The occasion was a silver anniversary buffet for our 25th class reunion from college. Of course I was much younger than any of those mid-life folks that I graduated with. What happened to them? But anyway, the location was our alma mater, Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. That was a great training place - it was founded and named after the outstanding evangelist of the 19th century, D. L. Moody.

Now, we met for breakfast in one of several private dining rooms off of the main dining room; they kind of reserve these for special occasions. And as you might expect, each one is named after a person who prominently figured in the founding of the school or the leadership of the school. But we were in the Kimball Room. So, I surveyed our group of distinguished alumni and I said, "Who was Kimball? We're in his room. Who was Kimball?" No one knew. But none of us would have been there if it hadn't been for him. Who knows, maybe you're a Kimball.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Extraordinary Ordinary."

Our word for today from the Word of God - Acts 4:13. Peter and John are in big trouble. They have been preaching about Jesus in the temple, they have attracted quite a crowd, and as a result the Sanhedrin, the governing body, calls them before them for a private hearing. They are not pleased with the preaching of Peter and John. However, it says, "When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus." The Jewish leaders were astonished that such ordinary men could be living such extraordinary lives.

Now back to the question we began with, "Who was Edward Kimball?" Well, he was a Sunday School teacher in Boston many years ago, teaching this little class of teenage boys. One of those boys in particular was biblically illiterate. He was out-of-step with everybody else in the class - he couldn't find anything in his Bible, didn't know anything in the Bible.

One day Edward Kimball felt led by the Lord to go where this lost young man worked at a shoe store. He felt led to go there and speak to him about accepting Christ, and the young man did. That shoe salesman prayed to give his heart to Jesus in the back room of that shoe store. Now, hardly anyone has ever heard of Edward Kimball the Sunday School teacher, but everyone in the Christian world has heard of D. L. Moody. Because it was Dwight Moody, that powerful evangelist, the founder of a place that has trained thousands of people for Christian work, that was the young man that gave his heart to Christ that day. There never would have been a D. L. Moody if it hadn't been for the faithfulness of one of God's ordinary people.

Is that an encouragement to you? I hope so. Maybe you consider yourself very ordinary, but God loves to do extraordinary things through ordinary people. That's what Acts 4:13 is all about. But they weren't ordinary anymore, because they had been with Jesus. Daily contact with Jesus leads to a total control by Jesus, and it leads to power being released in your life through which you can really make a difference.

You say, "Oh, I'm just a Sunday School teacher. I'm just a helper. I'm just a choir member. I'm just an untrained, simple person who loves Jesus." You're not a "just a..." Stop it! Don't keep saying you're "just a..." You're not that if you open yourself up to letting the Holy Spirit make your ordinary extraordinary. Did Edward Kimball know how extraordinary that little conversation would turn out to be? No, we never do. We do these little things for Jesus that turn out to be big things.

You can count on the Lord to take an ordinary person, doing ordinary things, and if you obey Him, He will make ordinary extraordinary.

My wife and I had been staying at a friend's house at the New Jersey shore. It was a great setting to be working on a book about "Peaceful Living in a Stressful World." One night this powerful storm hit the area, and we heard the wind howling and the rain was bombarding that house all night long. By morning, the storm was over, and I wanted to go to the beach to see what the storm tide might have deposited there. Even though the sun was out and the storm was history, the sea was still churning all brown. In fact, even when there wasn't a storm that week, the ocean never rested.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft, and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Peace Deficit."

There are times when the sea is more turbulent than others - like during and after that storm we experienced - but it's never really calm. Not unlike what's going on inside a lot of people's hearts - maybe yours. There are times that are more turbulent than others for sure, but there's never any lasting personal peace. It's not that we don't try to find something that will give us peace. We try all kinds of antidotes, all kinds of anesthetics, all kinds of escapes, all kinds of experiences, relationships, or people. But still where's the lasting peace?

The Bible tells us about a condition that's described in our word for today from the Word of God very graphically in Isaiah 57:20-21. What a picture this is! "The wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud." Now, we can all picture that. If you've ever been to the ocean, you can picture it. That's a human heart. "'There is no peace,' says my God, 'for the wicked.'"

Now, we don't want to think we're part of the people God calls "the wicked." But I am and so are you. Because God is referring to all those who have broken His laws, who have run their own lives, and who have missed His standard of perfection. Hello? That would be every one of us. And the Bible says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). And God's X-ray of what's going on in our heart reveals a two-word bottom line - "No peace." It may be a feeling that you know all too well. No relationship has ever given you lasting personal peace, no accomplishment, not even a religion or spiritual experience.

