Life Lessons with Dr. Steve Schell

Do we realize what a treasure we hold in our hands when we open a Bible? The very words of God were written down and preserved for thousands of years so that, today, we can hear them afresh and believe. Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, probably between 1446 B.C. and 1406 B.C. His writings and then those of all the others who wrote the books that are...

What would you pray for if you knew you were going to be executed tomorrow morning? A legion of angels? The rapture? A good lawyer? I think most of us would be fervently pleading for a miraculous change of circumstance, which is what makes Jesus’ prayer that evening so amazing. He didn’t ask to be rescued at all. He quickly acknowledged that the time had come for Him to die, but then began to pray...

Jesus’ disciples keep surprising us. You would think that by the final evening prior to His arrest they would have developed a strong, unshakable faith. After all, they had been watching Him minister and listening to Him teach for the past two and a half years. What greater miracle did He need to perform, or how much clearer could He be in telling them who He was and why He’d come? They had seen t...

If you want to know how you’re doing spiritually, all you have to do is answer one simple question: “Do I have joy?” If I’m full of fear, there is no joy. If I harbor bitterness toward someone, there is no joy. If I grieve the Holy Spirit by saying or doing something harmful to another, there is no joy. If I allow an addiction to control me, or follow after the passions of my flesh, there is no jo...

There are spiritual truths that you cannot understand, no matter how smart you are, until God reveals them to you. Once you finally understand, the meaning seems so obvious you find it hard to believe that you never saw it before. But the fact is, until God explained it to you, it never made sense. This is what Jesus was explaining to His disciples that evening when He said to them, “I still have...

What Jesus was about to do would change everything. All that God had done with the human race, from the time of Adam and Eve onward, looked forward to this moment. Even before He made the world, God peered into the future and saw everything. Listen to how Peter explained this,  “…knowing that you were ransomed, not with corruptible silver or gold from your futile conduct [which was] given to you b...

If you met God, would you recognize Him? You might say, “Well, of course I would. He’s an old man with a long white beard, sitting on a throne with a brilliant light shining around Him. And there are angels who worship before Him day and night.” But that’s only the way people picture Him, it’s not the Person Himself. What if there were no beard or throne or light or angels, could you still recogni...

There’s a great difference between being informed and conformed. Being informed means to receive knowledge. Our minds learn something we didn’t know. But to be conformed involves being changed from one thing into another. It’s what happens to a lump of clay when it’s pushed into a mold. It takes on an entirely different appearance; one that was determined by someone else. First the clay has to be...

Love is the key to longevity, and longevity is the key to much fruit. That means that in order to bear much fruit we have to stay in relationship with people for a long time, and to do that we have to love them. If love declines, we withdraw, we become judgmental, we cease to pray for that person and stop serving them. And when those activities stop our positive influence comes to an end. We cease...

To become a disciple of Jesus Christ requires enormous sacrifice. Basically, it requires a person to give Jesus the control of their life. From that point on, he or she will choose, over and over again, to live in such a way as to do whatever they can to help others meet Him. When Jesus called someone He never hid that fact from them. He never lured anyone with false promises of an easy life. Inst...

Salvation isn’t a transaction, it’s a relationship. We don’t do something to get something; we meet someone and then walk with that person for the rest of our lives. Then, when we arrive at our final day, He carries us through the veil of death into eternal life. It’s a relationship that connects us to the Creator, the One from whom all life flows. Life does not originate from an organic process,...

God is a generous God. He wants to share His authority, but only with a certain kind of person: His Son, and those who are like His Son. If He were to give His authority to anyone else they would use it for things that are not His will, which means He would be assisting them to do things that are harmful. And, of course, He can never do that because He is completely good. To deviate from His will...

When people talk about serving the Lord, when they try to convince us to selflessly minister to others, they often assure us that our service will bring with it a deep sense of fulfillment. We will feel good about ourselves knowing that we did something meaningful and helpful. But in practice, such feelings may boost our self-esteem for a moment, but they rarely make up for the level of personal s...

For the past few years these eleven men had been students. They had been listening, watching, helping and at times doing, but everything centered on Jesus. He preached, He healed, He cast out demons, He prayed, and He led them from place to place. So it was almost impossible for them to think that the kind of ministry that He had been doing could continue in any real way. And how sorry they must h...

ave you ever wondered why so many individuals who claim to be Christians behave so badly? In some cases, large numbers of so-called Christians have behaved worse than unbelievers and some even at a level of evil explainable only by demonic influence. Have you ever been reading a history book or watching a documentary only to suddenly realize that the horror being described was perpetrated by peopl...

God knew how weak we were when He called us. Yet He wanted us anyway. He knows us far better than we know ourselves. Nothing we do surprises Him. In one of the psalms David says, “He knows our frame, He knows we are but dust” (Ps 103:14). Clearly He’s not impressed with our natural capacities. How silly our well-intended promises must sound to Him when we try to assure Him that we will never fail...

They were in their final hours together. He would be arrested soon, and by nine o’clock in the morning He would be on the cross. So, Jesus devoted the time they had left to preparing His disciples for the future. Here were truths to which they would need to cling. Here were promises that would carry them through the trials they would face in the years ahead. He spoke of heaven, love, prayer, the H...

It’s one thing to be wounded by an enemy, but it’s another to be betrayed by a friend. We expect enemies to hate us, and usually know why they do. There’s been an offense or profound disagreement and we haven’t been able to repair it. And it seems that no matter how nice we try to be to people we all end up with a certain number of enemies. It’s just a sad fact of life. But betrayal happens very d...

 It’s counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense. You would think that the way to happiness would be by serving ourselves, but a self-centered life ends up being very depressing. At first it might seem to work, but as time goes on it produces anger. Life never seems to give us all we feel that we deserve and people seldom love us the way they should, so resentments build, leaving us angry. And that a...

It’s not enough to start out clean, we must arrive clean. When we place our faith in Jesus Christ our sins are forgiven, but on a day-to-day basis sins keep happening, and those sins, if left unattended, have the power to erode the very faith that saved us. That’s why our life with Jesus must be a daily walk, not a transaction that took place because of a prayer we once prayed or a doctrine we aff...

On that final evening in the upper room, Jesus did something that turned our world upside down. Normally, humans think that the more important a person is the more that person should be served and honored. We think important people are too dignified to do lowly tasks. We look for ways to give them special care. We give them the best seat, the best portion, the best of everything. They become the f...

On Sunday, five days before He was crucified, Jesus said this: “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” (Jn 12:31). This world is under God’s judgment because of sin, and the “ruler of this world” is the devil. So on that day Jesus was announcing that His death on the cross and His resurrection would potentially release all humans from these two forms of bond...

Truth doesn’t change, especially spiritual truth. The spiritual world is not a myth. There are lots of myths and fairy tales, invented stories about gods, goddesses and how the world was created. But that doesn’t change spiritual truth; it only makes it harder to find. The fact that there are people who say wrong things doesn’t mean right things don’t exist. And the truth is: There is a God who ma...

Fear is very lonely. It seems to place a barrier between us and others, and between us and God. It feels like we’ve walked into a chamber and closed the door. There, alone, trapped with our terrible thoughts, our emotions churn and our body grows weary. In fact the suffering that fear brings is often worse than the problem itself. We can suffer through the same event over and over again in our min...

The greatest decision you or I will ever make is to repent and receive by faith the righteousness of Jesus Christ. That decision changes where we will spend eternity. But there is another decision each person must make which determines the outcome of our life. It’s one of those decisions where to not make a decision is to make a decision. If we make the right choice our life will be “fruitful,” me...