Redemption – Page 2 – Pathway Journey

May 21, 2025May 18, 2025

How Grace and Mercy Lead to Peace with God

In the church world we throw around words and catch phases until they become threadbare of their meaning. Paul used the three terms of grace, mercy, and peace in his salutations to his spiritual sons. Here is one, “To Timothy, a true son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord” (1 Tim. 1:2 NKJV).

Peace always follows grace and mercy. It is impossible to have true peace with God without the blessings of grace and mercy. Since we were born with a sin nature, it is impossible to have peace with God without them. We can’t outside of these two make ourselves compatible with God’s peace.

We can measure twice and cut once. We can fill the cracks with putty and sand until smooth. We can put three coats of paint on a stairway to Heaven. Still, it will not reach!

May 9, 2025May 8, 2025

Understanding God: Insights from a Lifelong Journey

I will soon cross over into my seventh decade of life. There are a few things I know now. I did not know them when my hair was brown and my energy was like the battery bunny. The main morsel of knowledge I now realize is how much I do not know. The body of knowledge seems to be as vast as the ocean and I am in a row boat.

I have read the entire Bible each year for close to thirty years. I understand many truths of the Bible but I still scratch my head about some things. It is the Word of God. How can a mere mortal like me understand the vastness and the depth of it? The short answer, I cannot. Yet, I keep studying and praying for more understanding of the Word of Life.

April 25, 2025April 24, 2025

Paul and Silas’ Response to Persecution

Join me in a little stroll through Acts chapter 16 as we journey with Paul and Silas.

We must minister to those God sends us and work with those God brings alongside us.
Paul on his second missionary journey was accompanied by Silas. Silas was not Paul’s first choice as a traveling partner. Barnabas was Paul’s first missionary partner on the first journey. While planning the second missionary journey, Paul and Barnabas had an argument about whether to take Mark who had abandoned them on the first trip. Paul did not want him to go, but Barnabas insisted. Unable to come to an agreement, they separated and went different ways.

April 16, 2025April 16, 2025

The Division of the Resurrection

In my early childhood days, my mother usually bought me an Easter outfit. It wasn’t a suit. It was a pair of pants and usually a matching pastel colored shirt. She warned me to keep it nice because I would be wearing the same outfit on Decoration Day at our community cemetery. To those of you not from the Deep South, decoration day is a certain Sunday designated by the community to decorate the graves of departed family members. It often included a dinner on the ground, an all-day singing, and a community reunion rolled into one event.

April 3, 2025May 2, 2025

Message of the Cross

Jesus was not the first person ever crucified. The Persians had diabolically invented crucifixion in about 300 BC. The Romans of Jesus’ time had put the practice to their own evil ends. It was considered the worst punishment that could be carried out.

Man was created in the image of God, and one aspect of that image was the ability to imagine and create things. This endued gift in the fallen man was corrupted to invent objects for evil use. Death by crucifixion was one of those things. The word we use for unbearable pain is excruciating—which is from the Latin word “excruciare” [ex-scru-char-a] meaning “out of the cross, to torture.” We could say that excruciating is the pain of the cross.

March 20, 2025

King David’s Moral Crisis: Lessons in Repentance

King David had a moral crisis when he committed adultery with a beautiful woman named Bathsheba. He complicated and multiplied his sin by deceit and murder after it was revealed to him that she was pregnant with his child.

The husband of Bathsheba was Uriah. He was a trusted soldier of David and was numbered in the elite thirty-seven of 2 Samuel chapter 23. Uriah was ordered from the front lines for the sole purpose of obscuring his wife’s pregnancy as a product of adultery. Uriah refused to keep company with his wife out of concern for his fellow soldiers still on the battlefield.

David took the sin to an even lower level of murder. He wrote orders for Uriah to be put in the most dangerous position of battle guaranteeing his death. This strong faithful soldier faithfully carried his own death sentence to the commander of the army. He died in battle and David brought Bathsheba into his palace as his wife.

March 6, 2025March 5, 2025

True Disciple: A Follower of Jesus

A disciple of Jesus is a follower of Jesus. Someone who merely acknowledges Jesus as a great religious leader is not a disciple. Many people have only a mental nod to who Jesus is.

The first step of becoming a true disciple is when an individual receives a spiritual revelation of the reality of who Jesus is and their own need for a Savior. The seed for this revelation is the Word of God when one hears the Gospel. This revelation creates a strong desire to follow the One, who has the words of eternal life.

February 20, 2025February 25, 2025

The Bible in a Capsule: God’s Plan of Redemption

The story began long before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. It begins even before the events of the book of Genesis. The Bible tells us that the Son of God is eternal, not only in the future but also in the past.

The Word of God proclaims, “He [Jesus] indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you” (1 Pet. 1:20 (NKJV). God the Father designated God the Son to be the one and only sacrifice for sin from before the beginning of time.

November 14, 2024November 13, 2024

Fake Fruit on Dead Trees

“Fake fruit on a dead tree”, is a phrase my pastor, Bro. Bradley Petrey, recently used in a sermon. It describes the look some folks try to portray in Christian circles. I told him, “I do not like the condition it describes but I loved the phraseology.”

Jesus used something similar when He said, “Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. / A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (Matt. 7:17-18 NKJV).

The fruit depends on the tree. Said another way, the tree determines the fruit.

June 25, 2024June 24, 2024

Keep the Faith: Don’t Fret Over the World

All the great kingdoms that fill our history books such as the Babylonians, Medes-Persians, Greeks, and Romans have a date of their demise. In their day they controlled much of the civilized world, held sway over peoples, wealth, and resources. Their rulers held tyrannical control over peoples and lands. Those rulers are now dead, and their kingdoms fragmented and destroyed.

In the book of Daniel, the King of Babylon had a dream of an image, and the prophet Daniel told him the dream and interpreted it describing those empires mentioned above. The image was of a man made of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay representing those different kingdoms (see Daniel 2:31-33).