Sunday, August 29, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Precept Ministries entry~Kay Arthur
When God is our focus, everything else-- including self-- has to take a back seat. He is the only One we have to please. Isn't that refreshing? We don't have to be afraid that such an attitude will make us hard or unloving or uncaring. What God works out in our lives will reflect His character, His likeness... His imprint. Read Psalms 73:25.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
Beggars and Bread
This Blog is Wonderful:
http://thebread.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/an-aroma-from-the-oven/
An Aroma From the Oven
October 10, 2007 Ken Leave a comment
SO FAR IN MY LIFE, NO ONE has ever said to me, “I just can’t stand the smell of home-made bread baking.”
Of the many aromas we human beings encounter in life, this one rates right up there. Each of us has his or her personal list of most-pleasant aromas or scents, of course.
Mine would include lilac and lavender, jasmine and honeysuckle, fresh-cut sawdust and new-mown hay, cinnamon rolls, freesia and fresh mint, sandalwood incense, the salty ocean breeze, roses, maple syrup, the air after a quick rain on dusty ground, the smell of rubber in a tire store (probably a guy thing), a smoky campfire, an evergreen forest, and apple-spice—for starters.
But the aroma of home-made bread, for sure, is one that most everybody has on their list of favorites.
Home-made bread. The “staff of life.” Wholesome, natural, filled with good stuff. And when you’re hungry—nothing better.
Beggars—and bread. Let’s be clear from the outset what the bread is.
It’s not morality or theology or ecclesiology or psychology or any other “ology” (though all of these can be related to what bread really is.
Bread is what you find in John 6:
And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. . . . I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Verses 35, 51, NKJV.
I’d like to suggest that God put an inborn hunger for this Bread into each of us. We can ignore that hunger, of course. Or we can try to satisfy it with something else. But it’s there, that hunger.
When you eat store-bought bread—filled with all those nutritious additives and preservatives and dough conditioners and who knows what—it’s just not the same as the real thing: fresh home-made bread.
And nothing can take the place of the real Bread of life: Jesus. Nothing else can satisfy that inborn spiritual hunger as He does.
What you find of the Bread, please share. I’ll do the same.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Aromas, Beggars and Bread, Bread of Life, Home-made bread, Scents
http://thebread.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/an-aroma-from-the-oven/
An Aroma From the Oven
October 10, 2007 Ken Leave a comment
SO FAR IN MY LIFE, NO ONE has ever said to me, “I just can’t stand the smell of home-made bread baking.”
Of the many aromas we human beings encounter in life, this one rates right up there. Each of us has his or her personal list of most-pleasant aromas or scents, of course.
Mine would include lilac and lavender, jasmine and honeysuckle, fresh-cut sawdust and new-mown hay, cinnamon rolls, freesia and fresh mint, sandalwood incense, the salty ocean breeze, roses, maple syrup, the air after a quick rain on dusty ground, the smell of rubber in a tire store (probably a guy thing), a smoky campfire, an evergreen forest, and apple-spice—for starters.
But the aroma of home-made bread, for sure, is one that most everybody has on their list of favorites.
Home-made bread. The “staff of life.” Wholesome, natural, filled with good stuff. And when you’re hungry—nothing better.
Beggars—and bread. Let’s be clear from the outset what the bread is.
It’s not morality or theology or ecclesiology or psychology or any other “ology” (though all of these can be related to what bread really is.
Bread is what you find in John 6:
And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. . . . I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Verses 35, 51, NKJV.
I’d like to suggest that God put an inborn hunger for this Bread into each of us. We can ignore that hunger, of course. Or we can try to satisfy it with something else. But it’s there, that hunger.
When you eat store-bought bread—filled with all those nutritious additives and preservatives and dough conditioners and who knows what—it’s just not the same as the real thing: fresh home-made bread.
And nothing can take the place of the real Bread of life: Jesus. Nothing else can satisfy that inborn spiritual hunger as He does.
What you find of the Bread, please share. I’ll do the same.
Categories: Uncategorized Tags: Aromas, Beggars and Bread, Bread of Life, Home-made bread, Scents
13 Questions to Diagnose Your Idolatries
By: Tyler Kenney
http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/2624_13_questions_to_diagnose_your_idolatries/
http://www.hopeingod.org/player?url=sermons/20100822_KStokes.mp3&nid=42641
Idolatry is a word to describe what happens when we turn our worship away from God and attach it to anyone and anything else. Thereby, idolatry gives rise to the myriad of sinful desires and sinful actions that characterize humanity apart from grace. Romans 1:24-25 says, as a form of judgment, that God has given humanity over to our idolatry-driven desires. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” As judgment, God has given them up to vain, idol worship.