After golfer Payne Stewart died in a plane crash, some years ago really, a lot of us learned about a personal commitment he had made to Jesus Christ about a year before. In that last year of his life, he said "I'm so much more at peace with myself than I've ever been in my life. I don't understand how I lived so long without it." Maybe you've lived long enough without that peace. You'll find it where Payne Stewart and millions of others have found it...in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

There's no peace until you have peace with God. And there's no peace with God until that sin that separates you from Him is forgiven. And there's no forgiveness without the Savior who died to pay for your sin. As the Bible says, "The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him" (Isaiah 53:5).

Are you ready for some peace in your soul; the peace that has eluded you all these years? Then you're ready for Jesus. You're ready to begin your personal relationship with Jesus Christ - the love you were made for. And you begin it by giving you to Him. You can tell Him that right where you are, "Jesus, I'm done running my own life. I deserve the penalty for that, but you took it on the cross. And because you love me that much, I love you back and I'm giving me to you beginning today. I am yours."

At that point, I can say, "Welcome to the family of God." I want you to go to our website and there find the information that will help you be sure you belong to Jesus Christ. It's ANewStory.com.

Like the ocean that never rests, your heart may have never really been at peace. But it's about to be if you'll claim this promise from Jesus Himself, "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you."

Every once in a while we think someone left the floodlight on in the backyard, so I look outside the window to discover the floodlight isn't on - the moonlight is! It's one of those really impressive full-moon nights. The most beautiful one that my wife and I had, was when we were on vacation in the mountains. Our cabin was nestled in this quiet valley next to a gentle little stream. Not long after dark, I noticed that the valley was ablaze with light! The full moon was rising in the eastern sky and it was casting this celestial glow over everything. It was perfectly positioned in the sky to just totally illuminate the valley we were in. But then, something made me realize what I was really looking at, and I said as we stood on the porch in admiration, "You know, that moon really isn't producing any light at all. It's just reflecting the light of the sun."

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Surprisingly Competent."

Our word for today from the Word of God comes from 2 Corinthians 3:18. Paul says, "And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." Now as followers of Jesus Christ we're supposed to light our world. Right? God has positioned you where you work, or live, or go to school, or where you shop, to make a difference, a Jesus-difference by your love, joy, your Jesus-treatment of people. See, you're supposed to light up what would otherwise be a much darker environment.

But we are like the moon; we have no glory of our own. This verse says we reflect Jesus' glory! He says it in another way in chapter 4, verse 7. "We have this treasure in jars of clay so that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us." See, anything we do for the Lord, it's all God.

Now we should be a lot brighter, I think, than we are. There are a lot of important things He wants to do through you, but maybe you're not making nearly the difference you should be making. It's probably because of one basic spiritual misunderstanding about who is the "sun" and who is the "moon." Maybe these are things you've been asked to do for the Lord, but you're afraid to say "yes" because you feel inadequate. You want people you're around to hear about Jesus, but you haven't said anything because you're afraid you'll mess it up.

God is putting before you some ways He wants you to make a difference, but you keep shrinking back. But see, you're missing something. You're not the "sun." You don't have to produce the power, or the words, or the strength, or the light to pull it off. It's Jesus who does the work. He's only asking for you to be available. He knows you and I can't produce the light - that's His job! He just wants you to be in a position to reflect His light onto the people around you. Doesn't that take a lot of pressure off? That means you can help somebody be in heaven with you someday.

In chapter 3, verse 5 in 2 Corinthians He says, "Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent." See, you can dare to step up to responsibility that would be impossible if it depended on you. It doesn't. It depends on the Son of God!

This "reflected" glory neutralizes our feelings of inadequacy and pride. Maybe you've begun to feel a little prouder of the kind of Christian you've been, or some of the things you've done for the Lord. News flash! You haven't done them! You are just - I am just - a glowing piece of rock. It's all Jesus, reflecting His glory through you. Why are you taking any credit for it?

If the sun were to go out some full-moon night, we would immediately know where the light's been coming from all along and how little the moon has to do with it. The light of the Son of God never goes out, and He chooses to reflect in your valley, through your life, your personality, your abilities, and even your weaknesses. Isn't that amazing? You can light up your world with light that doesn't come from you, but from the very Son of God himself!

