Tag Archives: Christianity

January 21, 2015 · 7:02 AM

How To Slay A Giant

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As I was reading through the story of David and Goliath in I Samuel 17, I was tempted to pass over it. After all, I’ve heard the story since I was a kid and have heard numerous sermons about it. I decided to read it anyway and to not just scroll through it. As I read through it, I stopped often and looked at the words that were used. I tried to imagine myself on the hillside with the army of Israel so I could see what I had never seen before. With that different perspective, I saw three things that I had never seen before in the story. Here are three of them.

For 40 days, Goliath came out every morning and evening to taunt the army Israel. The Philistine army would stand on one hill and the Israelite army would stand on the other ready for battle. No one fought though they were set up to because fear is a paralyzer. Too many times we go to do something and stop before accomplishing it because we allow fear to hold us back. We stand armed and ready to accomplish what God has put before us, but then we allow fear to keep us from action. II Timothy 1:7 says that God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power love and a sound mind. Take the power God has given you and conquer your fear.

The next thing I saw came from verse 26. David asks, “Who is this pagan Philistine anyway, that he is allowed to defy the armies of the living God?” The word that stuck out to me was “allowed”. When I think of times when I haven’t done what God asked of me, it’s because I’ve allowed other voices to be louder than His. We accomplish so little in life because of the things we allow. When we quit allowing the voice of the opposition to dictate our every move, we’ll begin to live a more victorious life and others will follow.

The third thing I saw was in verse 40. It says that David picked up five smooth stones from the stream. I know I’ve heard sermons about Goliath’s four brothers and how David got a stone for each one of them. To me, I think David was being prepared. We fail in life and in doing things because we don’t count the cost ahead of time. David counted the cost and prepared for the worst possible scenario. He grabbed extra stones just in case the first one missed. He knew that God doesn’t always deliver us the first time we ask or open the door the first time we knock. What if He didn’t deliver the giant with the first stone? David had faith, but he also counted the cost.

If you’ve been paralyzed by fear, take a step of faith in the power that God has given you. If you’ve allowed other voices to be louder than God’s, quit listening to them and find that still, small voice that God speaks with. If you’ve gone into things without counting the cost and have tried to get by with the bare minimum, it’s time to get better prepared. God is ready to take care of the Giants that stand in your way, but you’ve got to move past your fear, listen to His voice and step out in faith prepared for whatever God may do.

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January 20, 2015 · 7:04 AM

Be Ordinary

We are raised hearing stories about great men and women of history. We have movies that encapsulate their lives in just a few hours. There are thousands of books that tell of their struggles. We also create Superheroes to further train our brains that we must be super or great in order to accomplish anything in history. While that may be mostly true according to this world’s standards, it’s not by God’s standard. He’s ok with you being ordinary. He doesn’t need you to be Super or great in order to change the world.

In Acts 4, Peter and John spent the night in jail for healing a crippled man and preaching that Jesus was the way to Heaven. The next morning, they were brought before the High Priest and the religious council. Knowing the answer, they asked the question, “By what power, or in whose name, have you done this?” Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, stood up and boldly spoke to them about Jesus. Verse 13 says, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures.”

Peter and John were fishermen before they followed Jesus. That was the low wage, manual labor of their time. Their job required long, hard hours, not an education. People were always surprised when they spoke because no one expects greatness from ordinary. It was the same in Acts 2 when they were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in other tongues. Acts 2:7-8 says, “And they were all beside themselves in amazement, saying, “Are not all these who are talking Galileans? Then how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own particular dialect to which we were born? (AMP)” No one expected these Galilean fisherman to know anything about the Scriptures, much less to be able to speak another language correctly.

When our lives are controlled by the Holy Spirit, our lives become great. We get a boldness to do things we’ve never been able to do. We speak like we’ve never spoken before. The Holy Spirit can make an ordinary life an extraordinary life. Don’t hold yourself back from ministering to others because you don’t have the education. Don’t be afraid to stand up for your faith because you don’t think you know enough about the Bible. Peter and John were in your shoes yet they spoke with boldness through the Holy Spirit.

God chose these uneducated men and women to turn the world upside down. If He can do that, He can use you. It’s ok to be ordinary because God uses ordinary people everyday. Don’t preclude yourself from God’s plan because you don’t think He can do anything with you. He can use your brokenness to heal someone else. He can use your simplicity to confound the wise. He can take what little you think you have to offer and do great things. It just takes you being willing to get past your excuses and to allow God to do His work through you. Let Him take your ordinary and do extraordinary things.