This is like this week’s Fighter Verse, Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
Overall the biblical teaching is consistent. An idol is anything or anyone that takes the rightful place of God. It doesn’t matter if it is an object or a person or anything else. It doesn’t matter if there is an actual “carved image” or not. It is true to observe that in the New Testament there is more of a focus on “idolatry of the heart” and less of a focus on idolatry of carved images.
David Powlison observes, “If ‘idolatry’ is the characteristic and summary of the Old Testament word for our drift from God, then ‘desires’ is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift…Interestingly (and surprisingly) the New Testament merges the concept of idolatry and the concept of inordinate, life-ruling desires. Idolatry becomes a problem of the heart” (Powlison, 36). When a created thing takes the place of worth, value, beauty, honor, trust, fear or love that rightly belongs to God, it is an idol.
How does this biblical perspective inform our understanding of 1 John 5:21? Since 1 John says nothing about worshipping carved images, verse 21 most likely refers to idols in their broader New Testament metaphorical sense of “idols of the heart.”[3] The warning is to cast out the myriad of idols within own hearts. And the warning is to keep yourselves from the idols that you create in your heart to satisfy “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions” (1 John 2:16).
Search Your Heart
How do we search our hearts for idols? First, don’t think of idols as primarily bad things. More often, they are good things that we have exalted to become ultimate. So don’t think if idols as primarily bad things but more often as good things. I find it most help to put it this way: Idolatry is when God’s gifts become gods.
Thomas Oden writes,
When a finite value [becomes a center of value by which other values are judges and] has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning, then one has chosen what Jews and Christians call a god…To be worshipped as a god, something must be sufficiently good to be plausibly regarded as the rightful center of one’s valuing…One has a god when a finite value is worshipped and adored and viewed as that without which one cannot receive life joyfully.[4]
In his sermon titled “Soul Idolatry Excludes Men Out of Heaven,” English Puritan Pastor David Clarkson (1621-1686) gives us thirteen pointers I’ll draw from to help us identify the idols of our hearts and I will frame them as questions.[5]
1.What do you most highly value?
2.What do you think about by default?
3.What is your hightest goal?
4.To what or whom are you most commited?
5.Who or what do you love the most?
6.Who or what do you trust or depend upon the most?
7.Who or what do you fear the most?
8.Who or what do you hope in and hope for most?
9.Who or what do you desire the most? Or, what desire makes you most angry or makes you despair when it is not satisfied?
10.Who or what do you most delight in, your greatest joy and treasure?
11.Who or what captures your greatest zeal?
12.To whom or for what are you most thankful?
13.For whom or what great purpose do you work?
Tim Keller says, Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry… Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them they are sinning because they are looking to their careers and romances to save them, to give them everything that they should be looking for in God. This idolatry leads to drivenness, addictions, sever anxiety, obsessiveness, envy of others and resentment. (Keller, “Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age,” Gospel Coalition).
I would urge you to search your heart too. Ask God for help, and he will help you. Search your heart to identify your idols. They are there, shaping your values, birthing sinful desires and causing sinful actions. Search your heart by the light of the Word and presence of the Spirit. What or who functions as your ultimate value, your ultimate meaning, your ultimate joy? What is the center of your life? Whatever it is, if it isn’t God it is one of his gifts.
As you search your heart, don’t let yourself off the hook by identifying someone else’s idols. It is so easy to do. O how easy it is to see the idols in the lives of other people. On the one hand, this can be helpful in the context of a humble community of believers. We can help one another see our idols and fight the fight of faith together. On the other hand, this can be deadly in a people blinded by pride because the hardest idols to see are your own. The danger is that I may swell with the self-exalting delusion that “Everyone else has idols, except me!” Look in your heart. The hardest idols to see are your own.
