Find YOUR way to GRACE
“I recently read a message I’d given in 1984 and felt a mixture of embarrassment and surprise. Embarrassed because it seems inadequate now, and surprised by how much my worldview has changed. Twenty-five years from now, I might read these messages and have a similar reaction. I offer no guarantee that my work or words will endure the eroding effects of time. I can only assure you these thoughts have been helpful to me, and perhaps a few others, today. With that qualification, I offer them to you.”
– Philip
Our Latest PlainSpeech Messages :
Easter 2025 – What We See
I was visiting with a friend this past week and we got to talking about the worst jobs we’d ever had. Mine was my first job out of high school, when for five years I operated a rattling, banging, prone-to-malfunctioning machine that scanned utility bills. Every day we’d mail out about 30,000 electric bills and every day it was my job to scan the same number of coffee-stained, torn, and otherwise abused receipts the customers …
2025 Palm Sunday
This is my 25th Palm Sunday here at Fairfield. This past week, I read through all 25 Palm Sunday sermons I’d given, and I noticed I was giving essentially the same sermon every Palm Sunday–the modesty and humility of Jesus riding a donkey stands in contrast to the power and arrogance of the Roman Empire, riding high in the saddle, armed to the hilt. The last days of Jesus reflect this difference, culminating in the …
A Culture of Caring
Welcome, friends. It is, as always, a delight to be with you in this pleasant place. It was Winston Churchill who famously said, “We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” I was having lunch with a friend this past week who asked me what I would have done if I hadn’t been a pastor and writer, and I said I would have wanted to create beautiful and useful places for people to enjoy. In …
Things That Give Me Hope (4)
It is good to be home. I was in North Carolina last weekend, officiating at the wedding of my niece, Lauren, the daughter of my oldest brother Glenn, who is as white as white can be. Here’s how white my brother is. When he retired two years ago, he bought a pick-up truck and a cowboy hat and began vacationing at a dude ranch in Wyoming. That’s how white my brother is. But back in …
Things That Give Me Hope (3) —Thank God for the Status Quo
A year after I was born, my father was hired by Johnson Wax as a salesman, visiting grocery stores across Indiana, peddling his wares, mostly Raid bug spray and Pledge furniture polish. Then in 1970, the shaving cream world was rocked when Johnson Wax invented Edge shaving cream, which Dad told me was going to be huge, that if a man used it just once, he’d be hooked for life. He gave nearly every man …
Things That Give Me Hope (2)
Last week, we began thinking about the things that give us hope in these challenging days, because it is far too easy to feel hopeless, so we need to think intentionally about the developments that give us hope, and I said one thing that gave me hope were the movements and moments of resistance, led by people whose names we don’t yet know, and this week I learned about just such a person. Her name …
Things That Give Me Hope (1)
I was thinking this week of Mr. Hoban, an elderly neighbor of ours when I was growing up on Broadway Street, there in Danville. He was a veteran of two wars—World War I and World War II. He was so gentle and kind, his activity as a soldier seemed incongruent with the man I knew, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. I went to his garage one day and found him bottle feeding baby rabbits whose …
Do’s and Don’ts in a Time of Change (11)
I learned this week that a kid I knew growing up had passed away. This seems to be happening with more frequency, and I am usually saddened by the development, but this time I had mixed feelings. I met him when I was ten years old, and my family moved across town to a new neighborhood. He lived up the street a few houses, and when we first met he told me he wanted to …
Do’s and Don’ts In a Time of Change (5)
I was up at Life’s Journey this week visiting Stacey Denny’s mother, who’s in hospice there. They have a bookshelf in the lobby filled with religious books, including a book called Heaven, written by a man named Randy Alcorn, whom I met 30 years ago when I started writing books. The flyleaf on the book said the Reverend Doctor Randy Alcorn was the world’s foremost expert on heaven, which I thought was interesting, since he’s …
Do’s and Don’ts In a Time of Change (10)
I’ve been thinking this week of my Baptist grandmother, who took it upon herself to make us fit for civilization. Fortunately, I didn’t see her often. When my father and mother were first married, they moved 120 miles away from her, to give themselves a little breathing room. But she was a determined woman, so would drive to our house every couple of months and stay for a long weekend. I say long weekend, though …
Do’s and Don’ts In a Time of Change (9)
When I became an intentional Christian, as opposed to a Christin who was dragged kicking and screaming to church by my mother, I decided to read the Bible. I did that for several years, because a man I knew told me the government would confiscate all the Bibles, which needed to be memorized so we would know how to live when the Bible was gone. I was gullible then and tended to believe everything I …
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