Archive for the ‘Devotional Thoughts’ Category

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Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, tagged , , , , , on April 24, 2013 | 2 Comments »

She was talking to me…. Guest blog by Liz Hile, www.thewellbiblestudy.org Justdoit

“If you’re like me, sometimes you get a little frustrated that God doesn’t reveal His plan for your life to you in a tidy little 5-10 year prospectus.

Maybe you’ve read that God has good works he’s set aside specifically for you to do, but you’re still waiting on the memo that details what those things are!

In Judges 13, it seems that Samson’s dad felt like that, too.

You see, an angel of the Lord told Samson’s mom that Samson would be a Nazirite and gave her special instructions to follow. Samson’s dad prayed for the angel to return so that he could get some more specific details. He asked, “What’s Samson’s life gonna look like? What will his mission be?”

The angel’s response makes me laugh, “All that I commanded her (Samson’s mom) let her observe.”

It’s just like us to over-complicate things, isn’t it? God may not show us right away where we’re going, but He makes it very clear for us how to get there: just follow and obey. Do each day what you already know you should do – repent, be baptized, pray, serve, love, give, forgive, teach, make disciples, etc., and that’ll put you on a sure path towards greater revelation of God’s will for your life. When we love God enough to do what He’s already made plain in His Word, we can be confident that He will reveal even more of Himself to us (John 14:21), including His dreams, His vision, and His plans.

So, instead of getting frustrated about the murkiness of the future, let us patiently live out what God clearly wants us to do today.”

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Are You A Mature Christian?

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, tagged , , , , , , , on March 11, 2013 | 2 Comments »

She’s at it again: * Guest blog by Susie Walther, http://www.thewellbiblestudy.org

 

Would you say that you are a mature Christian?

Why would you consider yourself “mature” in your faith?

Susie writes, “I recently attended a Verge conference, and one of the speakers cited some recent statistics from the Barna Group regarding women in the church.

She said that 74% of Christian women consider themselves mature in their faith.

But the Barna poll also revealed that less than 25% of those same women actually shared the gospel, helped the needy, valued volunteering/serving or gave financially to support ministry, and that only 13% viewed their main role in life as being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

So, that really begs the question – exactly what do these women mean when they say they’re “mature?”

Obviously, Christian maturity for them has little to do with being a disciple, which would involve spending time with Jesus through the Christian disciplines of daily quiet time and prayer, and intentional involvement in the Great Commission. Maturity for these women did not include the pro-active sharing of their faith, serving others intentionally, helping the world around them or giving generously out of their monetary means.

So, again I have to ask, what the heck do these women mean when they call themselves “mature???”

Are they defining maturity as time in grade – you know, “I’ve been a Christian for 10 or 50 years…so I’m mature” or “I’ve attended church all my life, so I’m mature?” Are they the ones who “read through the Bible once?” Are they dubbing themselves mature because they’re uber-involved in their kids’ lives or they home school, eat organic foods, run marathons and are nice people? Is maturity to them volunteering once a year on a missions trip or helping with VBS, attending a Bible study, listening to Christian radio, and reading Our Daily Bread when they can?

Whatever the case, we should be absolutely alarmed because we are a generation of Christian women who consider ourselves “mature in Christ” who don’t live like we need the Gospel and certainly aren’t living our lives to advance the Kingdom of God.

Righteous King of Heaven, wake us up from our slumber and show us the peril of our deception!”

So I ask you again, “Are you mature in your faith?”

What evidence of maturity can you point to in your life?

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Phases of Parenting

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, Parenting, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 7, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Imagine dividing up parenting into phases.  Andy Stanley* has suggested this breakdown:

Ages 1-5  Discipline

Ages 5-12 Training

Ages 12-18 Coaching

Ages 18+ Friendship

I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks.  I have a 12-year-old middle schooler.  It’s crazy how suddenly she “grew up”.  It’s clearly a new phase of parenting.  We are shifting from “Mom decides” to “You decide with the help and influence of Mom”.  And on what basis is she making decisions?  On the basis of all the training I have provided (or not provided!) in the last 10 years.  Eeeekk.

Here are a few other bits of wisdom for the coaching years:

- If you fail to discipline and train your kids when they are young, then it’s too late.  You cannot suddenly add discipline when they are teenagers.  Doing so provokes rebellion and communication breakdown.

- You cannot “be friends” with your middle schooler.  You are the coach.  Coach is not the same as friend.

