by Barbara Oliver

I was born in West Virginia. My grandmother was Maybelle Hatfield, before she married. One of my Hatfield aunts is married to a McCoy. Nearly everyone in the USA has heard of the historic feud between these two infamous families. And though it is fun to joke about being a Hatfield, it is not really a name to be proud of.

Names are so important. A girl in one of my karate classes was about fourteen, overweight, and very shy. She told the instructor her last name was Jones. A few weeks later, her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Butts, came to the school to find out why they had gotten a bill for a little girl named Jones. She was embarrassed about her last name. She was tired of being teased. She wanted to re-create herself.

Another young fellow's father had deserted his family for another woman. He now had a stepfather who loved him and wanted to adopt him. When he went to school for the first time, he gave his stepfather's last name as his own and cried inconsolably when they told him he couldn't use that name.

God considers names important. A few examples? He changed Jacob's name to Israel (Genesis 35:10). He named Ishmael (Genesis 16:11) and Isaac (Genesis 17:19), and renamed Abram and Sarai (Genesis 17:5,15). He also named John and Jesus (Luke 1:13,31).

Our Father has adopted us as sons, and each day we strive to re-invent ourselves in his likeness. And, oh, how proud we should be that God has renamed all his sons "Christian" (Acts 11:26, 1 Peter 4:16).

Let us hold fast to that name (Revelation 2:13, NKJV).

Heavenly Father, with you there is no vacillation, no change, no mood swings. You are constant, unwavering, true to your purpose and promise. So this, too, is our supplication:

• Let us begin every day with prayer and the word, in your presence.

• Let us meet with the saints, without fail.

• Let us be generous and kind to every person.

• Let the salvation of others be our constant goal.

To be like you, Father, consistent in all things, is our desire and our need. We cannot be so under our own power. Make us constant in faith, good works, hope, love, and motives. For Jesus never faltered on his way to the Cross. Amen.

by J. Randal Matheny

The Postal Service of the USA issued a stamp honoring the one hundredth anniversary of the first flight by the Wright Brothers.

The first man in powered flight was from Ohio. The first man ever to orbit Earth was from Ohio. And the first man on the moon was from Ohio. It sounds like a lot of people are trying to get out of Ohio.

And a lot of people are trying to get out of other states as well. The state of despair. The state of failure. The state of ruin. The state of flat soft drinks, where nothing ever happens. The state of sin's guilt and destruction.

But fleeing these states is not done by air or space travel. Nor by drugs or alcohol or indiscriminate sex or other attempts to warp the space-time continuum. The latter are part of the problem, not the solution.

Jesus came to earth, not in flight from heaven, but on a rescue mission. To help us get out of the bad fixes we invented.

I've never been to Ohio, but it's probably a decent state. I have been to Jesus, and I can speak authoritatively about him. And though I've never been to heaven, I know Jesus is there, and that is sufficient.

For I'm fleeing a bad state of spirit and heading toward the solution.

"No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13, ESV).

By Michael E. Brooks

"Then they said to the woman, 'Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world'" (John 4:42).

I never believed in jet lag. Oh, I understood the concept and intellectually accepted that for some people at least there must be some physical effect of flying long distances, crossing several time zones quickly. But I just couldn't believe there was much to it. I had flown some and crossed three or four zones –- no big deal. Then I started flying to South Asia. Halfway around the world. Twelve time zones. Two days in an airplane. Guess what –- I now believe fervently in jet lag. It is real, and I have learned to prepare and to allow for its effects.

On some levels there is no real substitute for personal experience. It does not apply in every case. There are too many things for us to learn for anyone to insist on personally experiencing everything before accepting it. We must accept the work and testimony of others. Consider scientific knowledge for example. If every generation started from zero, we would still be inventing fire and the wheel. Technology, medicine, space exploration and countless other fields would never have opened. We have learned to build on the knowledge of others and to proceed from what they have obtained.

There are areas of life, however, where personal experience is not only valuable but essential. One cannot truly appreciate a classic work of art through an oral description from someone else. One must see it for oneself. No one develops muscle tone by reading a book about someone else's workouts. Each one must do one's own exercises.

Faith is an aspect of life that demands personal encounter. The Samaritan villagers listened to Jesus because of the testimony of their neighbor. But they believed in Jesus because they heard and saw him themselves. We are brought to Jesus by the example and words of believers. But we commit our lives to him because we examine their testimony, study our Bibles and learn Jesus for ourselves.

On his second missionary journey Paul came to the city of Berea in Macedonia.

"These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. Therefore many of them believed" (Acts 17:11,12a).

They were open-minded, willing to listen to the words of Paul. But they insisted on proving their truth by studying their Bibles for themselves. This led to individual and genuine faith in Jesus Christ.

Note that this is not the same as "experiential religion." We cannot expect a special visitation from Jesus or the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the source of God's Truth -– it is what we must "experience" for ourselves, studying and learning it and allowing Jesus to speak to us and reveal himself to us through it. This is what the Bereans did, and they believed and were saved from their sins by their obedience.

by Steve Preston

In the state of Georgia, controversy erupted recently over the public display of the Ten Commandments. Lawsuits have been brought against individuals in positions of authority, challenging the posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings and schools. This apparently has become an issue of separation of church and state.

What I find really interesting is that people, even those who have long studied the Scriptures, seem to consider the Ten Commandments as applicable to us today (they are not, Romans 7:4, 6; Colossians 2:14). What is also interesting is that, of the commandments that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ called the greatest, neither is found among the Ten Commandments.

In Matthew 22:36, a lawyer asked Jesus this question: "Master, which is the great commandment in the law?" As with most questions asked of Jesus, this one was a test to see if He would answer "correctly."

Our Lord gave this reply: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Matthew 22:37-39).

These two commandments are of such great importance that Jesus stated that "on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets" (verse 40). Why is it that people today want to cling to an old law that can do nothing for us and yet ignore the teaching of the Saviour in Matthew 22? (This teaching is also found in Mark 12:28-31.) Even if we concede that Jesus lived and died under the Old Testament law, which included the Ten Commandments, it is clear that God intended all people for all time to adhere to the two "great commandments."

Why can I state this? Because in Mark 12, when the person asking about the greatest (or first) commandment agreed with Jesus' answer, our Lord replied, "Thou art not far from the kingdom of God" (Mark 12:34). Undoubtedly, then, one must love God with one's whole being and love one's neighbor in order to be a part of the kingdom of God.

In the Scriptures, the kingdom and the church are identified with each other, so the great commandments apply to us today as well as to the men and women of the Old Testament.

The greatest commandments were indeed part of the old law, but they are also part of the new law. We cannot be pleasing to God unless we love him with all our heart, soul, and mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves.

Display the Ten Commandments if you wish, but it would be better to display the greatest commandments in our lives every day.

Steve publishes the Bible Talk list, from which this article was reprinted, with his permission: ttp://www.topica.com/lists/list_BibleTalk