BABIES
A perfect example of minority rule is a baby in the home.
Arriving for a visit, a woman asked her small granddaughter, “How do you like your new baby brother?”
“Oh, he’s all right,” the child shrugged. “But there were a lot of things we needed worse.”
People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.
—Leo Burke
BACKSLIDING
Letter of Resignation
Dear Lord:
Kindly accept this as my resignation, due to the reasons listed below.
1. I am no longer interested in winning souls.
2. Those who look to me for spiritual guidance can get it from someone else.
3. The few who are grateful for my efforts don’t mean a thing.
4. My critics are ready to move in, and I want to show them I’m not too old and feeble to move out.
5. I’m not interested in church. I hate crowds.
6. The will of the Lord is no longer first with me.
Cordially,
A. Backslider
Backsliding begins when knee-bending stops.
BAD NEWS
A man went to his doctor for a checkup. He went back the next day to get the results from the tests.
“Doc, how do I look?”
The doctor said, “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”
The man said, “Let me hear the good news first.”
The doctor said, “Well, the good news is you have twenty-four hours to live.”
“Good grief! That’s the good news?” the man gasped. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to live? Then what’s the bad news?”
The doctor replied, “The bad news is I was supposed to tell you yesterday.”
BALANCE
Martin Luther once said that God’s truth is like a drunkard trying to ride a horse: prop him up on one side, and he topples over on the other. Balance is indeed hard to achieve in applying God’s truth no less than in understanding it. We are always in danger of pushing some biblical principle to an extreme.
BALDNESS
There’s one thing about baldness—it’s neat.
If a person is bald in the front, he’s a thinker. If he’s bald in the back, he’s a lover. If he’s bald all over, he thinks he’s a lover.
BAPTISM
A preacher in the South preached constantly on water baptism. The people were tired of it. The deacons suggested he preach on something else. He said, “Okay, give the text and I’ll preach on it.” They gave him Genesis 1:1.
The next Sunday he said, “By request the text today is Genesis 1:1.” He read it and then said, “When the Lord created the earth, He made it one-fourth land and three-fourths water, and that brings me back to the subject of water baptism.”
BAPTISTS
In a small west Texas town, there were three churches in one block: Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. On Sunday evenings they had the windows open. One evening the Methodists sang, “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?” The Baptists heard it and sang, “No, Not One.” The Presbyterians sang, “Oh, That Will Be Glory for Me.”
When Charles Spurgeon was saved at the age of fifteen, he told his mother he wanted to be baptized by immersion. She said, “I’ve prayed for you for years, but not that you would become a Baptist.” He replied, “That shows, dear Mother, that God is able to do abundantly above all you think.”
In a train robbery, the robber came to a pastor. “You won’t rob me, a preacher, will you?”
“What denomination are you?”
“I’m a Baptist.”
The robber put his gun in his left hand and extended his right hand to the pastor and said, “Put it there, Pastor. I’m a Baptist too.”
A Baptist minister and a Methodist minister were talking one day about the seating capacity of their churches. The Baptist preacher was telling that his church could hold only two hundred people. Several days later they happened to meet again and the Baptist preacher said something about his church holding three hundred. “But I thought you said it seated only two hundred.” “Oh, but you don’t know how narrow we Baptists are.”
Three pastors—a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and a Baptist—each faced the problem of bats. The Presbyterian said they shot them with shotguns. The Methodist said, “We are more compassionate. We wrapped them in a big blanket and took them to a woods far away and let them go. But they beat us back to the church.” The Baptist pastor said, “We baptized each one and made them members of our church, and we haven’t seen them since.”
BASEBALL
The baseball season is upon us and an office manager we know passes along this explanation of the game, given to her by her grandson: You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s on the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When three men are out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. When both sides have been in and out nine times, including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.
—Bits & Pieces
BEAUTY
Socrates, when he looked into the shops of Athens, remarked, “How many things I can do without.” He was uneasy in the presence of luxury. From what we know of him, it does not surprise us that he offered the prayer, “Beloved Pam, and all ye other gods that haunt this place, grant that I may become inwardly beautiful.”
BEGINNINGS
The victory of the Allied forces in North Africa signaled a turning point in the early stages of World War II. After this crucial campaign, Winston Churchill made one of his most memorable statements: “This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”