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January 19, 2015 · 5:45 AM

MLK Do It Well (Video)

“Whatever you do, do it well.”

Ecclesiastes 9:10

If you have trouble seeing the video, click here.

 

 

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January 16, 2015 · 5:30 AM

10 Scriptures On Being Spiritual

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1. It is love, then, that you should strive for. Set your hearts on spiritual gifts, especially the gift of proclaiming God’s message. (1 Corinthians 14:1 GNB)

2. And I will give you [spiritual] shepherds after My own heart [in the final time], who will feed you with knowledge and understanding and judgment. (Jeremiah 3:15 AMP)

3. I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. (Ephesians 1:16-17 NLT)

4. My brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in any kind of wrongdoing, those of you who are spiritual should set him right; but you must do it in a gentle way. And keep an eye on yourselves, so that you will not be tempted, too. (Galatians 6:1 GNB)

5. And be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind [having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude], (Ephesians 4:23 AMP)

6. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. (1 Corinthians 2:12-13 ESV)

7. Be careful therefore how you listen. For to him who has [spiritual knowledge] will more be given; and from him who does not have [spiritual knowledge], even what he thinks and guesses and supposes that he has will be taken away. (Luke 8:18 AMP)

8. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. (Romans 12:10-11 NIV)

9. For this reason we also, from the day we heard of it, have not ceased to pray and make [special] request for you, [asking] that you may be filled with the full (deep and clear) knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom [in comprehensive insight into the ways and purposes of God] and in understanding and discernment of spiritual things– (Colossians 1:9 AMP)

10. Friends, when life gets really difficult, don’t jump to the conclusion that God isn’t on the job. Instead, be glad that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. This is a spiritual refining process, with glory just around the corner. (1 Peter 4:12-13 MSG)

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January 14, 2015 · 6:48 AM

Spiritual Acumen

A few years back, I was a general manager of a store for a Fortune 15 company. The company had hundreds of stores across the U.S. and almost 100,000 employees. To give you an idea of the size of this company, every quarter they had revenues in the billions of dollars. They were so concerned about how the little things affected the company as a whole, that they sent me and other general managers to a business acumen class. They wanted us to understand how the CEO and other C level employees thought as well as how our decisions affected the bottom line.

Until then, I had mainly thought of my store as a silo. I had never really considered the role I played in how profitable the company was. The conglomerate of stores like mine were what was driving the billions in revenue. If I made poor decisions each day, the company as a whole took a hit. Suddenly, I quit making decisions based on the temporary circumstance of my store and started making them based on how it affected the company as a whole. I quit comparing my store versus other stores around me and started comparing to the company average. Either I was helping the company or I was hurting it.

The same can be said of our Christian life. There are decisions you and I make each day that are based on our temporary circumstances and not on our eternal goals. We look at how things will affect our near future instead of our eternal future. When we do that, we slow our growth down and affect our life as a whole. We create problems in the future that can be life altering because we don’t have the spiritual acumen to see how our decisions affect everything in our life.

Zig Ziglar once said, “If you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves.” He understood acumen. He understood how each decision that is made sends a wave that gets bigger into our future. If each of us could grasp that, we’d have a lot fewer issues and more spiritual growth. Hebrews 12:1 says, “Let us strip off and throw aside every encumbrance (unnecessary weight) and the sun that so readily clings to and entangles us.” We can strip those off by making better decisions regarding our spirit man based on our whole life.

What decisions have you made lately based on convenience instead of eternity? What can you do to help you remember that the decisions you make today will echo throughout eternity? When we change to an eternal perspective on how we look at our decisions, we begin to make better ones. We will begin to realize what really matters and what doesn’t. Those weights will begin to fall off and we will be free to run the race we were made to run without any self placed obstacles.

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January 13, 2015 · 7:32 AM

Spiritual Adjustment

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Every once in a while, my body gets out of alignment. My back hurts, my neck gets tight and I get headaches. I try laying on the floor to pop my back myself. When that doesn’t work, I have my wife stand on it to try to pop it. When all else fails, I visit a chiropractor to give me an alignment. He hooks me up to a machine that sends electric pulses to the muscles and places warm blankets on top. He then comes in and begins to pop my back and put everything back into alignment. It’s not fun, but when I walk out of there, I feel a lot better.

