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The dead don’t watch the news | Releasing our grip on the world

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

Those who rest in cemeteries hold no opinions about the season’s trending content. They are not concerned with the movements of financial markets, indifferent to the fortunes of sports franchises, and entirely unaffected by the latest shifts in fashion. Death has done what nothing else could: it has severed the connection between those souls and the world that once occupied so much of their attention.

First John 2:15 presses this image into the life of the believer: do not love the world or the things in the world. If the love of the world occupies the heart, the love of the Father cannot. These are not compatible allegiances.

The reasoning behind this command is not that the created world is evil in itself, but that the world as a system, with its values, its powers, and its appetites, is passing away. It is a temporary arrangement, already under judgement, already in the process of dissolution. To invest one’s deepest love in what is passing is to build one’s life on something that will not hold.

The believer has been crucified with Christ. This is not a metaphor for mild detachment; it is a description of a real severance. Reckoned as dead to this world’s systems, we are simultaneously alive to God in Jesus. That life does not compete with the world; it simply belongs to a different order entirely.

The invitation, then, is not primarily about what we give up, but about what we are freed to embrace. Release the grip on what is fading, and find in Christ something that does not fade. Let the world go. Concentrate on Him.

The world is passing away and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God continues to live forever.

1 John 2:17

The death that could not hold him

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JOHN COPIC

Consider the audacity of Peter’s sermon. Standing before thousands, he reaches not for flattery or careful diplomacy, but for the ancient scriptures, and he makes a declaration that would shake the foundations of everything his listeners assumed they understood.

David, he argues, was not writing about himself. How could he be? His tomb was visible, his body long since given to corruption. When Psalm 16 speaks of a Holy One who would not see decay, it reaches past David entirely, pointing toward One whose death could not hold him, whose resurrection would vindicate every promise God had ever made.

This is the breathtaking logic of Peter’s preaching: the resurrection is not a surprise ending. It is the fulfilment of a plan laid before the foundation of the world. What appeared to be Rome’s victory, what seemed like the triumph of jealousy and lawless hands, was in truth the sovereignly ordained moment around which all of history turns.

And here is where it touches us, wherever we stand today. Some in that Pentecost crowd had cried “Crucify him” with genuine hatred in their hearts. Yet mercy was offered freely. Guilt does not disqualify a soul from grace; it simply reveals how desperately grace is needed.

The question Peter’s sermon always asks is the same one that echoes still: knowing what you now know about this Jesus, what will you do?

He who was delivered over because of our wrongdoings, and was raised because of our justification.

Romans 4:25

How a preacher’s one-liner became the Kingdom Heirs’ new single

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TEXAS GOSPEL VOLUNTEER

The Kingdom Heirs are back with their first new music since 2024’s No better time, and this one comes swinging. The Sonlite Records quartet, longtime Southern Gospel favorites out of the mountains of East Tennessee, just released “Jesus never met a sinner (that he couldn’t save),” an up-tempo, unpredictable number that grew out of a single line overheard in a small church in North Augusta, Georgia.

The song’s writer, and the group’s drummer, Dennis Murphy, remembers the exact moment it hit him. “This song was inspired by a quote from Pastor C.T. Townsend when we sang at his church,” Murphy says. “As he was introducing us, he simply told the congregation, ‘Jesus never met a sinner that He couldn’t save.’ It instantly tweaked my songwriter brain, and I was obsessed for the remainder of the service.”

He laughs about it now, sort of. “It’s a blessing and a distraction,” Murphy adds, “but I’ve learned to live with it. I began to build around this great quote as the Lord delivered the words.” He’s not alone in that habit, he suspects. “I’m sure this happens with other songwriters who hear a sermon and then begin to focus on a ‘nugget of gold’ from the preacher.”

The result, produced by Roger Talley, opens with snappy guitar and keyboard work before lead singer Chris Bryant takes over, his voice riding a propulsive drum line courtesy of studio veteran Tony Creasman. Murphy calls it fitting for the group’s sound: “I believe everyone will enjoy this up-tempo, unpredictable, and energetic tune,” he says, adding that Bryant “delivers an amazing fast-paced lead as the remainder of the quartet add incredible harmonies.”

