Guidelines For Living Devotional

What Is Your Life Worth?

What is the value of a human life?  There is enough phosphorous in the human body to tip twenty-two hundred matches, enough iron to make a small nail, enough fat to seven make bars of soap (in some cases a few more than that); enough calcium to whitewash a chicken coop; enough sulfur to delouse a dog and enough sugar to fill a small bowl.  But, is not life worth a great deal more than a few elements from a periodic chart? 

How To Get Started Studying The Bible

You have only five minutes in the morning.  Then you head for work, come home tired at the end of the day and fall exhausted into bed.  Your conscience nags at you a bit and you really want to pick up your Bible and spend a few minutes reading.  "But, can I really get anything out of this in five or ten minutes?" you ask yourself as you debate even bothering.  Here are four tried and true guidelines which will help you.  Make a note of these four words.  They are 1) attitude; 2) observation; 3) interpretation, and 4) application.

How Did Jesus Get To Be God?

Out of the mouth of babes come some of the toughest issues that ever confront theologians, to say nothing of Sunday school teachers or parents.  For example, the question that my son, then five years of age, once put to me in rush-hour traffic:  "Daddy, how did Jesus get to be God?"  What struck me about the question was that we hadn't even been talking about the subject.  Surprising as it may seem to you, that very issue was one of the first controversies in the early church.  Did Jesus become God when He was born?  Or rather was He always God and only appeared to be a man? 

Why You Can Still Have Peace When Life Unravels

When the sky turns dark, your health fails, your marriage partner walks out on you, or you are fired from the job you hoped you would keep until retirement, your world gradually unravels. Paul's words, "In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus," seem to torment you.  No matter how you try to put things together, it just doesn't make sense.

5 Ways To Age Well

"Dear Dr. Sala," wrote a friend, "Would you have any suggestions to help people who have reached their eighties and feel they have nothing to live for?  I admit feeling very useless at times. I am 82, in a wheel chair, and have little energy."

How To Be Truly Miserable…Or Content

An eminent psychologist, Joseph Kreisler, recognized the importance of contentment from having observed problems of human nature from a professional viewpoint.  Dr. Kreisler says, "If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself and what you want, what you like, what attention other people ought to pay you, and then you will find nothing will satisfy you.  You will spoil everything you touch, and finally, you will make pain and misery out of everything God sent you." 

What Does It Really Mean To Have Faith?

"Faith," wrote the Quaker scholar Elton Trueblood, "is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation."  Yet the fact is, faith seems to contradict the world of reality.  It is no wonder that the writer of Hebrews described faith as the "conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1, NASB).  It is the battle of the tangible versus the intangible, the seen versus the unseen, the material versus the spiritual.

Why Not You?

When Dr. Stanley Collins, a renowned Bible teacher and conference speaker, was felled with a heart attack, he looked up towards heaven, and though he did not actually say these words, his heart cried out, "Why me, Lord?"   Collins, like King Hezekiah who lay dying long ago, reminded the Lord of what he had been doing for Him.  Then, without hearing any voices or seeing any visions in the sky, Collins says it was almost as if he heard a voice so clearly say, "Why not you?" 

6 Secrets Of Strong Families

When Larry Alexander learned that he had eighteen months to live, his world came crashing down. The prospect of experimental surgery offered some hope, but the future was pretty bleak. His wife, Anne, then pregnant with their third child, faced the stress of having to raise their three children, provide for the family and nurse a man who faced the prospect of losing his life.

Stop Living A Greedy Life!

It's an old story retold many times. In the fourteenth century, there was a duke named Ranald who lived in the country we now know as Belgium. The duke was not only overweight; he was grossly indulgent. He craved food and his appetite for more was never fully satisfied, so much so that the peasants called him Crassis which in Latin means "the fat one."