Category: Bible

The Image

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I was in a discussion with others recently and we talked about how there are people in our life who run around saying they are Christian, but their talk doesn’t match their walk. We all know those people who love to tell unbeliever’s what they need to do, and who believe that it’s their place as a Christian.

When I was a new follower of Christ I was happy when our company hired another follower. That joy quickly waned when he took the time to correct others without seeing his own fault. He was critical of the owner (an unbeliever) of our company and the way he chose to run his business. He complained about everything, and when he found out I was a follower of Christ he said pompously, “Don’t even talk to me about Christianity until you can explain in detail what you believe about the trinity, pre-trib or post….” I tuned out at this point. I don’t even think I knew what pre-trib and post meant at that point. It was crazy stuff for me in that time and space.

This would all be funny if those of us who are followers of Christ don’t constantly have to fight this fanatically image. If we didn’t hear of so much abuse of perceived power in the body of Christ. Yet, I am reminded that if we were looking for a power trip prior to our salvation then we will be looking for one after our salvation. We somehow miss the part about being a new creation.

However,

The Image has to match the things coming out of the mouth.

In the early days of my Christian walk I was a closet Christian often because of these types of representatives. I didn’t want to be included with “them”. There is a t-shirt that depicts Jesus walking among the throngs of people and the caption read, “Jesus save me from your people.” Although it was made with an anti-Christian campaign in mind, I identified with it on some levels. I knew what it was talking about. It was talking about those people who yelled at others for not being Christians. The Image unfortunately continually perpetuates as we don’t learn the lessons of love. Jesus drew people to him by his ability to help others. The only harsh words I see him speak is to the religious. So, rather than point the finger at the world who really doesn’t believe what we believe, or know what we know or what we are talking about, we need to be more introspective with the finger pointing. Only that would reveal those flaws we want to mask with The Image.

Ouch!

The bible says of those of us who follow Christ;

John13:35 By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”

WHERE’S THE LOVE PEOPLE?

A True Friend

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Pastor Doug preached once on what it means to be a true friend versus a well-wisher. It really has me thinking about my friendships. I pray for my friends, I call them, I send an email, and check on them from time to time, but does that mean I am a good friend?

Galatians 6:2 Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ

This was the scripture in my devotional today and it caused me to think about the sermon and my friendships. His sermon was based on the bible passage of the man with palsy (Luke 5:18), and what friends are willing to do for one another. When put in this perspective it makes you take a look at your friendships.

Do you have friends that if you were paralyzed would go and get you, carry you and your bed to Jesus, climb a ladder, cut a whole in a roof, and then lift you and your bed up and over into that cut hole and lower you in front of the feet of Jesus? Or would they merely say they will pray for you? Hoping you’d get better? It’s a powerful question.

Luke 5:18 Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. 19 When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus. 20 When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.” 21 The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 22 Jesus knew what they were thinking and asked, “Why are you thinking these things in your hearts? 23 Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? 24 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…” He said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 25 Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. 26 Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

More to the point are you that kind of friend? Are you the kind of friend who bears the burdens of another? Maybe our friends aren’t physically paralyzed but maybe they are emotionally paralyzed in pain over their divorce or their breakup? Maybe they have another kind of loss or pain and they need you, their friend, to go and get them! Are you whom someone would consider a true friend?

Cell Phone vs. Bible

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An oldie but a goodie!

I wonder what would happen if we treated our
Bible like we treat our cell phone?

What if we carried it around in our purses or pockets?

What if we flipped through it several time a day?

What if we turned back to go get it if we forgot it?

What if we used it to receive messages from the text?

What if we treated it like we couldn’t live without it?

What if we gave it to kids as gifts?

What if we used it when we traveled?

What if we used it in case of emergency?

This is something to make you go…. hmm…where is my Bible?

Oh, and one more thing…

Unlike our cell phone, we don’t have to worry about our Bible being
disconnected because Jesus already paid the bill……and no dropped calls!

Makes you stop and think, “where are my priorities?”

Be Still and Know

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Psalm 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God;

How often are you just quiet before the Lord? How often do you tune out he static of life to truly listen to what is going on within you?

New age calls it meditation, but followers of Christ call it meditation as well. The process is the similar because the principal of meditation doesn’t change.

Psalm 48:9 Within your temple, O God, we meditate on your unfailing love.

The temple of God is not a place. You are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?

So what does it mean to meditate on the word? When I worked in a large city I had a masseuse who taught me to mediate because she said I was too tense. She said I had to get to a quiet place in my mind and the way to do that was to count back from 100 to 1 with each breath until I could do so without any other thoughts of things to do, thoughts of breathing or anything else that came to mind to distract me. Honestly, I was never able to do that. My mind would wander and I’d forget where I left off in the breathing. It’s impossible to not think about anything, so I changed my meditation time in to learning to be still before the Lord. Have you ever tried to still your mind? It’s very difficult. Yet, the bible says that God speaks to us in that still small voice. (1Kings19:12) The only way to hear a still small voice is to be as quiet as possible. When people whisper you have to be quiet and draw near to hear.

