Tommy Mann

    Psalm 95 is a song of praise to God for His goodness. It is believed that as the ancient Jews recited this psalm they would prostrate themselves in a posture of worship, as the sixth verse contains this instruction: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!”   But the chapter begins with these words: “Oh come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise (v.1-2)!”   We should certainly sing to the Lord with thanksgiving because of all that He has done for us. Psalm 95 takes a sharp turn by looking back at the Jews in the Exodus who were not grateful. They put the Lord to the test and complained, even when God was providing water from a rock and manna for breakfast each morning.    We do not want to repeat their mistakes, but it is easy to do that when we focus on our wants inst...

  I read about a businessman who had an idea for a book. The title was going to be  A Million Thanks,  and the book was just going to say “Thanks” one million times. The idea was not to sell the book, but to hand them out for free to his clients as his unique way of expressing his gratitude for their business. He submitted the title to the Library of Congress to obtain the rights to his book.   But the Library of Congress responded by saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” It is not possible to copyright just a single word, even if it is used a million times. I love what this demonstrates—that no one owns the exclusive rights to “thanks.” Being thankful is in the public domain; no one will get in trouble for saying thank you.    That means we all can and should be thankful people, and more than that, we should express our gratitude often. We should regularly say thank you to those who bless us, whether it is our Sunday school teachers, the ones who work with our ...

When we went to bed on Tuesday, November 26, th our main concern was Reagan being discharged from the Children’s Hospital in Greenville. On Monday she had her ureters re-implanted into her bladder, and our prayer was that we could all be home by Thanksgiving. Early Wednesday morning Alicia left the Greenville hospital and went to Spartanburg Regional to see her doctors at the Maternal/Fetal Medicine office. I stayed with Reagan, and her doctor came in and said he would like her to stay one more night. I crawled in the bed with Reagan and turned on the new Sophia the First movie, and when I looked out the window a heavy snow had begun to fall. “It’s going to be a good day,” I thought. Reagan was feeling better and we had nothing to do but relax and enjoy the snow. It’s snowing. That was the text message I sent to Alicia. I began to record the snow falling on my phone as I awaited her response. The response I received was not at all what I expected. I...

Many of us know that the Bible says that Christians are saved by faith (Ephesians 2:8), but did you know there was a man that was saved by thanks? Luke 17 records the time that Jesus was encountered by 10 lepers; lepers were people who suffered from the debilitating disease known as leprosy. Leprosy was thought to be contagious, although we now know that it wasn’t. Out of fear of causing an outbreak, lepers were quarantined and confined to spend out their days in leper colonies. Since there was no known cure for the disease, its victims would gradually decline until they lost their battle. Since there were no real doctors in those times, people who were thought to be infected with leprosy had to appear before a priest, and that priest would follow the guidelines from the Law (Leviticus 13) in diagnosing it; in the same way, if a leper thought he had been healed he would go back before the priest. It is possible that the lepers we are about to see in Luke 17 had just been diagnosed ...

One of my favorite parts of what I do is going into the schools. We have a Bible study called First Priority that meets at the high school, and at our three junior highs at Lockhart, Sims, and Jonesville. There are hundreds 6th-8th graders that pack out Sims every Wednesday morning, and some days it can be difficult to keep the crowd quiet. I’ll be the first to admit that the majority of these students are not there because of their love for Jesus or their desire to hear the message, but we always believe that we are helping to make a difference. Last Wednesday, due to other circumstances, I was the only pastor at Sims. The room quickly got out of control, and I was even mocked by a few students. In my frustration I later told my wife that I wasn’t going back to Sims. That night at church a lady handed me a hand written note from one of her students who goes to Sims. The note was very simple, thanking me for visiting each week and teaching her the Bible. Aside from making me cr...