Pulley Publications

  The Color Purple (Mark 15:20)     Are you a purple person? Do you wear the color purple? Do you know what the color purple means? How many of you have seen the movie The Color Purple , the musical The Color Purple , or both? Whether it's the old or new movie, The Color Purple is one of my favorite stories. The lies, the music, the characters, the story, and, of course, the purple flowers captivated me. For a long time, I wondered how it got the name The Color Purple . Eventually, I realized the flowers inspired it. Today, I invite you to dig deep into the meaning of purple. We see the color purple in the story of Jesus on the cross. They stripped Him naked, took all His clothes, and put a purple robe on Him, along with a crown of thorns on His head so that they could mock Him. They used purple to ridicule Him, laughing at Him and calling Him "King of the Jews." It wasn’t meant in reverence, honor, celebration, or praise. It was mockery and persecution. Yet Jesus ...

  What’s Going to Last? (Matthew 24:35) My question for today is: what’s going to last forever? A lot of things that we place great emphasis on are only temporary and have no eternal value. They are not everlasting; they are just temporary. As the song says, "Build your hopes on things eternal." The things we can see are temporary, but the things we cannot see are everlasting. Jesus said to them, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." So, even heaven is temporary. I know people talk about the walls of jasper, the streets of gold, and the crystal sea, but Jesus said heaven is temporary. Scripture speaks of an old heaven and a new heaven if there's an old one and a new one, it means heaven must be temporary. Many times, people put all their energy into dying and going to heaven, or they focus on the belief that when Jesus returns, we'll go to heaven. But heaven is not everlasting; it will pass away because heaven is a physica...

  The Real JESUS (Matthew 24:31-46)   Who Are You Following: The Real Jesus or the Religious Jesus? Are you following the real Jesus or the religious Jesus? The biblical Jesus or the whitewashed Jesus that is often presented in Hollywood and the movies? The real Jesus is not who you think he was. The real Jesus came from a blended family everyone didn’t have the same father in Jesus’ household, and they weren’t all full-blood brothers and sisters. They were a blended family. If Jesus were around today, he might have been on Maury Povich to find out who the father was because Joseph wasn’t the biological father. The real Jesus had anger issues. He came to the temple and threw people out, turned over tables, and cleared out the church. Today, we would have called the police and had him locked up or committed to an insane asylum. The real Jesus needed therapy. In modern times, his friends and family might have taken up a collection because he didn’t have insurance. He was bur...