The noise of the world often drowns out the possibility of hearing from God. We have noise wherever we go. We have even created noise machines so as not to sleep in silence. The very thing we need to exist in peace, wisdom and love, we drown out in the chaos of life. Jesus often went away from the crowds to be still. You must often get to a quiet place in your life where you are still. In those moments of stillness are where revelation comes, where problems can be resolved, and where wisdom is imparted. In those quiet moments is where God speaks to the scared part of your heart, the wounded part of your heart, the healthy part of your heart, and the inquisitive part of your heart. Is it any wonder that the enemy of your soul surrounds you with noise? Televisions that are on all night, music in elevators, can you ever find a quiet place unless you make room for it? Some people I know actually feel edgy in quiet times. Simply they have not learned to be still. Quiet makes them nervous because they’ve never learned to dwell in the peace of stillness. Quiet can be scary because it forces you to face fears.

Noise is sent to distract us from the union between God and us. I’ve heard people say that they decided to shut the TV off for a set number of days and that boredom caused them to read the bible. Do you have a quiet place? Can you access it regularly? If not, I urge you to find one. Try to find a place where you are still. To find a place where you are able to hear God’s still small voice. It’s the direction and the peace you need. Sometimes my best prayer time with God is when I am quiet and I listen rather than speak.

Carrying Out Our Servant Assignment

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1 Corinthians 3:1. But for right now, friends, I’m completely frustrated by your unspiritual dealings with each other and with God. You’re acting like infants in relation to Christ, 2. capable of nothing much more than nursing at the breast. Well, then, I’ll nurse you since you don’t seem capable of anything more. 3. As long as you grab for what makes you feel good or makes you look important, are you really much different than a babe at the breast, content only when everything’s going your way? 4. When one of you says, “I’m on Paul’s side,” and another says, “I’m for Apollos,” aren’t you being totally infantile? 5. Who do you think Paul is, anyway? Or Apollos, for that matter? Servants, both of us – servants who waited on you as you gradually learned to entrust your lives to our mutual Master. We each carried out our servant assignment. 6. I planted the seed, Apollos watered the plants, but God made you grow. 7. It’s not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process but God, who makes things grow. 8. Planting and watering are menial servant jobs at minimum wages. 9. What makes them worth doing is the God we are serving. You happen to be God’s field in which we are working. 10. Using the gift God gave me as a good architect, I designed blueprints; Apollos is putting up the walls. Let each carpenter who comes on the job take care to build on the foundation! 11. Remember, there is only one foundation, the one already laid: Jesus Christ. 12. Take particular care in picking out your building materials. 13. Eventually there is going to be an inspection. If you use cheap or inferior materials, you’ll be found out. The inspection will be thorough and rigorous. You won’t get by with a thing. 14. If your work passes inspection, fine; 15. if it doesn’t, your part of the building will be torn out and started over. But you won’t be torn out; you’ll survive – but just barely. 16. You realize, don’t you, that you are the temple of God, and God himself is present in you? 17. No one will get by with vandalizing God’s temple, you can be sure of that. God’s temple is sacred – and you, remember, are the temple. 18. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t think that you can be wise merely by being up-to-date with the times. 19. Be God’s fool – that’s the path to true wisdom. What the world calls smart, God calls stupid. It’s written in Scripture, He exposes the chicanery of the chic. 20. The Master sees through the smoke screens of the know-it-alls. 21. I don’t want to hear any of you bragging about yourself or anyone else. Everything is already yours as a gift – 22. Paul, Apollos, Peter, the world, life, death, the present, the future – all of it is yours, 23. and you are privileged to be in union with Christ, who is in union with God. -“The Message”

Hung Up On The Whys?

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Ever talk to a three year old? They will ask a simple question that then leads to about 50 more questions that start and end with one word – WHY? Gideon was a man in the bible who was called a mighty warrior. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a time in his life where he and his people had nothing. They were bullied, stolen from and living an impoverished life. Here is the story.

Judges 6:1 Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and for seven years he gave them into the hands of the Midianites. 2 Because the power of Midian was so oppressive, the Israelites prepared shelters for themselves in mountain clefts, caves and strongholds. 3 Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites, Amalekites and other eastern peoples invaded the country. 4 They camped on the land and ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys. 5 They came up with their livestock and their tents like swarms of locusts. It was impossible to count the men and their camels; they invaded the land to ravage it. 6 Midian so impoverished the Israelites that they cried out to the Lord for help.
7 When the Israelites cried to the Lord because of Midian, 8 he sent them a prophet, who said, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I brought you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 9 I snatched you from the power of Egypt and from the hand of all your oppressors. I drove them from before you and gave you their land. 10 I said to you, ‘I am the Lord your God; do not worship the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.’ But you have not listened to me.”
11 The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. 12 When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” 13 “But sir,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.”

