Active Faith

The Pattern of Prayer

Lord, teach us to pray. (Luke 11:1 NKJV) In our modern world we have tools at our disposal that our parents never dreamed of having. Take the navigation systems on our cars and smartphones. We simply type in the address of our destination, and it guides us there, telling us an estimated time of arrival. When the disciples asked our Lord to teach them to pray, they were asking for a route, a path that would lead them into the throne room of God’s presence in prayer. The Bible clearly lays out this route for us, and it begins when […]

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Dirty Truth

There is a favorite pastime (for some) that you can indulge in while visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The signs beckon you to pull over and take your chance. The family can be heard screaming in unison, “pull over, pull over, pull over” as the pressure mounts. You may think I am speaking of the obligatory Cracker Barrel stop, nope! Boiled peanuts? A western souvenir store featuring “Coonskin hats (short for racoon) worn by the famous Daniel Boone? The random “theme” park? Hardee’s? Could it really be that I am referring to the famous Billy Graham Library, […]

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Building Dreams: PBA’s Transformative Journey into the Future

At Palm Beach Atlantic University (PBA), the 2024 spring semester is before us. Our halls are bustling with students, faculty and staff. Every day there are interesting, engaging campus activities — in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, we just celebrated 1,900 hours of volunteer work on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.   God-Sized Dreams The semester also marks the start of construction projects under our God-Sized Dreams campaign. Just last month, we ceremoniously broke ground on the Marshall and Vera Lea Rinker Business Hall — a significant milestone and one of four major construction projects slated […]

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Insights from Forrest Gump

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1). An Insight from Forrest Gump A quick scan of the internet will reveal that Americans spent close to $26 billion – that’s not a typo, $26 billion – on Valentine’s Day in 2023. Depending on who you read, the average American household spent between $100 and $200 each proclaiming our love to spouses and “significant others” last year. That’s quite an investment in love, yes?There’s a tremendous line in the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump” that surely resonates with all […]

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Chaos, Conflict and the Hope of the Gospel

As we begin a new year, storm clouds continue to gather heavily around the world, even darkening our own doorsteps. As I write this, the conflict in Gaza is continuing, and the reverberations are felt across the globe. I was there just before Thanksgiving, and what I saw greatly moved and disturbed me. I visited several kibbutzim that Hamas terrorists had attacked on the morning of Oct. 7, killing men, women and children — even infants.  Chaos and Conflict I walked through some of the homes that had been burned and scarred with hundreds of bullets. I saw craters in […]

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New Year’s Solution

The late Walter Matthau acted in or produced 62 movies in his 45-year career. These included “A Face in the Crowd”, “Hello, Dolly”, “The Sunshine Boys” and “Fortune Cookie”, with which he won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. A man of multiple talents, he is best known in his later years for work such as “Grumpy Old Men”, “The Odd Couple” and “Dennis the Menace”, in which he played a curmudgeonly, cantankerous, ill-tempered sourpuss. For many of us, the movie that encapsulated this carefully crafted persona was “The Bad News Bears”, where he became Morris Buttermaker, an alcoholic […]

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Franklin Graham: Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

The world is on edge. Following the slaughter of more than 1,400 Israelis—including women and children—by savage Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, the state of Israel launched retaliatory strikes across the Gaza Strip to destroy the entrenchments of militants who butchered unsuspecting civilians and carried off more than 200 hostages, including Americans and Brits. The conflict threatened to escalate, as the United States sent carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and warned against intervention by Iran — who supplies arms to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. Peace of Jerusalem? It should come as no surprise that […]

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The Promise of Christ’s Return

“If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3 NKJV). It may well be that the greatest chasm between the first-century church and the modern twenty-first-century church is in the very way we respond to this promise of Christ to “come again.” His promised return is virtually a forgotten subject in our more sophisticated Sunday gatherings. When was the last time you remember hearing a message on the second coming of Christ, this coming great and climactic event in all […]

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