Excuses. “It isn’t time to rebuild the house of the Lord” was their defense of their inactivity. Billy Sunday called an excuse “the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie,” and Benjamin Franklin wrote, “I never knew a man who was good at making excuses who was good at anything else.” The first congregation I pastored met in a corrugated metal tabernacle that should have been replaced years before, but whenever somebody would suggest a building program, some of the fearful people would resurrect their