The lady in the airplane seat next to me was from Norway. And I knew she had experienced something I needed to know about - winter months with very long nights and summer months with very long days. With our Native American team planning some major summer outreach among Native young people in Alaska at that point, I was especially interested in what our days would be like up there. My neighbor from Norway made the answer very clear - they'd be endless! She said that even after all the years living there, she could never sleep much in those northern days where there is virtually no dark. I thought, "O-o-o, it should be a lot of fun getting our team to sleep at night, when there is no night." But then I was curious to know about those December days when we have only about nine hours or so of daylight. She told me about a time when it was, in her words, "almost always dark" where she lives. It's hard for me to imagine weeks where you basically never see the light of the sun. It's not hard for me to imagine the way my Norwegian neighbor said many people feel during that time - really depressed.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "When It's Dark All the Time."

A long, depressing darkness. You don't have to live in the North Country to know what darkness like that feels like. I mean you can feel it in your heart. It may have been winter inside your soul for a long time - maybe concealed from others. You've got this smile, this really busy life, but it's still dark inside most of the time.

Maybe it's the guilt of past mistakes you've made that has brought on the long winter. Or just this nagging sense of worthlessness that goes way back, or a chronic despair over the pain of your past or maybe the meaninglessness of the present, or it could be the darkness might be summed up in one increasingly, desperate word - loneliness. But whatever the cause, this heaviness inside, this relentless darkness has been there long enough.

The end of a long, long night can begin with a hope-filled promise made by Jesus Christ - who has never made a promise He did not keep. It's our word for today from the Word of God in John 8:12, "Jesus said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'" Jesus promises that if you belong to Him, if you stay close to Him, He will lead you out of the darkness that no one else has been able to dispel. And that's the beginning of the end of your long, dark winter in your soul.

But only Jesus can replace your darkness with what He called "the light of life." Why? Because our problem really isn't the darkness. Near the North Pole in winter, the problem is that the sun doesn't shine there. Our problem isn't ultimately the darkness of our loneliness or our despair. It's the absence of the Light! We were created to live in the light of a love-relationship with our Creator, which we have lost by running our lives our way instead of His way. In God's words, "Your sins have separated you from your God." (Isaiah 59:2)

That separation could only be healed by the death penalty for your sin being erased. And that's what was going on when Jesus Christ was bleeding and dying on a cross. He was voluntarily paying for your sin, which is the ultimate cause of the darkness in your soul. And the forgiveness, the peace, and the light that He died to give you becomes yours when you tell Him you're trusting Him to be your Savior from your sin.

If you do that, Jesus will shed His light on every dark stretch you ever walk, including the darkest stretch of all, when one day you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Why don't you open your heart to Jesus today right where you are? It's been dark long enough. Tell Him, "Jesus, I'm yours."

If you really want to know that you've begun this relationship, that's why our website is there. Check it out today! It's ANewStory.com.

This wonderful promise of God will be all about you. It says, "God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves" (Colossians 1:13).

We were shooting some video footage of a group of teenagers and they were kind of surprised when they saw the result on a TV screen. We were seated in a little cluster on the floor discussing various youth issues, and what surprised them was the fact that when they saw it on the screen they realized we had focused close-up on each individual as they were commenting. Of course, they went, "Oh, no! Look at me!" See, they thought it was going to be this big group shot. We didn't want the viewers to be distracted by anyone else, so most of the time we would zoom our lens in a real tight close-up, so you would only see one person. The telephoto effect actually makes a big difference.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Love Through a Telephoto Lens."

Now, our word for today from the Word of God comes from Proverbs 5:15, and it's talking about married love. It speaks about it in symbolic terms and then gets pretty direct. "Drink water from your own cistern, running water from your own well. Should your springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth."

And then God expresses here as the Inventor of sex that He is, some of the joy that He intended married couples to have, "A loving doe," it says, "a graceful deermay her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love."

This is really a passage about focused love. It's about a man who has eyes for only one woman and doesn't let his springs overflow anywhere else, who really has decided there's only one place for his love. As a result he enjoys a fulfilling and exciting relationship with her. Now, whether you're a husband or a wife, this secret of happiness is still the same. Marital and sexual fulfillment is the byproduct of focused love. Lasered love.

Notice here it says, "Let your ability to express love be yours alone" in so many words. And then in the King James Version, I like the way it says, "Rejoice with the wife of your youth. Let her satisfy you always." In other words there's a choice here. Let her/let him be enough. I choose to focus my telephoto lens on one person; there's no one else in my picture. As soon as you widen your focus, the discontentment, the dissatisfaction begins. Maybe you've been allowing other fantasies into your heart; maybe some of those sites you visited have fueled that kind of mental unfaithfulness.