Next week, Lord willing, come back and I hope to describe some of the workings of specific idols with the hope that God would grant us new awareness, new insight, new vigilance and new power to worship God in Christ alone. For his glory and our joy, now and forever.
http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/2624_13_questions_to_diagnose_your_idolatries/
http://www.hopeingod.org/player?url=sermons/20100822_KStokes.mp3&nid=42641
Idolatry is a word to describe what happens when we turn our worship away from God and attach it to anyone and anything else. Thereby, idolatry gives rise to the myriad of sinful desires and sinful actions that characterize humanity apart from grace. Romans 1:24-25 says, as a form of judgment, that God has given humanity over to our idolatry-driven desires. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” As judgment, God has given them up to vain, idol worship.
This is like this week’s Fighter Verse, Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
Overall the biblical teaching is consistent. An idol is anything or anyone that takes the rightful place of God. It doesn’t matter if it is an object or a person or anything else. It doesn’t matter if there is an actual “carved image” or not. It is true to observe that in the New Testament there is more of a focus on “idolatry of the heart” and less of a focus on idolatry of carved images.
David Powlison observes, “If ‘idolatry’ is the characteristic and summary of the Old Testament word for our drift from God, then ‘desires’ is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift…Interestingly (and surprisingly) the New Testament merges the concept of idolatry and the concept of inordinate, life-ruling desires. Idolatry becomes a problem of the heart” (Powlison, 36). When a created thing takes the place of worth, value, beauty, honor, trust, fear or love that rightly belongs to God, it is an idol.
How does this biblical perspective inform our understanding of 1 John 5:21? Since 1 John says nothing about worshipping carved images, verse 21 most likely refers to idols in their broader New Testament metaphorical sense of “idols of the heart.”[3] The warning is to cast out the myriad of idols within own hearts. And the warning is to keep yourselves from the idols that you create in your heart to satisfy “the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions” (1 John 2:16).
Search Your Heart
How do we search our hearts for idols? First, don’t think of idols as primarily bad things. More often, they are good things that we have exalted to become ultimate. So don’t think if idols as primarily bad things but more often as good things. I find it most help to put it this way: Idolatry is when God’s gifts become gods.
Thomas Oden writes,
When a finite value [becomes a center of value by which other values are judges and] has been elevated to centrality and imagined as a final source of meaning, then one has chosen what Jews and Christians call a god…To be worshipped as a god, something must be sufficiently good to be plausibly regarded as the rightful center of one’s valuing…One has a god when a finite value is worshipped and adored and viewed as that without which one cannot receive life joyfully.[4]
In his sermon titled “Soul Idolatry Excludes Men Out of Heaven,” English Puritan Pastor David Clarkson (1621-1686) gives us thirteen pointers I’ll draw from to help us identify the idols of our hearts and I will frame them as questions.[5]
1.What do you most highly value?
2.What do you think about by default?
3.What is your hightest goal?
4.To what or whom are you most commited?
5.Who or what do you love the most?
6.Who or what do you trust or depend upon the most?
7.Who or what do you fear the most?
8.Who or what do you hope in and hope for most?
9.Who or what do you desire the most? Or, what desire makes you most angry or makes you despair when it is not satisfied?
10.Who or what do you most delight in, your greatest joy and treasure?
11.Who or what captures your greatest zeal?
12.To whom or for what are you most thankful?
13.For whom or what great purpose do you work?
Tim Keller says, Sin isn’t only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry… Instead of telling them they are sinning because they are sleeping with their girlfriends or boyfriends, I tell them they are sinning because they are looking to their careers and romances to save them, to give them everything that they should be looking for in God. This idolatry leads to drivenness, addictions, sever anxiety, obsessiveness, envy of others and resentment. (Keller, “Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age,” Gospel Coalition).
I would urge you to search your heart too. Ask God for help, and he will help you. Search your heart to identify your idols. They are there, shaping your values, birthing sinful desires and causing sinful actions. Search your heart by the light of the Word and presence of the Spirit. What or who functions as your ultimate value, your ultimate meaning, your ultimate joy? What is the center of your life? Whatever it is, if it isn’t God it is one of his gifts.
As you search your heart, don’t let yourself off the hook by identifying someone else’s idols. It is so easy to do. O how easy it is to see the idols in the lives of other people. On the one hand, this can be helpful in the context of a humble community of believers. We can help one another see our idols and fight the fight of faith together. On the other hand, this can be deadly in a people blinded by pride because the hardest idols to see are your own. The danger is that I may swell with the self-exalting delusion that “Everyone else has idols, except me!” Look in your heart. The hardest idols to see are your own.