- “Don’t freak out.”  This is your mantra as long as you have teens in your house.  Don’t freak out.  Be calm.  If you freak out they will stop talking to you.  Don’t shut down the communication.  Leave them open to coaching.

- Say “Oh no, that’s terrible!  What are we going to do about that?”  See how you can use your words to communicate that you understand the drama and that you are on their side?  Then let them work out a solution.  Practice encouraging from the sidelines, not charging out into the middle of the field to sort things out.

- Remember that the most important things are not the urgent things.  (True for much of life!)  Do not allow seemingly urgent issues and activities replace the important things…

- Sometimes you say “no” to good things (sports, ministry, whatever) in order to invest more in your kids and have time with them.

- Don’t lie.  Don’t let them lie either.

- Teach them to honor their mother.

- Let them fail when the stakes are low.

- Help them see how their faith intersects three important things: 1. Decision making, 2. Relationships, and 3. School.  You can do this partly by talking all the time, everywhere, in a natural fashion about how your faith affects your thinking processes too.

- And finally remember that “Later is Longer”.  You have only a few short years of parenting, but you will be friends with your kids for 60 or more years.  Make the hard decisions now.  It’s ok to cry for a night.  Later is longer.  Always.

*Our Wednesday night dinner/small group has really enjoyed Andy Stanley’s “Future Family” series.  Session 5 he co-taught with his wife and they discussed parenting. http://www.northpoint.org/messages/future-family

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Old Testament – A Visual

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, Discipleship Tools, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Whoo hoo!  I finished Deuteronomy in my read-thru-the-Bible project… Can I get an amen?  Leviticus and Deuteronomy were the hardest parts!

OTVisualI am a visual learner, and a teacher in love of visual aids and a big white board!  So let me share with you this diagram that will help you, and your students, remember what’s going on in the first part of the Old Testament.

Imagine a map of the Middle East – from the Garden of Eden somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, the nation of Israel, and Egypt.  The Mediterranean Sea is to the west.  Now follow the tracks of Old Testament characters on the map…

Genesis – The beginning.  We start in the east (Iraq) with Adam, Eve, and Noah.  Then Abraham left Ur and settled in Canaan (Promised Land to be).  After Jacob came the story of Joseph who is sent in capitivity to Egypt.

In Exodus the Israelites exit Egypt after 400 years of captivity.

Leviticus is the Law given at Mt. Sinai (see the Levite/priest in the book title?).

In Numbers the people are numbered and wander in the desert for 40 years.

Deuteronomy is the re-reading of the Law before entry into the Promised Land, which is why it is so similar to Leviticus and closes with all the blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.

Joshua crosses the Jordan River into the Promised Land with the nation of Israel and they proceed to slowly conquer most of it.

And the Judges mark a period of rebellion and suffering in the land because “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”.

And then we go to I & II Samuel and the Kings.

I hope it helps you remember the history – it worked for me!

I start reading Joshua next week.  Yea!

 

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Not “Accept” but Follow Christ

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, tagged , , , , , , , on February 26, 2013 | 3 Comments »

* Guest blog, Susie Walther, http://www.thewellbiblestudy.org

Did you know that the religion of Jesus begins with the word follow (as in follow Christ) and ends with the word go (as in go into all the world and make disciples)?

Did you know that Jesus never told anyone to “accept Me,” but instead said in no uncertain terms to “follow Me?” Did you know, then, that the opposite of rejecting Jesus is not accepting Him, but rather choosing not to follow Him?

Until we begin to export en masse to the Church and the world the same kind of gospel Jesus lived, died and rose again to give us, bucket loads of people will continue to flounder in sin and compromise and/or remain spiritually sterile believing a version of “Christianity” that has no power to transform them or bear eternal fruit. But that will mean we’ve got to stop making this stuff up as we go along and just start believing what the Christ of the Bible told us, whether it fits our denominational SOP for doctrine or not.

And while I still have the mike, I’d like to say one more thing about this business of “acceptance.” Do you know that the ones who need to be accepted are us? We are rotten, miserable, self-centered creatures who intrinsically don’t know a thing about holiness or righteousness and we are the ones who need to be accepted by the Father, and He has ordained that the only means for His acceptance of us is through the blood sacrifice of His son, Jesus Christ. For crying out loud, Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords! Why does He need to be accepted by us? We need to be accepted by Him!

So, we can make “decisions” and “professions of faith” and we can be baptized and confirmed all day long, but the Bible still says that to be accepted by God we must receive Christ which means we must repent of our sin. To repent means to surrender all rights and control of our lives. To surrender means to follow after Jesus. To follow means to obey Him, and to obey is to love God and others enough to go and make disciples!