Where should your heart be? Focusing all your fantasies on your husband or your wife. Those sexually-oriented pictures, the ads, the videos, the movies, the websites - they let other women and other men into a place that should be reserved for just one person. That's the way The Creator made it.

Maybe you joke about having a wandering eye. That's no joke! It dilutes your focus on that one man and that one woman. The soap opera love affairs, the flirtations with that other person, all those mental wanderings erode the excitement of focused love. Don't betray your lifetime partner in your fantasies. You'll both lose.

Decide to let her or let him be enough. Ask for Christ's strength to narrow your focus and you'll see just a close-up on one person. The best of married love is for those who choose love through that telephoto lens.

Our son's first word was the name he called me, "Da!" I know it's supposed to be "da da," but it was good enough for me. Now, our grandson's first word was "mama," which he liked so much that he just kept it rolling, "ma-ma-ma-ma-ma." Sort of the opposite of "da!" The first words children learn reflect what's going on around them. If they see Mama all the time, you can expect them to say her name early on. Sometimes, those first words aren't happy words. Our friends were dedicated missionaries in a war-torn part of the Middle East for years. Not long after their daughter was born, their area became a place where frequent bombardments and violence erupted all around them. Some of her first words told the story: "bomb," "gun."

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Lessons That Shape Your Child's Life."

Children learn what they live, for better or worse. For all our words as parents, it's ultimately what our children live that makes them into the people they become. And God doesn't give a human being any greater trust, any greater responsibility than the shaping of a little person that He made in His image.

God, who asks us to call Him our Heavenly Father, has left us parents and grandparents some great help in the book He wrote. The Bible passes along some valuable instructions given to a generation of parents who were trying to raise their children in a culture that had no use for the values they were teaching their children. And in a setting where their children were being given what their parents had to work for. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

His instructions to parents are recorded in Deuteronomy 11, beginning with verse 13, and it's our word for today from the Word of God. He begins by saying, "Love the Lord your God and...serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul." Parents need to give their children more than a religion. They need to show them a personal love relationship with the God who made them and a life that makes God the sun in your universe and everything else the planets that revolve around that sun.

Then God says: "Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds...teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses...so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land." In short, live your life in such a way your kids keep bumping into God wherever they turn; a real God that they see in real life situations.

It isn't enough for your child to hear the truth. He or she needs to see what the truth looks like in your life. You teach them faith by how you handle the storms and the stresses that hit your family. You teach them loving their neighbor by seeing your compassion for hurting people. They learn about forgiveness by you forgiving them and asking them to forgive you. They learn that lying is wrong from a parent who always tells the truth. They learn about managing anger when they see you always make things right before your day ends. They learn to love God's Word when they see you meeting with God with His book in your lap.

The truth is, children grow up thinking God is like whatever their parents are like, and that's scary. Especially if you know you have a dark side that all too often is what your kids see; a dark side that continually causes you to hurt most the people you love most. Honestly, your child is your mirror. And if you don't like what you see in that mirror, it's time for you to know the Savior of mommies and daddies. That's Jesus, who died for our sins so they could be forgiven, who rose from His grave with the power to help us change what we could never change about ourselves. Our children show us a truth we may have been able to run from before. We need a Savior. We need Jesus.

This might be the day to make this Savior your Savior. I'd love to help you with that, that's why our website is there. Go to ANewStory.com.

You can't begin to imagine how different your home could be - how different you could be - if Jesus lives there, in you.

Funny things happen when church youth groups go on summer missions trips. Suddenly these comfortable American kids are facing a totally unfamiliar situation, maybe for the first time in their lives!

There's money they don't quite understand. There's a language that's different from theirs. Surroundings that are really different from their comfy little room back home. Unusual places to sleep, food they're not used to eating.

And suddenly, teenagers who seldom have quiet time in the Bible, are up early every morning for devotions. Amazing! In fact if you look, there's a teenager with a Bible on every rock. It's not quite like that back home is it? What is happening? And kids who find prayer back home kind of boring? Well, now they want prayer meetings. Some who have never prayed aloud before, suddenly find the words. What's going on here? Maybe the same thing that's happening where you are.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Personally Bankrupt, Spiritually Rich."