That’s putting it mildly once the full quartet crashes into the chorus, four voices locking in behind a message that’s been the group’s calling card for over four decades: no one is too far gone.

Dollywood regulars know that message well. The Kingdom Heirs first started singing at what was then Silver Dollar City back in 1982, and when the park rebranded in 1986, the group became its resident gospel act, a role they still hold today. This year, both the Kingdom Heirs and Dollywood are marking more than 40 years in the family entertainment business, a milestone that says as much about the group’s staying power as any new single could.

When your eyes deceive your soul

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WILLIAM KILLIAN

There is a quiet peril in trusting only what your eyes can measure. We navigate the physical world admirably enough, reading hunger, sensing danger, smelling smoke before we see the flame. These senses are gifts, marvellous and necessary. Yet they were never designed to carry the full weight of our most consequential decisions.

Consider Lot, Abraham’s nephew, standing at a crossroads with the whole of the land before him. He lifted his eyes, surveyed the Jordan Valley, and saw what any reasonable person would see: lush, well-watered ground, rich as the garden of Eden, fertile as Egypt along the Nile. By every natural measure, it was the obvious choice, the sensible choice. And it destroyed him.

He journeyed east, incrementally, almost imperceptibly, from camping near Sodom, to residing in Sodom, to leading within Sodom, until judgment rained down and everything he had built by sight lay in ashes. The text does not spare us the commentary: the men of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.

How often do we perform our own version of this same calculation? We weigh salary, location, opportunity, and comfort, factoring in everything visible and measurable, while the unseen promises of God gather dust in the corner of our thinking.

Faith is not the absence of wisdom; it is wisdom’s completion. It incorporates what the eye cannot reach, what the senses cannot verify, what only the word of God can illuminate.

Abraham, by contrast, rested in promise rather than prospect. He did not need the best land because he trusted the God who owns all land.

 for we walk by faith, not by sight

2 Corinthians 5:7

Paul Lancaster ties the knot | The Guardians tenor on grief, guarded love, and letting his boys lead the way

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TEXAS GOSPEL CANADA VOLUNTEER

Paul Lancaster has spent decades building a career on trust: trust in his voice, trust in the groups that shaped him, and trust in the audiences who followed him from Alabama church stages to the biggest platforms in gospel music. Now he’s added another kind of trust to the list, the kind that comes with a wedding ring.

The Guardians tenor has married Greta, the woman he calls a blessing that arrived when he least expected it. Their story began in 2021, not long after Lancaster lost his wife, Michelle. Neither of them was looking for love. “She came into my life in 21, just a few months after Michelle had passed. I wasn’t looking for anybody, and neither was she,” Lancaster said. “God put us together. My mother-in-law had a lot to do with, my mother-in-law and God had a lot to do with putting us together.”

For a man who’d built his whole life around family, the stakes of a new relationship weren’t small. Lancaster’s sons came first, and he wasn’t willing to risk their wellbeing on a decision made out of loneliness rather than clarity. “I wanted somebody, because sometimes out of loneliness, you can make the wrong decision, and I did not want to do that,” he said. “I’ve seen somebody out of loneliness will make the wrong decision. It can divide the family because it’s not good for you. The people that love you can see it. Maybe you can’t because loneliness won’t let you see it, right? But this was not the case.”

That caution paid off. Greta didn’t just win Lancaster over, she won his boys over too, and for him, that mattered as much as anything. “My family, my boys love her, which that had to be a deal,” he said. “I was very guarded about that because my boys were first. They were my responsibility. But God has blessed us. She has brought us even together and closer. The boys love her.”

It’s a fittingly quiet, faith-centered turn for a singer whose career has been anything but quiet. Lancaster came up singing locally in Alabama before landing on some of gospel music’s biggest stages, first catching wider attention through the Gaither Homecoming videos during his run with Mullins & Company. From there he moved through some of the genre’s most storied lineups, including the Nelons, the Martins, and the Booth Brothers, building a reputation as a tenor who could slot into any group and make it better.

That reputation is exactly why the Guardians came calling at the start of 2023, bringing Lancaster on full time to fill the tenor position during Dean’s absence. By the group’s own account, the fit exceeded expectations. His voice found its place in the blend, and so, it seems, did the rest of him: the guarded father, the grieving widower, and now, the newly married man who found love again on his own terms.