living for eternity today
There’s no such thing as a greedy Christian. If you know someone, or are yourself, who calls themselves a Christian and yet lives a pretty stingy and greedy life then perhaps we need to revisit what a Christian is! In my point of view you can’t be a Christian, or what I consider a Jesus follower, and be greedy. It just can’t happen!
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There are days when you just realize how blessed you are. Some call it lucky. Others call it a fluke. But I’m not one who really does the whole lucky or fluke kind of thing. I believe it’s about being blessed. Blessings are those things that come to us from outside of ourselves that enhance our lives and make them better. Some blessings appear good in the moment, while others are good only in the aftermath. But what about the blessing of waking up today? What about the gift of being able to see or speak or hear or walk or run or jump? This week’s Music Monday (albeit Tuesday already) is about the blessing of being alive in Christ.
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Families are tricky things. Anytime you put multiple people in a room for a given time there are bound to be disagreements. Right? Well add the dynamic of living together and the fact that in a family we tend to be so similar that disagreements are often more heated and differences are more severe and you have a recipe for disaster!
Continue readingFor some people serving is something they do. But for the Jesus follower it should just be part of who we are. That was this week’s focus in our Red Letter Challenge. Throughout the week we’ve been challenged to find creative ways to serve one another. Maybe it’s someone in your house or maybe it’s someone at work or even someone in your neighborhood – whoever it is find a way to touch their lives with an act of service.
Jesus was known for serving people. As a matter of fact, Jesus made it a practice to touch someone’s life before he taught someone a life principle. This week in our message we spent time seeing how Jesus has already touched our lives. Then we dug into the life lessons we’ve gleaned from this touch and the teaching that undoubtedly followed. If you have about 25 minutes, you should check out this week’s Red Letter Serving message.
Have you ever had one thing you just couldn’t get enough of? Maybe it was dinner at your favorite restaurant and you just wanted more. Maybe it was a day of vacation and you didn’t want to go back to work so you wanted more vacation. Maybe it was a person, maybe there is a person in your life that is so amazing you just always want to be around them. Jesus wants us to want Him. To desire Him. To crave Him so much that we cry out “I want more”.
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I’m always leery when someone comes back from a conference and starts to change everything. Once upon a time I was that guy who heard a powerful speaker and came back to try to do much of what the other person did. But that’s just not a good idea. It’s not healthy at all! And there’s a much better way.
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It’s a simple fact that I can’t give away someone I haven’t first received. I have to have it in order to give it away. I know that sounds pretty simple but so often we fail at sharing something because we haven’t properly invested in it ourselves. This week at Living Word Galena, we talked about forgiveness. The idea was that I’m only going to forgive as much as I’ve been forgiven. If I don’t value my own forgiveness, then I’m not going to forgive others well.
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Some days you’re on top of the world and have it all together. You’re stronger than you’ve ever been. You’ve got it all together and things are seemingly just falling into place. Then there are the other days. You know the days when it’s a success to just get out of bed. The days when finding a matching pair of socks makes you feel like a champion! Both of these kind of days are going to happen. But how can we face the challenging days with as much confidence as the easy one? Maybe it happens in knowing that someone is actually fighting for me!
Continue readingThis week at Living Word Galena we took a moment to stop and just be. It’s a pretty hard thing to do if you’re honest with yourself. Not focusing on work or to do lists or meetings or meal planning on running kids around or band practice or sporting events but just stopping for even just a minute to be, simply be.
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In a quest to make my way through 52 books this year, I made my to book 37 for the year and wow it was a good one. Someone suggested this book because I’ve been talking a lot about prayer lately, so I added it to my reading app and when it arrived I did my normal listening routine. I set my speed at around 1.75 – 2.25 times normal and started to listen. It didn’t take long before I realized that this book would require two runs through and one at a much more manageable speed!
So here’s the gist of the book. Simply put we pray to small and too seldom. It’s pretty much that easy. The idea behind The Circle Maker is the story of Jericho in the Bible. The Israelites were told by God to walk around the city everyday. Each day they essentially drew a circle around the city until one day God finally did something amazing. The walls crumbled to the ground. They didn’t crumble because of the weight of their trampling feet. The walls didn’t collapse because the Israelites were so mighty and so powerful that just walking had this massive effect.
The walls came down because the Israelite people did what God told them to do and circled the giant city and let the results be in God’s hands. You see so often we start to circle our Jericho and think it’s too big so we stop walking. We look at the size of our problem and forget the size of our God. The author, Mark Batterson, tells us that the things for which we ask of God are just flat too small. If we can do it then why do we ask God to do it?
I’ve started my own journey of circling my prayers. I’m not sure if you have one or not but I re-started my prayer journal. In it I write the things I’m praying for and the ways God has answered them. As I pray, I’m now circling some words in the prayers. I circle the words that are my Jericho. Some of the words are physical things like helping us pull off a big event at church while others are non-tangible things like self-confidence or focus. Whatever they are, in the moment they’re like a Jericho to me. But as I look at my prayers I’ve quickly realized that I don’t pray nearly big enough!
I guess it’s time to find a prayer that only God can answer and start praying that prayer. Will you join me is becoming a circle-maker?
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