Now, our word for today from the Word of God comes from 2 Corinthians 1, and I'm beginning to read at verse 8. Paul is struggling. He says, "We are under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure." Maybe that's something you can relate to. He goes on to say, "so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts, we felt the sentence of death. But this happened so that..."

Okay, pause for a moment. He's finding the reason for this heavy pressure, getting to the end of his rope, this despairing even of life, why has God allowed this to happen; what's the reason? He says, "It happened so that we might not rely on ourselves but on God." And then he adds, "...who raises the dead." Wow!

Paul says, "I'm bankrupt, man! I have no resources left. Why? How did I get to this point? I had run out of me to depend on. I totally abandoned me and the situation to God." What happened? The next verse says, "He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us."

I told you about the mission trip scenario. Kids are stripped of everything they usually can depend on, and so they're forced to grab Jesus as if their lives depended on Him. Well, it isn't that you suddenly started needing the Lord when you're bankrupt. You just don't realize it until you're bankrupt. Then something very intimate happens in your love relationship with Jesus. You experience His unlimited power at the point of your total powerlessness. In a sense, you don't really know the Lord until you really need the Lord.

Our safe, predictable, well resourced Christianity insulates us from really living by faith.

And then God allows the bottom to drop out, just so He can hold you up. And you find out what He can do when there's none of you and it's all God. And then you can learn that He's enough. He fills up your empty bankrupt account and in a paradox that only God could reveal to us.

Are you ready for it? Here it is: in your bankruptcy you can finally be rich.

Ahhh, Nantucket! My wife and I had some wonderful, romantic times on that picturesque little island 30 miles off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. The little village of Nantucket is just full of colonial charm. And everywhere you look you find reminders of its glory days in the whaling industry. I was surprised to learn, though, that during those glory days most of the town actually burned to the ground, right to the docks. It was a tragedy that nearly put Nantucket out of business. But it was a tragedy that never had to happen. It was an ugly, four-letter word that ultimately destroyed Nantucket, and the word wasn't fire. It's a word that's still destroying things.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "No Turf In His Kingdom."

Turf. Yep, that's what destroyed Nantucket Village many years ago. See, when the fire companies arrived at the site of the blaze that day, the fire was still small. But the firefighters got into an argument over who got to use the fire hydrants. They all wanted to be the heroes. Duh! And while they were fighting over turf, literally, the fire spread and they lost the town. That's hard to believe isn't it? But it's true. Or is it that hard to believe? Losing the town while the rescuers fight over turf. That's still happening today, and it's not a new problem.

It's talked about in our word for today in the Word of God, 1 Corinthians 1:10-13. "I appeal to you, brothers," Paul said," in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some of Chloe's household have informed me there are quarrels among you." Sadly, this tendency for God's people to fragment into camps and different groups, to focus on their differences, to get entangled in quarrels, has infected Christ's church for 2,000 years.

And we tend to operate as if only our group, our leader, is right. Paul said here, "One of you says, 'I follow Paul'; another, 'I follow Apollos'; another, 'I follow Cephas"; and still another, 'I follow Christ'" (that was the really spiritual group.) "Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?" The apostle seems to be saying, "Folks, can't you see? It's all about Jesus! This turf thing is tearing His Body apart!"

It was this turf pride that allowed a fire to destroy Nantucket Village while the rescuers argued with each other. Well, today our world is burning down. Lost people are farther from Christ than ever, but we have more means of rescuing them than ever before! So where are the spiritual firefighters? They're fighting over turf.

We're so concerned about our organization, our denomination, our church, our group's doctrinal distinctives, the agenda of our group, getting the credit so we can get the glory, or maybe the donations, or loyalty to human leaders rather than to the Lord who raised up those leaders. And meanwhile, a lost world is burning down around us. This has to break the heart of God.

There's probably 90% Bible-based Christians agree on, maybe 10% we disagree on. Why do we have to spend 90% of our energy on the 10% we disagree on? That's what makes us "us." We're surrounded by a life-or-death situation! And like the people at Ground Zero when the towers came down, we need to pull together for a desperate rescue operation! Turf does not matter when people are dying!

It's time to unite our resources to defeat a militant and united enemy; to get the attention of neighbors who know nothing about the cross, replacing "My kingdom come" with "Thy kingdom come!"

There's no stopping God's people when they're united; there's no stomaching God's people when they're divided into hundreds of little personal kingdoms. The town's on fire, folks! The firemen have got to work together!