youth home

Two locations, separated by time but forever joined in the greatest story of history: Eden and Gethsemane. The season of Lent can have many sanctifying influences on the believer’s life, but none so evident or “Lenten as our battle with the pervasiveness of sin in us. From the symbol of ashes placed on the forehead on Ash Wednesday. . . what more prominent location to declare that sin has infiltrated every part of our being . . . to the darkness that spreads over the land on Good Friday when the battle with sin reaches its climax on the cross. It is finished there when the Victor lowers His head and dies.

In the midst of this last week of terror and suffering by the Japanese people, I have received information from many different sources generated by the earthquake and tsunami and its aftermath of death, destruction, and radiation fears from the severely damaged nuclear power plants. It is important to get some balanced perspective from as many sensible sources as possible, recognizing that the media will give a picture that is not nearly compatible with the full truth, since they are more pressured to excite and sustain readership and viewership than objectively convey actual facts on the ground.

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]   Recently when writing a college reference for one of our young men soon to graduate from the Paul Anderson Youth Home and High School, I highlighted one of his traits which first came to light after he had been here for some time; a trait which I felt »

A number of the older military chapels I have been in are decorated with beautiful stained glass windows some of which were designed to honor soldiers who died in battle for their country. During a worship service in such a chapel a young boy whispered to his father, sitting next to him in the pew, asking who the figures were in the stained glass windows. The father whispered back that they were soldiers who died in the service; to which the boy asked...

Crying shows man’s humanity and the nature of the soul. It displays an aspect of the image of God in which we are created. It speaks of humility and a sense of sin; of depravity and genuine repentance. It expresses an overwhelming sense of awe at the glory and majesty of God and His Son as marveled at in their works and their creation.

"If we are good why are we allowing this to happen?" We are not winning this battle of eliminating sexual trafficking of children; and we are allowing butchers like the abortionist Dr. Gosnell of Philadelphia to ply their trade in human slaughter across the land. God forgive us!

C.S. Lewis wrote in his classic, Mere Christianity, that “Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind… It is the characteristic which predominates in the atheist mind and pulls the rest of us in their direction more than we are willing to admit, even though we say we believe in God and His Son with the fiercest resolve.

Is marriage passé today? Does it have any value in a “modern world? Or is God just the Grinch who stole Christmas in commanding that a man and a woman reserve sexual relations for marriage, and ought to honor the marriage bed by being faithful to one another?

The one who lives as though this world is his home and the home of his treasure, will be blown around by every wind of tragedy, devastation, and sudden cataclysm that rocks his life, and will question “Why did God let this happen? Well, God did let it happen and in other cases brought it to pass, always with the perspective of eternity.

Even now we do not know all that God is constantly about in His world. Most of it is simply never reported. The church is growing exponentially in China, Indonesia, the Southern Hemisphere, in places where it is persecuted and underground, but impossible to wipe out. “The blood of the martyrs is the seedbed of the church.