Redemption – Page 2 – Pathway Journey

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).

May 14, 2024May 13, 2024

Benchmark of Life

Recently, I needed to determine the approximate elevation of a hill on our little homestead. My son and I used a process called differential leveling that I learned in an agricultural technology class. The point of the beginning was an established point set at 100 feet of elevation. It is called a benchmark—the initial point of reference. The final reading at the top of the hill was 138 feet, so the hill was 38 feet tall (138 minus 100=38).

I’m sure most of you care nothing about differential leveling, but I wanted you to know where I came about with this concept of a benchmark.

A benchmark is a reference point established as a constant and everything is referenced back and evaluated from that point. In life we need a benchmark to reference all the information that comes to us. If you do not have a reference point, everything else is just a garbled mess.

In the culture of the world, the secular mindset says there is no absolute truth–that there are no benchmarks. (It is funny, that they absolutely state that there are no absolute truths.)

If there is no absolute truth, then every known concept is a falsehood and there is no reliable reference point to anything. It is by this viewpoint of fluctuating ‘facts’ that people are redefining words and concepts that have stood for over 5,000 years of recorded history with little challenge during those five millennia.

April 4, 2024April 3, 2024

Our Purpose in the Vastness of God

Consciously or unconsciously people struggle with their purpose in life. Though few may admit it, all people, unless they are consumed in narcissism, know deep down that they are less than they could be. As the scripture states, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23 NKJV).

God in the beginning made man in His image. We have the stamp of God on our lives. We have a purpose from God that originated before time began. That may be a far reach for some, but the scripture bears it out.