This is Christ’s version of Christianity, ladies, and it’s the one that’ll revolutionize your life, this city, and the world.

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7 Hours. No Regrets.

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, Parenting, tagged , , , , , on February 12, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

“No, you don’t want our family to do that.  Really?  Are you sure?”no tv

I was very curious who my husband was talking to on the telephone!

It was the Nielson Television Ratings organization.  We were chosen to participate in their television viewing and ratings survey.  So for one week now we have been filling out the t.v. viewing log book – for each t.v. in the house (two), hour by hour, channel by channel, marking each family member as watching or not.

I’m telling you – we are really going to be the statistical outlier on their survey!

Seven hours of t.v. – that’s the grand total for the last seven days.

2.5 hours of “Phineas and Ferb”, 1 hour of the Grammys, 1.5 hours of “Chicken Little”, and 2 hours of the evening news.

Well at least we’ll never look back and regret all the hours we wasted in front of our television!

Too bad they didn’t ask how many miles we ran this week (40 miles, mostly Ross)…

Or how many hours we spent playing tennis (8 hours)…

Or what books we were reading… “Running the World: the Inside Story of the National Security Council” by David Rothkopf (Ross), “East of the Sun” set in Bombay in 1928, by Julia Gregson (Mindy), “The Lightening Thief” by Rick Riordan (Mark), and I have no idea what Mara is reading because she always has it with her.

How many hours of television did you and your family watch last week? 

Today is Mardi Gras and the season of Lent starts tomorrow.  Maybe you should consider giving up some of your television time in pursuit of something greater?

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The Question That Made Them Laugh

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, Missions, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2013 | 3 Comments »

A powerful truth about love emerges from grammer questions during a Hdi Bible translation session. – by Cathy Drobnick

NTMAfricanMen“The verbs for a particular African language consistently end in one of three vowels,” Dennis Farthing writes from the NTM Missionary Training Center. He shares a translation story that a missionary recently shared with him.

“Almost every verb ends in i, a, and u. But the word for ‘love’ was only found with i and a. Why no u?” this missionary wondered.

Dennis says the Bible translation team included the most influential leaders in the local community.

In an effort to truly understand the concept of “love” in this African language, the missionary began to question them.

“Could you dvi your wife?”

“Yes,” they answered, “that would mean that the wife had been loved, but the love was gone.”

“Could you dva your wife?”

“Yes,” they responded, “that kind of love depends on the wife’s actions. She would be loved as long as she remained faithful and cared for her husband well.”

“Could you dvu your wife?”

Everyone in the room laughed.

“Of course not!” they replied. “If you said that, you would have to keep loving your wife no matter what she did, even if she never got you water and never made you meals. Even if she committed adultery, you would have to just keep on loving her. No, we would never say dvu. It just doesn’t exist.”

The missionary sat quietly for a while, thinking about John 3:16, and then he asked, “Could God dvu people?”

Dennis writes that there was complete silence for three or four minutes; then tears started to trickle down the weathered faces of the elderly men of the tribe.

Finally they responded, “Do you know what this would mean? This would mean that God kept loving us over and over, while all that time we rejected His great love. He would be compelled to love us, even though we have sinned more than any people.”

The missionary noted that changing one simple vowel changed the meaning from “I love you based on what you do and who you are,” to “I love you, based on who I am. I love you because of me and not because of you.”

“God encoded the story of His unconditional love right into this African language. For centuries, the little word was there—unused but available, grammatically correct and quite understandable,” Dennis writes.

“This is why we minister here at the Missionary Training Center. This is why we teach grammar to the missionary candidates,” Dennis adds.

God is powerfully at work for His eternal glory in many distant parts of the world through Bible translators.

Read the original article here – http://usa.ntm.org/mission-news/52145/the-question-that-made-them-laugh

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Thinking About Hell

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 8, 2013 | 4 Comments »

DamnedIfYouDoI heard a great sermon on  hell last Sunday.

“Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?  I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?  I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” – Luke 13:2-5

I’ve been thinking about hell all week – and rereading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.  Here are a few quotes that have stuck with me,

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. ”

“The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.  A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’ –or else not.”

Did you get that?  “All that are in Hell, choose it.”  The reoccurring theme here is choices… Little choices, big choices, choices every day and every hour.  Choices to love, to obey, to surrender, to seek truth, to reach out, to engage, to labor…. Or choices to disobey, to turn away, to be independent, to seek our own good, to hide behind falsehood, to ignore, to not love, to be lazy…

Over time our choices will define us and the path that we walk on.