I’m fascinated by this story because here is a man who has nothing. He’s trying to mill in a winepress in secret. He’s just trying to get some flour for a meal to feed his family and angel of the Lord appears to him. I don’t know about you, but I would be freaked out! My heart would be racing and I would be listening to hear what the angel was saying. Gideon however is fed up and he wants to know why these things are happening. Why has God been absent? Why hasn’t he done any miracles? Why has he abandoned us? Why has he put Israel into the hand of the Midians?

All of us can relate to Gideon. We get hung up on the whys of life instead of seeing the miracle that the time has finally come for God to send an answer to get us out of our situation. We want to know why we were there in the first place. Does it matter in the scheme of things? Does it matter why we were suffering or is it simply the fact that we get to get some relief? The fact of the matter is that the answer of why Gideon found himself in a mess can be found in the very first sentence of this story. Go back and read it. The reason our own messes have happened can be found in the very first sentence in the chapter of our very own story. Does it even matter now? The fact is there is a way out of the problem a solution has been sent!

Don’t get hung up on the whys! Instead look for solutions that will get you out of your troubles. Cry out to God for the answer. Many times when we say things like, “Why does this always happen to me?” The answer is simple, “Because I haven’t learned the lesson in life that I need to about this situation.” We are not victims. Sometimes we cause things to happen, sometimes others in our lives cause things to happen but we always have a free will choice on what to do next. We can dig our heels in and get hung up on the whys or we can actually be that mighty warrior and get through this situation in our life!

A Spiritual Mentor

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Titus2:3 Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. 4 Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.

I am blessed to have an amazing mother-in-law, Doris, that has been my spiritual mentor. She loves the Lord and she is a big time intercessor (that means she prays for me)! I love her and what she has to teach me. Do you have a spiritual mentor? If not, pray and ask the Lord to send her.

How will know when she arrives? Is she already in your life? Here are the signs that follow a mentor. She is the one who encourages your spiritual walk. She walks with the authority of a woman who knows her Lord and she teaches you what she knows as you are ready to learn. She is the one who loves you through the rough times in your life and leads you straight to the feet of Jesus. She is the one whom you see really walk out her faith. Is she perfect? No, not at all but she’s working on herself and it shows. She sees your progress and tells you about it. She never loses patience with you (for very long). She has a divine word for your life and she prays for you. She corrects you with love and guides you with wisdom. She rejoices with you in all of your successes and comforts you in your sorrow. She imparts her wisdom into your life. She is one with whom you can share your secrets with and she will hold them, not casting judgment but giving wisdom. She teaches you to walk in the way of a true woman of Christ.

Here is how you know she is not a spiritual mentor. She will not ever give you advice that goes against the word of the Lord. She will never manipulate you into doing what she thinks you ought to do. She will never try to control your actions. She will always have your best interest at heart. She does not counsel with you over her stuff but she is authentic and may share life lessons learned. She does not intimidate you ever. She knows intimidation never works long-term. She understands you will either follow her advice or not but she loves you anyway.

My prayer for you today is that you find her. That if you don’t have her in your life already that God will send her to you. Your life will be better for it and you will have someone with whom you can rely on to be with you!

It’s Easter!

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Luke 24:1. At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. 2. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, 3. so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus. 4. They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. 5. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? 6. He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you when you were still back in Galilee 7. that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on a cross, and in three days rise up?” 8. Then they remembered Jesus’ words. 9. They left the tomb and broke the news of all this to the Eleven and the rest. 10. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them kept telling these things to the apostles, 11. but the apostles didn’t believe a word of it, thought they were making it all up. 12. But Peter jumped to his feet and ran to the tomb. He stooped to look in and saw a few grave clothes, that’s all. He walked away puzzled, shaking his head. -“The Message”

Aren’t you glad we are not puzzled anymore? Praise you lord for the freedom you restored us to. May we never take your sacrifice for granted.

A Dinner Invitation

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Psalms 15
1. God, who gets invited to dinner at your place? How do we get on your guest list?
2. “Walk straight, act right, tell the truth.
3. “Don’t hurt your friend, don’t blame your neighbor;
4. despise the despicable. “Keep your word even when it costs you,
5. make an honest living, never take a bribe. “You’ll never get blacklisted if you live like this.”

A Hand-Crafted World

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Psalm 8:1. God, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name.
2. Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs That drown out enemy talk, and silence atheist babble.
3. I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, Moon and stars mounted in their settings.
4. Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?
5. Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden’s dawn light.
6. You put us in charge of your handcrafted world, repeated to us your Genesis-charge,
7. Made us lords of sheep and cattle, even animals out in the wild,
8. Birds flying and fish swimming, whales singing in the ocean deeps.
9. God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world.