Robin Steele

There are several variations of this story.  Here is a very detailed one:

A master chess champion was walking through an art gallery and came across a painting that fascinated him. It was the painting of a young man sitting at a table playing a game of chess with the devil. There was a look of glee on the face of the enemy and of panic on the face of the young man. The name of the painting was “checkmate.” As the master chess champion observed the painting, he felt uncomfortable. He was a master chess champion and there was something about the painting that just wasn’t right. He called for the curator of the gallery and told him to take the painting down. When that didn’t work he demanded to meet the artist. That was arranged and the meeting took place. The master chess champion arrived at the meeting with a chessboard and the chess pieces. He set the board up exactly as the artist had arranged it in the painting and said, “There is something wrong with your painting.” When the artist inquired as to what that might be, the master chess champion stated, “You have entitled the painting “Checkmate,” but that implies that the young man has no more moves to make.” The chess champion reached over to the board and moved the young man’s king one space and said, “The devil is now checkmated. When the king has one more move, the game isn’t over”.

Here is a depiction…  Read the rest of this entry →

This weekend I am speaking on JONAH and the GREAT FISH.  Sermon title: ‘I Am Jonah’.

While researching, I found a sermon by Charles Spurgeon.  Check it out this excerpt, what great writing and concept…

The life of Jonah cannot be written without God; take God out of the prophet’s history, and there is no history to write. This is equally true of each one of us. Apart from God, there is no life, nor thought, nor act, nor career of any man, however lowly or however high, Leave out God, and you cannot write the story of anyone’s career. If you attempt it, it will be so ill-written that it shall be clearly perceived that you have tried to make bricks without straw, and that you have sought to fashion a potter’s vessel without clay. I believe that, in a man’s life, the great secret of strength, and holiness, and righteousness, is the acknowledgment of God. When a man has no fear of God before his eyes, there is no wonder that he should run to an excess of meanness, and even to an excess of riot. In proportion as the thought of God dominates the mind, we may expect to find a life that shall be true and really worth living; but in proportion as we forget God, we shall play the fool. It is the fool who says in his heart, “No God,” and it is the fool who lives and acts as if there were no God.