Tag: God

“Do not lean on your own understanding”

Andrée Seu, “Alice’s battle“:

You have never seen a struggle like Alice’s struggle against joy. The doubting Narnian dwarfs were preemptively miserable, and so is Alice. The girlfriends’ counsel of lowered expectations mounts a new offensive in her mind. (There is no force so powerful as error in a godly person’s mouth.) But just as Alice starts to sink again, the Spirit counters with this coup de grace:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).

Alice perceives in a hot instant that this is not only where the present battle is joined, but where every battle is joined—against the counsel of one’s saintliest friend, against the received wisdom of one’s generation, against the carnal instinct to protect oneself. There are only ever these two—the Word of the Lord; your own understanding.

It dawns on Alice that at any given moment of the day she has a choice of which thoughts she may entertain—those of her friends and “her own understanding,” or the word of the Lord. All that is not the latter is the former, no matter how sweetly wrapped.

Don’t keep it in the closet

Glenn Beck, in the epilogue of The Christmas Sweater:

My mom gave me the sweater, but the greatest gift was given to all of us by a loving Father in Heaven. It is the only true gift ever given to all and yet opened or appreciated by so few. It is the gift of redemption and atonement, and it sits on the top shelf, largely untouched, in the closets of our soul.

At Christmas we celebrate the birth of the Christ child, but by doing so, sometimes we miss the real meaning of the season. It is what that infant, boy, and then perfect man did at the end of His ministry that makes the birth so special.

Without His death, the birth is meaningless.

Wow

I had read somewhere a brief bit of Brian Welch’s acceptance of Christ, but his testimony for I Am Second is powerful stuff.

[Wave of the phin to Evan Courtney.]

The future

Mark Hall:

“Praying about the future? Take heart! God is already there. He’s standing at the end of our lives looking back on all our days.”

A message from God

“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.” –Rabindranath Tagore
[Via A Child Chosen.]

In praise of single-issue voting

Tony Woodlief:

Those other issues certainly affect a country’s safety, prosperity, and greatness. But I’ve come to believe that a nation that tolerates destruction of innocents deserves neither safety nor prosperity nor greatness. We’ve descended into barbarism, and it poisons how we treat the elderly, the incapacitated, even ourselves. We shouldn’t be surprised, having made life a utilitarian calculation, that more and more humans become inconvenient.

It’s certainly true that there are other issues that ought to concern Christians, like the sanctity of marriage, and how we treat the mentally ill, the elderly, and children who have been born. But abortion is, in my view, the touchstone. Get this one wrong and your moral compass can guide you in nothing else.

What does it mean to be a Christian voter?

Tony Woodlief, with words I need to take heed of:

Cast aside what you think you know is right, the church marquee urges, and consider the God-breathed Word. Give yourself over to it and these seemingly large things–tax rates, economic growth, wars, and rumors of wars–will diminish. Meanwhile, those seemingly small things–the anger in our hearts when we, say, confront someone whose ideology we dislike or the fact that we find it so much easier to spend time with those we like rather than those who need us–will become grievous to our spirits.

This is the Word that cuts through every heart, through the very heart of darkness, illuminating the world as it is and will be. Beside it every politician ever born is remarkably inconsequential. Our business on Election Day is brief, and regardless of who wins our work remains the same–seeking and serving the lost, losing our own lives in the doing, and clinging to the Cross that shatters nations, tribes, and creeds.

I’m hanging my hat on this one

“Who is in the White House is not as important as Who is on the White Throne.” –Stewart Briscoe
[Via Mike.]

You never know

Dr. Wess Stafford, President and CEO of Compassion:

“The cure to cancer might be in the slums of Kenya or Indonesia.”
In other words, you don’t know what the children of today are capable of tomorrow, how God may use someone like me, someone like you, now to change the lives of scores, hundreds, thousands, possibly millions, years from now, just because we help change the life of one child today.
Please consider sponsoring a child.

A prayer


Brandon Heath – Give Me Your Eyes from Brandon Heath on Vimeo.