Blogs by Leland Maples

In our weekly Bible study, we are studying II Timothy, the apostle Paul’s final epistle. Paul knew his time was short on earth. He experienced the loneliness and ridicule of “sticking to his guns” in his spiritual beliefs. When he was saved, he was ridiculed and hated by his peers, the religious leaders of Israel. Now, in his final months, those he had befriended with the gospel of Christ had also forsaken him. Paul was not what you would call a rough or physical man, like Peter, but he was mentally and spiritually tough, yet it is obvious from his writings that he hurt when men turned...

The latest Pew Poll is out and again there is more falling away from the “old paths.” America has just celebrated their 233 birthday, farther removed than ever from her founding fathers. Men may debate the Christianity of our forefathers. Were they Deists or Christians, etc? What we all know and is not debatable, is that they all exhibited a tremendous amount of God-consciousness. Every where you look, you find the hand of God recognized by our forefathers. The majority of them recognized Jesus Christ as the Son of God, Who died, was buried and rose again. The footprints of such beliefs...

We live in unusual and interesting times. Never have things moved so fast around us. It took right at 5900 years for transportation to advance from animals to automobiles. In a 100 years man has achieved speed faster than sound, traveled to destinations as far as the moon and changed the English Bible over 200 times. In less than 50 years we have seen the most prosperous and advanced civilizations legalize murdering innocent babies, approve same sex marriages and strive to remove God and the Ten Commandments from our society. Man keeps contradicting himself. One day he is saying that Jesus...

Not too many years ago, subjects like abortion, homosexuality, same sex marriages, children born out of wedlock, adultery, unmarried couples living together and our continued drug problem would have caused our pulpits to be on fire. Those God-called men would have preached loud and clear about God’s judgment. With our morals and convictions hitting an all time low, our pulpits are speaking of developing a better self-esteem and encouraging more tolerance. Preaching about sin is pretty much passé. Now we have communicators and lecturers who ignore God and His evaluation of this world....