11b). But it was true! And once they became convinced, they raced out to tell a hopelessly lost world that there is hope after all – “the Lord Jesus    Christ our hope” (1 Timothy 1:1b)! And His disciples have been holding on to and held by and holding out that blessed and undying hope for some two thousand years, awaiting Jesus' second coming (Titus 2:13).

 Hope – that powerful Bible word at the center of the Christian faith. Hope – that deep-down-inside fire that the devil's water can never, ever put out. Hope – that light that shines even during the darkest nights of our lives. An inspired man, referring to God's promises, declares at Hebrews 6:18a that, "it is impossible for God to lie.” He goes on to encourage readers to “lay hold of the hope set before us” (v 18b) and hurries on to add in verse 19, “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure & steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil.” The Christian hope is a heavy-weight thing. The Hebrews writer says, in effect, that hope is what keeps our souls anchored in the next world even as we struggle with sin and setbacks and sail through a sometimes-stormy-sea of heartbreaks and heartaches in this one! Hope – why does it have such a hold on Christians? Words from Titus 1:2 are a big part of the reason. There, as he began a short letter to his friend Titus who was preaching on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the apostle Paul wrote that Christians are “in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.” Read Titus 1:10-16 and you might think things looked hopeless. The gospel appeared to be behind 18 to nothing! But the apostle Paul believed in a power-packed Gospel chock-full of hope! Hope that could change not only people’s lives but change where they spend eternity! Jesus Christ is the one hope we all have for forgiveness of sins and getting out of an eventual grave alive (Ephesians 4:4). Face it friend, there is no other hope. Why would you let go of the one hope you have in a world that offers no hope at all? If you hold on to that hope, it will hold on to you!

    By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN  

The Truth About Lying!

 J. Michael Shannon tells about three men discussing the biggest liars they had ever heard. One said, “I know a boy who lied so often he had to get somebody else to call his dog.” The second man complained, “That’s nothing. I knew a man who lied about his golf score so often that one day he made a hole in one and wrote down ‘0’ (zero) on his scorecard.” The third man chimed in, “My preacher said last Sunday that our crowd was somewhere between four and five-hundred. I told him I only counted 125. He insisted, ‘Well, that’s between four and five hundred.’ ” These funny stories illustrate a sad truth – lying is common and acceptable. Groucho Marx once said, “There is one way to find out if a man is honest. Ask him. If he says yes, you know he is crooked.” David said in Psalm 116:11, “I said in my haste, all men are liars.” David admits he was hasty in saying that, and I don’t want to overstate the case. Still, there’s a lot of lying going on. Advertisers, politicians, even preachers sometimes prevaricate (a fancy way to say fabricate, fib,lie)! It is easy to say someone looks nice when they don’t, or tell the preacher you “enjoyed” the sermon when you slept half way through it! Or tell your host the grilled steak was great when it was tough as shoe leather! In "The Day America Told the Truth" (published 1991) author James Patterson, then CEO of J. Walter Patterson (an ad’ agency in New York) related that 91% of those surveyed lied routinely about matters they considered trivial; 36% lied about more important matters; 86% lied regularly to parents, 75% to friends, 73% to siblings, and 69% to spouses. Girls lie to boyfriends and boys lie to girlfriends. Husbands lie to wives and wives to husbands. People lie to the IRS, their employers, and their insurance companies. Witnesses lie to courts, students lie to teachers, and people lie to preachers. All indications are many people have a proclivity to prevaricate! Put more simply, there’s a whole lot of lying going on! And that’s the truth!

Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is true that you can fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” What can you say about people who are consistently deceitful and dishonest and who make lying a way of life? All you can honestly say is they are liars. Some people lie to be polite, others out of carelessness or to avoid conflict, and some lie out of malice, seeking to create or add to conflict. Some people lie out of habit. The apostle Paul must have been referring to such liars (on the Mediterranean island of Crete) in Titus 1:12 when he wrote, “One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” This passage and the people it describes brings to mind the businessman who complained about a partner: “He’s a real phony – I wouldn’t believe him if he said he was lying.” If  we engage in deceit and lying, we are very unlike the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and for whom it is impossible to lie (Hebrews 6:18). “The truth is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21b) and Jesus’ gospel is “the word of truth” (Ephesians 1:13). Christians are told to“ put away lying ... Let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another” (Ephesians 5:25). There will be no liars in heaven (Revelation 21:8). There ought not to be any in the church of Christ here on earth. To be like Jesus, Christians simply will not lie to one another (Colossians 3:9). That’s the truth about lying. 

By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN     

Endless Hope, Hopeless End?