Next week, Lord willing, come back and I hope to describe some of the workings of specific idols with the hope that God would grant us new awareness, new insight, new vigilance and new power to worship God in Christ alone. For his glory and our joy, now and forever.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Treasuring Him - DWYL Sermon Jam Video
Philippians 3:7-9 "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ."
Family Worship
Matthew Henry:
If therefore our houses be houses of the Lord, we shall for that reason love home, reckoning our daily devotion the sweetest of our daily delights; and our family-worship the most valuable of our family-comforts...A church in the house will be a good legacy, nay, it will be a good inheritance, to be left to your children after you.
From Donald Whitney's book Family Worship.
If therefore our houses be houses of the Lord, we shall for that reason love home, reckoning our daily devotion the sweetest of our daily delights; and our family-worship the most valuable of our family-comforts...A church in the house will be a good legacy, nay, it will be a good inheritance, to be left to your children after you.
From Donald Whitney's book Family Worship.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Enjoying God Ministries
"The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him."
C.S. Lewis
Click the link below to go to the webside Enjoying God Ministries.
http://www.enjoyinggodministries.com/
http://www.enjoyinggodministries.com/article/what-is-christian-hedonism/
C.S. Lewis
Click the link below to go to the webside Enjoying God Ministries.
http://www.enjoyinggodministries.com/
http://www.enjoyinggodministries.com/article/what-is-christian-hedonism/
The First Attack on Family~John MacArthur
http://www.gty.org/Blog/B100819
Thursday, August 19, 2010
After God created the first couple and brought them together in the first marriage ceremony, there was perfect harmony, fellowship, and joy. Adam had a wife to fellowship with; the two of them exercised dominion together. Eve had her husband to protect, provide, and care for her. All was well in Eden, for the moment.
Perfection didn’t last long—a serpent was loose in the Garden of Eden, crafty and animated by Satan. He launched the first attack on the first family, striking out against God and His perfect creation.
In the first recorded assault against humanity, Satan sought to overturn God’s pattern of marriage. The devil—in one strategic act of treachery—undermined not only the first family, but God’s entire system of earthly rule. Think about it: God is the head of man, man is the head of woman, and mankind together presides over the animal kingdom. Essentially, the pattern was God, man, woman, animals. Satan literally turned that entire system on its head. An animal (the serpent), came to the woman (Eve), counseled her to act independently of her husband (Adam), and to disobey the creator (God).
From a military standpoint, Satan’s plan was brilliant and won an immediate victory. And his strategy didn’t end with the first parents—he used the same tactics on the first children as well. Adam’s first son, Cain killed his younger brother, Abel, incurring the curse of God on his life. Satan managed to inject poison between spouses, siblings, and in all human relationships.
That’s a pretty impressive track record for Satan—he’s a crafty and wily enemy. He was, and still is, quite the home-wrecker. He tempts us, offers us the opportunity for a sinful alternative to God’s design, and we take what he has to offer, to the detriment of our relationships. Satan has known from the very beginning what many naïve Christians are slow to grasp—the family is key in God’s program. Destroy the family, and society crumbles.
There are too many families for Satan to single-handedly carry out his campaign of destruction, so he enlists the help of contemporary secular society. After all, the “whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (1 John 5:19). Through ungodly philosophies and ideologies, he continues to attack the traditional roles of men and women within the family. Special-interest groups and government agencies seem bent on the dissolution of the traditional family, advocating the normalization of homosexuality, same-sex “marriage,” and (in some cultures nowadays) sterilization programs. Divorce has been made easy, tax laws penalize marriage, and government welfare rewards childbirth outside of wedlock. All those trends (and many more like them) are direct attacks on the sanctity of the family.
Although many Christian leaders have been passionately voicing concerns about the dissolution of the family for decades, things have grown steadily worse, not better, in society at large. Secular social commentators have lately begun to claim that the traditional nuclear family is no longer even “realistic.” An article published by the online magazine Salon said this: “The ‘ideal’ American family—a father and a mother, bound to each other by legal marriage, raising children bound to them by biology—is a stubborn relic, a national symbol that has yet to be returned as threadbare and somewhat unrealistic.” The nuclear family simply won’t work in twenty-first-century society, according to many of these self-styled “experts.”
I know those voices are wrong, however, because I have witnessed literally thousands of parents in our church who have put into practice what the Bible teaches about the family, and they and their families have been greatly blessed for it.
