It’s hard to believe that we are already entering another summer season of ministry. Depending on your occupation and age, the word summer likely holds varying connotations for you. If you are a student, it means vacation! If you are a teacher, it means preparation. If you are a farmer, it means work.

Moses had Aaron; David had Jonathan; and Paul had Barnabas, then Silas, then Timothy. Moody had Torrey, Frank Norris had Louis Entzminger, and Lee Roberson had J. R. Faulkner.

I don’t know if your life is like mine, but I find that time is moving at breakneck speed. I hardly get a new week started when it seems like the week is over and I am looking at a new week. They say that time moves quicker the older you get. I don’t know why that is, but it certainly seems true.

Have you ever experienced the frustration of wanting someone to change his spiritual direction more than the individual himself desired to change? Maybe it’s a junior higher in your youth group who just doesn’t know when to be serious, a senior high girl who craves all the wrong attention, or maybe it’s a teen who is just plain apathetic toward biblical truth.

In war there are no blacks and whites, young and old—only soldiers. Let us fight for Him. “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.”—2 Timothy 2:3–4

One of the greatest responsibilities of being a parent is to instill the proper values and convictions in your children. When we give our children a strong foundation of biblical values and convictions, we are teaching them that life is about more than making ourselves happy and pleasing ourselves. Rather we are to live for God and please Him.

What comes to your mind when you think of the word renew? At first we might think of something that is expired and needs to be renewed, such as a driver’s license or passport. Or, we might recall a time when we ran out of our medicine and needed to renew a prescription.

I had the privilege to be saved and raised in independent Baptist churches. Having now served as the pastor of an unaffiliated Bible-based Baptist church for twenty-eight years, I’m deeply grateful for my heritage. Why? Because even though other groups do good works, the autonomous Baptists have generally believed in and practiced the ten traits below which are clearly emphasized in Scripture and are timeless in their effectiveness in local church ministry.

Hyper Calvinists believe in unconditional election—the teaching that there is no condition for God choosing you to be saved before creation, other than His secret will. In fact, one well known Calvinist has even stated that faith is not a condition for election.

This year marks my twentieth year to pastor what researchers call a megachurch—a church averaging over two thousand people in weekly attendance. Statistics on pastoral tenure in churches suggest that for a pastor to remain twenty-eight years in the ministry, let alone in one church, is unusual—especially when twenty of those years are overflowing with the needs of a large congregation.