One day we shall come to the end and discover that we have chosen our own destiny.  God, in His grace and mercy, desires that we choose to follow Him… to take the narrow path, the path of surrender and obedience… And if we do He will do everything in His power to help us along, making us stronger, sustaining and encouraging us, and using us to bring about His kingdom on earth.

If we chose not to follow Christ He does not give up on us but continually pursues us… Yet, like a warm coal that is separated from the fire, as it draws farther and farther away it becomes harder and harder to breathe life and flame into it… It cools and eventually there is no possibility of a fire left in it.

God is calling – You choose.  Hell is a reminder that the choices we make matter, right now.

Here’s the sermon: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fusion-sermons/id554555824 under the title “Hell And Who Goes There”.  He covers what Jesus meant when He spoke of gehenna, God’s love and justice, universalism, exclusivism, and inclusivism, and more.  It’s well worth 30 minutes of your time.

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A few good men…

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, tagged on January 6, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

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On Brain Surgery and Other Dramas

Posted in All Posts, Devotional Thoughts, Parenting, tagged , , , , , on December 3, 2012 | 2 Comments »

12 years old.  Kinda young for brain surgery, really.  One of my best friend’s daughters is having brain surgery tomorrow, December 4th.  Here she is – with her surgeon at Johns Hopkins today as they get ready for tomorrow… (Rare case of pediatric  trigimenal neuralgia, if you must know.)

It’s exhausting to think about.  Overwhelming.  Actually, for them, I think it’s been all that and a whole lot more for the last 4-5 months of trying to figure out what is wrong with KT Rose and how to go about fixing it.  I really cannot relate.  It’s hard to have empathy for a situation that is so far from what most of us ever have to endure.

As I thought about KT Rose and her brave-by-necessity parents… I am not sure what to say.

Yet I do have one story to tell.  This incident was one of the biggest dramas I have faced as a Mom… but it pales in comparison to brain surgery.

Yet the truths remain.

My son Mark had his tonsills out when he was 6 years old.  We were living in Germany and the German hospital sent us home on the 7th day.  In the middle of that night, our first night home, he ruptured something deep in his throat.  There was blood was everywhere – it was like a scene from a horror movie that I couldn’t make stop. I had to call a German ambulance and send him back to the hospital, the one we’d left only 12 hours ago, with my husband for emergency surgery to stop the bleeding.

The adrenalin rush of the crisis was absolutely exhausting, and we’d already had a week in the hospital… I didn’t know at the time that it would be two more weeks until we would finally be free, sent home to rest and heal and make new blood on our own time.

The ambulance left our house with Mark and my husband around 2 AM and then suddenly it was just eerie and silent.

I paced the hallways.

There was no way I could sleep, so I cleaned up all the messes in the house.  I prayed.  And prayed.  And prayed.

Ross called around 5 AM to say the surgery was over and Mark had been moved into the recovery room.

I watched the sunrise around 6 AM and drifted off to sleep finally.

I had a dream, but really it was more like a vision as the details were so clear and it was just a picture… not moving pieces.  I saw myself, curled up in the fetal position, in the palm of God’s hand.  Of course.  The meaning was so clear.  I was in His hand… just curled up, exhausted.  Resting.  He had it all under control.  I could relax.  Sleep.  Let go.  So I slept finally.

(It was another two years before something odd occurred to me.  Why was it me in His hand, and not Mark?  Shouldn’t He have been confirming that Mark was in His hand?  But no, what God really wanted to say was that I was in His hand.  Apparently that’s what I needed most, was to know that He was cradling me.  Comforting.  Protecting.  Controlling.)

I slept the sleep of the dead, the exhausted.

For one hour.

At 7 AM my phone rang.  It was Christa, one of my closest friends in Stuttgart.  She was the one had been picking up my daughter from school all week, feeding her dinner, and keeping her busy until my husband and I changed shifts at the hospital every night.

“What in the world is going on?!” she asked.  “I have been awake since 2 AM – praying for you.  Now tell me what’s happening.”

God woke her up to pray for Mark and our family.

When I most needed help, I couldn’t do anything about it, but God could.

I still don’t understand how prayer works in the economy of God but I do know this – He is in control.  Of everything.  Including waking up your friends to pray for you.

How awesome it is to serve a God like that!

Love, hugs, and prayers to KT Rose.  Mom and Dad, rest in peace.  You are in the palm of His hand.

Sleep as best you can.  Some of us may be up praying for you.

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