As society continues its mad quest to eliminate the family, and as our whole culture therefore unravels more and more, it becomes more important than ever for Christians to understand what the Bible teaches about the family, and to put it into practice in their homes. It may well be that the example we set before the world through strong homes and healthy families will in the long run be one of the most powerful, attractive, and living proofs that when the Bible speaks, it speaks with the authority of the God who created us—and whose design for the family is perfect.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
After God created the first couple and brought them together in the first marriage ceremony, there was perfect harmony, fellowship, and joy. Adam had a wife to fellowship with; the two of them exercised dominion together. Eve had her husband to protect, provide, and care for her. All was well in Eden, for the moment.
Perfection didn’t last long—a serpent was loose in the Garden of Eden, crafty and animated by Satan. He launched the first attack on the first family, striking out against God and His perfect creation.
In the first recorded assault against humanity, Satan sought to overturn God’s pattern of marriage. The devil—in one strategic act of treachery—undermined not only the first family, but God’s entire system of earthly rule. Think about it: God is the head of man, man is the head of woman, and mankind together presides over the animal kingdom. Essentially, the pattern was God, man, woman, animals. Satan literally turned that entire system on its head. An animal (the serpent), came to the woman (Eve), counseled her to act independently of her husband (Adam), and to disobey the creator (God).
From a military standpoint, Satan’s plan was brilliant and won an immediate victory. And his strategy didn’t end with the first parents—he used the same tactics on the first children as well. Adam’s first son, Cain killed his younger brother, Abel, incurring the curse of God on his life. Satan managed to inject poison between spouses, siblings, and in all human relationships.
That’s a pretty impressive track record for Satan—he’s a crafty and wily enemy. He was, and still is, quite the home-wrecker. He tempts us, offers us the opportunity for a sinful alternative to God’s design, and we take what he has to offer, to the detriment of our relationships. Satan has known from the very beginning what many naïve Christians are slow to grasp—the family is key in God’s program. Destroy the family, and society crumbles.
There are too many families for Satan to single-handedly carry out his campaign of destruction, so he enlists the help of contemporary secular society. After all, the “whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (1 John 5:19). Through ungodly philosophies and ideologies, he continues to attack the traditional roles of men and women within the family. Special-interest groups and government agencies seem bent on the dissolution of the traditional family, advocating the normalization of homosexuality, same-sex “marriage,” and (in some cultures nowadays) sterilization programs. Divorce has been made easy, tax laws penalize marriage, and government welfare rewards childbirth outside of wedlock. All those trends (and many more like them) are direct attacks on the sanctity of the family.
Although many Christian leaders have been passionately voicing concerns about the dissolution of the family for decades, things have grown steadily worse, not better, in society at large. Secular social commentators have lately begun to claim that the traditional nuclear family is no longer even “realistic.” An article published by the online magazine Salon said this: “The ‘ideal’ American family—a father and a mother, bound to each other by legal marriage, raising children bound to them by biology—is a stubborn relic, a national symbol that has yet to be returned as threadbare and somewhat unrealistic.” The nuclear family simply won’t work in twenty-first-century society, according to many of these self-styled “experts.”
I know those voices are wrong, however, because I have witnessed literally thousands of parents in our church who have put into practice what the Bible teaches about the family, and they and their families have been greatly blessed for it.
As society continues its mad quest to eliminate the family, and as our whole culture therefore unravels more and more, it becomes more important than ever for Christians to understand what the Bible teaches about the family, and to put it into practice in their homes. It may well be that the example we set before the world through strong homes and healthy families will in the long run be one of the most powerful, attractive, and living proofs that when the Bible speaks, it speaks with the authority of the God who created us—and whose design for the family is perfect.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
William Wiberforce quotes
“Of all things, guard against neglecting God in the secret place of prayer.”
“Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.”
“The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.”
~William Wilberforce
“Can you tell a plain man the road to heaven? Certainly, turn at once to the right, then go straight forward.”
“The objects of the present life fill the human eye with a false magnification because of their immediacy.”
~William Wilberforce
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Running
"You have to stop loving and pursuing Christ in order to sin. When you are pursuing love, running toward Christ, you do not have opportunity to wonder, *Am I doing this right?* or *Did I serve enough this week?* When you are running toward Christ, you are freed up to serve, love, and give thanks without guilt, worry or fear. As long as you are running, you're safe." — Francis Chan (Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God)
Francis Chan Quote
"The core problem isn’t the fact that we’re lukewarm, halfhearted, or stagnant Christians. The crux of it all is why we are this way, and it is because we have an inaccurate view of God. We see Him as a benevolent Being who is satisfied when people manage to fit Him into their lives in some small way. We forget that God never had an identity crisis. He knows that He’s great and deserves to be the center of our lives." — Francis Chan
Friday, August 13, 2010
George Mueller
"In the course of time I came to this country, and it pleased God then to show to me the doctrines of grace in a way in which I had not seen them before. At first I hated them, “If this were true I could do nothing at all in the conversion of sinners, as all would depend upon God and the working of His Spirit.” But when it pleased God to reveal these truths to me, and my heart was brought to such a state that I could say, “I am not only content simply to be a hammer, an axe, or a saw, in God's hands; but I shall count it an honor to be taken up and used by Him in any way; and if sinners are converted through my instrumentality, from my inmost soul I will give Him all the glory; the Lord gave me to see fruit; the Lord gave me to see fruit in abundance; sinners were converted by scores; and ever since God has used me in one way or other in His service.”
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Biographies/1531_George_Muellers_Strategy_for_Showing_God/
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Biographies/1531_George_Muellers_Strategy_for_Showing_God/
Whiner or Winner?
“It is wise to direct your anger towards problems -- not people; to focus your energies on answers -- not excuses.” ~William Arthur Ward
Whiners:
Bring other people down.
Expect others to cater to them.
Want others’ opinions to be what they want to hear.
Are pessimistic.
Try to justify their complaining.
Interrupt discussions to make personal comments.
Complain about things over which they have no control.
Winners:
Inspire others to take action.
Expect others to do the right thing.
Are willing to hear dissenting opinions.
Are optimistic.
Have a valid reason behind their complaint.
Listen to others’ responses in turn.
Complain about things they perceive to be out of control.
Taken from intouch.org
Whiners:
Bring other people down.
Expect others to cater to them.
Want others’ opinions to be what they want to hear.
Are pessimistic.
Try to justify their complaining.
Interrupt discussions to make personal comments.
Complain about things over which they have no control.
Winners:
Inspire others to take action.
Expect others to do the right thing.
Are willing to hear dissenting opinions.
Are optimistic.
Have a valid reason behind their complaint.
Listen to others’ responses in turn.
Complain about things they perceive to be out of control.
Taken from intouch.org
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Jesus Was Not Always Nice
Luke 20:45-47
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Videos/T8242-250A
"The enemies of the Gospel were and always are most formidable when they are religious."~John McArthur
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Videos/T8242-250A
"The enemies of the Gospel were and always are most formidable when they are religious."~John McArthur
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Pascal Quote
"Not only do we not know God except through Jesus Christ; We do not even know ourselves except through Jesus Christ." ~Blaise Pascal~
Excerpt from Suffering and the Sovereignty of God~John Piper
http://www.desiringgod.org/media/pdf/books_bssg/books_bssg.pdf
It is right and good to pray for healing. God has purchased it in the death of his Son, with all the other blessings of grace, for all his children (Isa. 53:5). But he has not promised that we get the whole inheritance in this life. And he decides how much. We pray, and we trust his answer. If you ask your Father for bread, he will not give you a stone. If you ask him for a fish, he will not give you a serpent (see Matt. 7:9-10). It may not be bread. And it may not be a fish. But it will be good for you. That is what he promises (Rom. 8:28).
It is right and good to pray for healing. God has purchased it in the death of his Son, with all the other blessings of grace, for all his children (Isa. 53:5). But he has not promised that we get the whole inheritance in this life. And he decides how much. We pray, and we trust his answer. If you ask your Father for bread, he will not give you a stone. If you ask him for a fish, he will not give you a serpent (see Matt. 7:9-10). It may not be bread. And it may not be a fish. But it will be good for you. That is what he promises (Rom. 8:28).
Friday, August 6, 2010
The Scandal of Grace, Pt. 2 Mark 2:13-17
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Videos/T8241-9B
The first 8 minutes of this video is a clip of McArthurs new video series on The Prodigal Son.
The first 8 minutes of this video is a clip of McArthurs new video series on The Prodigal Son.
Encouragement
“A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.”
~William Arthur Ward quote
~William Arthur Ward quote
Criticism
“Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you.”~William Arthur Ward quotes
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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