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In all Things

You’ve spent your day on a moving train, working nonstop for 14 hours.
You’ve carried suitcases, run errands, made beds, shined shoes, and
politely greeted countless passengers, even the rude ones. If you’re
lucky, you’ll get four hours of sleep tonight. You are a Pullman porter.

In the 1920s, job opportunities for African Americans were limited. At a
time when most worked as sharecroppers or housekeepers, the job of a Pullman
porter was highly respected in the black community. Porters had steady work
and got to travel around the country. But their friendly smiles and neatly
pressed uniforms masked the hardships of the job. Porters clocked 400 hours
a month, earned low wages, and could be fired for speaking up about their
difficult working conditions.

 

Pullman Porters Chicago 1920’s
Chicago Museum
Facing Freedom In America

What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all- how will he not also, along
with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God
has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died –
more than that, who was raised to life – is at the right hand of God and is also interceding
for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution
or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all
day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate
us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8: 31-39


No Fear

 

” Where there is no vision, there is no hope.”

 

“Fear of something is at the root of hate for others and hate within will eventually
destroy the hater. Keep your thoughts free from hate, and you need have no fear
from those who hate you.”

George Washington Carver (1864-1943)


My Soul

 

“I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.”

“Great men cultivate love … only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.”

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)


The Gospel

 

” WHEN the GOSPEL is at STAKE, EVERYTHING is at STAKE.”

R.C. Sproul (1939-2017)


Men Have Forgotten God

 

 

” But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of

the ruinous Revolution that swallowed

up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat:

Men have forgotten God;

that’s why all this happened.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

(1918-2008)

 


Hell

 

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)

 


Think

 

 

“In God’s name, I beg you to think!”

Demosthenes (384 – 322 BC)


But Mark This:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.

2 Tim 3:1


Serve The Lord

“Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your forefathers worshiped beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living.

 

  But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24: 14,15


We Are More Than Conquerors

 

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

 

For I am convinced that neither death nor life,

neither angels nor demons,

neither the present nor the future,

nor any powers, neither height nor depth,

nor anything else in all creation,

will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:37-39

 

The overcoming of fear—that is what we are proclaiming here. The Bible, the gospel, Christ, the church, the faith—all are one great battle cry against fear in the lives of human beings.

Fear is, somehow or other, the archen­emy itself. It crouches in people’s hearts. It hollows out their insides, until their resistance and strength are spent and they suddenly break down.

Fear secretly gnaws and eats away at all the ties that bind a person to God and to others, and when in a time of need

that person reaches for those ties and clings to them, they break and the individual sinks back into himself or herself, helpless and despairing,

               while hell rejoices….

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

From “The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” edited and introduced by Isabel Best.