 A man in Louisiana explained why he refuses to buy life insurance: “When I die, I want it to be a sad day for everybody. Believing that man is nothing more than a pile of material (if magnificent) molecules, millions find it impossible to view death with anything but gloom and despair. What is it like to face death with no more hope than human reason (unaided by faith in God and His revelation in the Bible) can give? The skeptic Ingersoll, while dying (1899) exclaimed, “O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.” The great French skeptic Voltaire (1694-1778), contemporary with American patriot and statesman Ben Franklin, argued that human reason alone was a sufficient guide in life without a revelation from God. But human reason failed to comfort him as he

neared the end of his life. The thought of what was beyond the grave terrified him. On his deathbed he told his physician, “I am abandoned by God and man. I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months of life.” When the doctor told him he

could not comply, Voltaire said, “Then I shall go to hell.” Bertrand Russell, another famous unbeliever, affirmed his life was built on the foundation of unyielding despair. He issued a joint statement with the brilliant big-brained Albert Einstein, just two days before Einstein’s death, confessing that “those of us who know the most are the gloomiest about the future” (quoted by Ravi Zacharias in "Can Man Live Without God?", p 74). David Hume was an atheist philosopher famous for his religious skepticism. His deathbed is said

to have been a horrible scene as he cried out, “I am in flames!” Thomas Hobs, a political philosopher, said as he neared death, If I had the whole world at my disposal, I would give it to live one more day. I am about to take a leap into the dark.” All these were brilliant,

accomplished men loaded with tons of human brainpower. But they all discovered that human brilliance, intellect, reason and brain power alone are no match for the power of death and the hopelessness that accompanies death without Christ. Atheists and materialists sometimes boast they can die without fear. While that may be true in some cases, they want us to forget that they also die without the hope Christians have (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).

Contrast this doom and despair with the hopeful and confident words written by the apostle Paul from a prison cell as he awaited certain and imminent death: “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Finally, there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give to me on that Day, and not to me only but also to all who have loved His appearing” (2 Timothy 4:6-8). For Paul death was not the end, and it was not a “leap into the dark.” He was not in despair and was not gripped by a sense of doubt, fear, doom or gloom. For Paul death was not an end but a new beginning! Not a descent into hell – but a transition into a glorious forever, at home with God (verse 18)! Not a hopeless end, but an endless hope. And the difference was not human brilliance or reason alone – the difference was Jesus Christ. How about you? Are you headed for a hopeless end or an endless hope? Jesus will be faithful to you when you die if you are faithful to Him while you live. Are you listening? 

    By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN     

Unpopular Preachers!

 A preacher was having a tough ministry. His work was not going well and he was not appreciated by many in the congregation. Things were falling apart, attendance was low, finances failing. After one particularly poor bad Sunday morning sermon he received an anonymous note – “The last train out of town leaves today at 3 p.m. Be under it.” History bears out truth-preaching preachers sometimes displease men and women. The bigger question is whether or not God is pleased. Jesus Christ preached truth. In John 8:26 Jesus told a group of Jewish leaders who opposed Him, “... He who sent Me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I heard from Him.” But what God had to say was not what those close-minded men wanted to hear, so later at John 8:40 Jesus stated,

“But now you seek to kill Me, a Man who has told you the truth which I heard from God.” They finally did kill Him, but not for long, and He and the truth He told ever lives on. Jesus always pleased God (John 8:29), but that wasn’t enough to please some people. The prophet Jeremiah preached the Word of the Lord for forty years. He spent part of that time in prisons and dungeons for telling God’s truth (Jeremiah 38:6). John the Baptist’s preaching literally caused him to lose his head – to King Herold’s executioner’s axe, that is; all because John had the gall to tell Herod his marriage was unlawful in the sight of God (Matthew 14 * Mark 6). John’s case reminds us God still has a little something to say about marriage, and that preachers who are true to their God-assigned task will remember they answer to a higher authority than kings, Presidents, public opinion polls, the Supreme Court, liberal preachers and churches, popular pop icons, and people who don’t want to change their ways. Jesus’ apostles were often accused of causing trouble and suffered for preaching Christ  (see Acts 4:3, 17ff; 5:18-42; 16:20-24). So dangerous was it to be a prophet over the course of Old Testament history that Jesus plaintively lamented in Matthew 23:37, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” The historical record testifies that truth-tellers and preachers who are popular with God are always unpopular with some people.               

 All this is what makes the words of 2 Timothy 4:1-5 so important in every time and place. Wherever you live, whoever you are, whatever church you’ve been in or are in or even if you’re not in one, this is what God expects of the preacher: “I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when        they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.” If the preacher is the real deal, those words are his guide. Hopefully he is kind, patient, and loves not only God but people. But he will preach the Word whether it pleases people or not. And God is on      public record – His truth will not please everybody. Never has. Doesn’t now. Never will. Still, we must preach the word. That will make us popular with God, but not all people. Every preacher is unpopular with       someone. The vital question is, is it people with fable-loving and itching ears, or with God? Think about it.

Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN