From the Home Place

May 12, 2026

Good morning dear readers. At 5 a.m. the thermometer reads 45 degrees, moving to 75 later on today. When I put ‘ol Coffee out the door, I didn’t notice a cloud in the sky anywhere around Lusk. It looks like we are already in the hot and dry season.

Back in the 1960’s a flashlight cost around $2 including two D-batteries. If it was really dark when you turned said flashlight on, you could notice that it was lit, otherwise you were better off to grab a lantern if you really needed light for a project outside in the dark. And the good part was that those two big D-size batteries might last long enough to get you back to the house!

Yesterday I was working on a project out in the shop when I dropped a very small screw that I needed to finish putting my pocketknife back together. So, I grabbed my $22 LED flashlight to look for the screw that sounded like it went under my workbench. When I turned the 1,200 Lumen light on, it lit up the whole shop! I swear, a pilot could have landed an airplane in there! That flashlight contains two small AAA batteries that have been in it for nearly a year. Now I have a flashlight that when the batteries start to get dim, I just plug it into an outlet and “recharge” the same batteries.

Here’s my point, the flashlights of yesterday were nothing when compared to the brightness of much smaller, rechargeable flashlights of today. Much like when I first started studying my Bible in the 1980’s, all I had was an old Ryrie Study Bible and a Cruden’s Compact Concordance for study tools. Today, I have a computer program that contains sever thousand books on just about that many topics. It also contains maps and charts from the times before Christ up to the present day. The crazy part is that all I have to do is to type in a topic or name and every book containing my desired information is opened and available for my reading pleasure.

No longer do I need to spend hours searching for an answer to a theological question, all I have to do is to type the question into my Bible program and there is the answer, according to several different commentaries. The first Bible Commentary I owned was a used one-volume book. It contained comments on the entire Bible, more or less.

Today, my computer contains several different volumes of commentaries that are only a click away. Study is almost a thing of the past, now I just click and read. But you know what? I miss the hours of looking in this book and then another book and then another to find just one answer. Way-back-when, we pastors would borrow books one from another. But we would never just go borrow a book, usually we would listen to each other, pray with each other and encourage each other in the process. You see, as pastors we didn’t just trade books, we also shared life.

Today, I just click my computer, gather information and move on to the next task at hand. For most pastors, that next project is usually an administrative task rather than a theological task. I serious, most pastors of today spend more time managing the local church than they spend studying for Sunday’s sermon. Sermon prep used to take around 30 hours each week. Most of today’s pastors spend a fraction of that time in study because they have to deal with all of the administrative tasks of the local church. To be honest, many preachers that I know today, purchase an outline for Sunday’s sermon, if not the entire sermon; all they have to do is read what their printer spits out.

As I said earlier, I miss the days when it took hours of hard study to put together enough information for a Sunday’s sermon, way back when. That which has made sermon prep so very much easier today, has also robbed me of total dependence upon the Holy Spirit to help me find the answer to the questions I knew my people would be asking about the next sermon. You see my friends, we didn’t preach on topics nor did we do sermon series back then. We preached our way through an entire book of the Bible because that was the only commentary we owned.

Usually, a pastor of 1980 would buy one volume of a commentary series so that he could comfortably preach on the Bible book that his new commentary contained. But every pastor owned a “pulpit” Bible that was full of written notes, cross references and underlined verses. Yes, I remember when the first Bible highlighters came into existence; my what a blessing those little sticks of colored juice were!

Yesterday, I walked into the office of my pastor to ask him a question. Two hours later I left there feeling like I was one of the most blessed people on the face of this earth, I had just spent a couple of hours with my pastor, talking about lessons each of us are working on. It almost felt as good as it did when a fellow pastor would leave my office after we had spent hours laboring over his sermon for the next Sunday. Yep, those were the good ‘ol days! Now days, for the most part, it’s just me and my computer. I don’t need a Bible, nor a stack of commentaries, nor the help of a fellow pastor, nor that of the Holy Spirt to prepare the lesson for this Sunday, it’s all on my computer – my what a shame.

So, this Sunday, if your pastor feeds you good Biblical food, thank him for being a good student of the Scriptures. Let him know that you appreciate his study time, and encourage him to take time to be holy, not just a pencil pusher.

My prayer is that as flashlights have become much brighter, so have our pastors and Bible teachers. My prayer is that they too will plug into a regular supply of Biblical truth to “recharge” their batteries, because we all need our pastor to allow biblical truth to shine brightly on Sunday. After all, the people we come into contact during the next week need to see that we have “been with Jesus.”

Appreciating today’s pastors with you, Neal