From time to time, you and I can get spiritually misaligned. We lack interest to go to church, we quit reading the Bible and we barely pray. We tell others that we need to get back to those things, but nothing ever happens. We keep going until something bad happens and we go back to church for a spiritual alignment. It’s a cycle that a lot of us go through. When times are good, we forget we need God. When things go wrong, we suddenly remember He is our help in times of need.

Since the beginning of time, that’s the story of the human race. We are constantly in need of spiritual adjustment. We walk out of church feeling great and have a renewed purpose. We do great for a little while, but slowly we begin to fade. We hit to the snooze button instead of getting up to pray. We fall asleep before we crack open the Bible. We tell ourselves, “Tomorrow I’ll read. Tomorrow I’ll pray.” Tomorrow becomes a week, a week a month and so on. It’s the cycle I’ve been on too many times. So how do we stay spiritually aligned?

It’s much like any relationship. It takes work, time and effort. We need to be adjusted when we begin to look at the things needed to maintain the relationship as a checklist. When we look at them like a checklist, they become chores and no one likes chores. God isn’t into making us do chores. He wants us to love Him the way He loves us. He wants us to want to do the things that keep our relationship fresh. He wants us to want to spend time with Him. He doesn’t want us to feel as though we have to.

Ephesians 4:23 gives us the answer. It says, “Be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind, having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude. (AMP)” We have to constantly find ways to keep our mind and spirit renewed. We have to switch things up. Read a different version of the Bible to gain fresh perspective. Change the time and place you pray. Sit in a different seat at church. Get out of your routine and find a fresh love for God. That’s how you get your spiritual adjustment. Stay out of a rut and constantly renew your mental and spiritual attitude.

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January 9, 2015 · 6:44 AM

10 Scriptures On Life

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1. Those who try to gain their own life will lose it; but those who lose their life for my sake will gain it. (Matthew 10:39 GNB)

2. Wisdom will multiply your days and add years to your life. (Proverbs 9:11 NLT)

3. And this is that testimony (that evidence): God gave us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who possesses the Son has that life; he who does not possess the Son of God does not have that life. (1 John 5:11-12 AMP)

4. For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life. (John 3:16 GNB)

5. I am the Bread of Life [that gives life–the Living Bread]. (John 6:48 AMP)

6. Let us give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! Because of his great mercy he gave us new life by raising Jesus Christ from death. This fills us with a living hope, (1 Peter 1:3 GNB)

7. He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them. This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! (2 Corinthians 5:15, 17 NLT)

8. The thief comes only in order to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come in order that you might have life — life in all its fullness. (John 10:10 GNB)

9. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ. (Colossians 3:3-4 MSG)

10. For you have been born again, but not to a life that will quickly end. Your new life will last forever because it comes from the eternal, living word of God. (1 Peter 1:23 NLT)

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January 8, 2015 · 6:53 AM

Heavy Lifting

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Have you ever tried to carry something that was too heavy for you? I’m not talking about something you couldn’t lift. I’m talking about something that you could hold, but not for very long. You struggle to lift it, with each step you exhale trying to manage the weight and size of the object. You can only go a few feet before you have to set it down, take a breather, look at how much further you have to go and then try again. You repeat the process over and over until you finally reach your destination. It’s exhausting and can give you medical problems if it’s too heavy or too far.

Imagine carrying that same object and a friend comes over. They see you struggle and instead of offering help, they offer suggestions on how to carry it better. “Lift with your legs, not your back,” they say. How does that make you feel? Clearly they see you struggling, but they are doing nothing to help you. It gets frustrating. How about if instead of helping you they cheered you on? How would that make you feel? “Come on! I know you can do it! You’ve got this.” While it might help morally, it still doesn’t help with the problem.

What you really want when you’re struggling like that is for them to say, “Hey, let me give you a hand.” When they grab the other side, the weight is halved. Suddenly it’s more bearable than it was. You may be able to go a little bit further before you have to set it down. Their physically helping you with the object is a lot more useful than telling you how to do it or encouraging you to do it. Would you agree? Then why do we do the first two when we see someone struggling with heavy burdens?

