Guidelines For Living Devotional

3 Guidelines To Follow God Wholeheartedly

Your brain may rule your head, but it is your heart which rules your emotions, and emotions are to life what pigment is to paint.  When your heart is committed, your world is together; but when it is divided, you are headed for trouble. 

Are You Courageous Enough To Obey?

When Moses knew that time for him was running out, he gave a charge to Joshua, saying, "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach" (Deuteronomy 30:11).  As a man who knew his days--possibly even his hours—were numbered, he gave it to him straight.  He said that obedience is a choice, a decision which you make.  And with obedience comes blessing; with disobedience comes difficulty.

Do The End Justify The Means?

A five-year-old Australian girl was "doing very well" after a heart-lung transplant in London, but her father halfway around the world in Melbourne wasn't doing very well.  Robert Edward Matthews, then aged 39, was apprehended for robbing a McDonald's restaurant to help pay for the surgery which gave the promise of new life to his little girl.  "I did it for Brooke," said Matthews, "and I'd do it again," he told the court.

What to Do When Your Friends Don't Like Each Other

"Dear Dr. Sala," writes an 8-year-old friend of Guidelines, "my name is Amy and I have a problem with my friends.  Missy won't like me if I like Aimee!  I like both of them but I don't understand!  I don't know what to do!  Could you tell me...?"  Signed, "Amy--your 8-year-old friend."

How To Truly Forgive Others

FORGIVEN!  No word in all the English language quite speaks to the heart of man as does this one word.  Pause for a moment and pronounce the word several times: forgiven, forgiven!  Forgiveness involves three areas of relationship--and the three, like the structure of a honeycomb, are all intertwined.

4 Guidelines On How To Forgive Yourself

"God has forgiven me, but I just cannot forgive myself."  You may never have said it, but perhaps you have thought it.  You can do one of two things:  You can go through life constantly defeated, or else you can follow the following guidelines that will tell you how to forgive yourself--once and for all.

Dealing With Past Failure And Guilt

A student caught cheating on an exam, stops going to church.  A mother of a child with disabilities lives in constant torment, convinced that God is punishing her child because she lived with her husband for a year before they were married and conceived her child during that time. A senior citizen--the victim of three heart attacks--sends a large check to a man who was his business partner forty years before with a terse note saying, "I had to get this off my chest before I meet my maker..."

What Is Most Important To God?

When the astronauts on the Apollo 8 were speeding back to planet earth from their rendezvous with the moon, they reflected on the vastness of what they had seen in space by reading the words of the eighth Psalm where David wrote, "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; What is man that Thou art mindful of him?  and the son of man, that Thou visitest him?  For Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour" (Psalms 8:3-5, KJV). 

Waiting For God When You’re Impatient

Island shrouded in heavy fog--am going on," was Richard Haliburton's last radio message before he sailed into oblivion.  Haliburton was a flamboyant adventurer and explorer who was attempting to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco in a Chinese junk.  He intended to stop in Taiwan for supplies, but when he approached the island, he could not see light and assumed that it was shrouded in fog.  It was not but Haliburton did not know that.  The lights had been blanketed in a practice air-raid drill, and sailing on was his last mistake.  He was lost at sea.  Richard Haliburton's impatience cost him his life.  Had he only waited for guidance, he would have made his destination.  James McConkey was right when he wrote, "Haste is the parent of 9/10ths of our mistakes..."

Is Success or Significance More Important?

Three of the most important questions that will ever confront you are 1) Where do you want to go with your life? 2) How are you going to get there? And 3) Once you have arrived, what are you going to do?