I once heard a person say, “With a friend, joy is doubled and pain is halved.” I could also add burdens are halved. Galatians 6:2 says, “Help to carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will obey the law of Christ.” It didn’t tell us just to encourage someone who is carrying a burden or to tell them how to carry it. We are told to help them carry it. When someone is carrying a burden, it’s a lot like that large object. They may only be able to take a few steps before they’re exhausted. They may not feel like they’re making progress. While words of encouragement are nice, helping them with the heavy lifting is what’s needed.

Think of a time when you’ve had a heavy burden. What is it that you wished people had done for you? Go and do that for someone else. When I see others who are going through something I’ve been through, my first thoughts are, “What did people do that made me mad? What did I wish people had done.” I then go and try to do the second instead of the first. It’s important that we look around us today to see which friends are struggling. While a word of encouragement is nice and a few tips on how to bear the burden is great, I’m sure they’d love some help with the heavy lifting.

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December 17, 2014 · 7:29 AM

Joseph’s Character

The Bible only gives us a few clues about Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus. He’s only mentioned in a few verses, but from those verses we can tell a lot about him. I think it’s important to remember that even though he wouldn’t have a role in the DNA of Jesus, he was chosen by God to help shape the man jesus would become. God knew that he possessed the qualities He wanted in a man that would raise Jesus as his own and would take care of his family above all. That tells me that he was a man of character.

We know that Joseph received some news that was hard to swallow. His fiancé told him she was pregnant and he knew that it wasn’t his. The story she told him was hard to believe. It went against everything he knew. I wonder if he was furious, angry or just heart broken. No matter what emotions went through him, Matthew 1:19 says, “Joseph was a man who always did what was right, but he did not want to disgrace Mary publicly; so he made plans to break the engagement privately.” He must have struggled with the right thing to do.

His love for Mary overrode the letter of the law. Mary could have been put to death for getting pregnant with someone else’s baby. Remember the story of the adulteress woman? They wanted to stone her. It was custom to put her to death, but Joseph didn’t want to do that. He loved her and valued life. His decision to break the engagement privately spoke again to his character. He had every right to shame her and her family publicly, but he chose a better route because of his character. Doing what’s right isn’t always doing what you’re permitted to do.

As he thought of the consequences of his predicament, an angel visited him in a dream. The angel said, “Do not be afraid to take Mary to be your wife. For it is by the Holy Spirit that she has conceived. She will have a son, and you will name him Jesus – because he will save his people from their sins.” The angel corroborated the story Mary had told him. A few verses later we read that Joseph did what the Angel told him to do. Not only was he a man of character, he was a man of obedience. He obeyed even though it was the hard thing to do.

We know from the story of David being anointed king that God loos at our heart. When He looked at Joseph’s heart, He saw a man of character and a man of obedience. He knew He could trust Him with anything including raising His only son. When God looks at our heart, what does He see? Does He know we will obey even though it is inconvenient? Does He know we will act with integrity even though circumstances may be against us? It’s in the hard times and decisions of life that your character is revealed. Be a person of obedience so God can trust you with anything.

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December 12, 2014 · 5:30 AM

10 Scriptures On Leaving A Godly Heritage

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1. And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. (Deuteronomy 6:5-7 NLT)

2. A good man leaves an inheritance [of moral stability and goodness] to his children’s children. (Proverbs 13:22 AMP)

3. We will not keep them from our children; we will tell the next generation about the Lord ‘s power and his great deeds and the wonderful things he has done. (Psalms 78:4 GNB)

4. Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6 AMP)

5. It is the living who praise you, As I praise you now. Parents tell their children how faithful you are. (Isaiah 38:19 GNB)

6. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15 ESV)

7. But no weapon that is formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall show to be in the wrong. This [peace, righteousness, security, triumph over opposition] is the heritage of the servants of the Lord [those in whom the ideal Servant of the Lord is reproduced]; this is the righteousness or the vindication which they obtain from Me [this is that which I impart to them as their justification], says the Lord. (Isaiah 54:17 AMP)

8. Children are fortunate if they have a father who is honest and does what is right. (Proverbs 20:7 GNB)

9. I could have no greater joy than to hear that my children are following the truth. (3 John 1:4 NLT)

10. The Lord knows the days of the upright and blameless, and their heritage will abide forever. (Psalm 37:18 AMP)

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