Guidelines For Living Devotional

How God Uses Flawed People

The English poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured an age-abiding truth when he wrote, “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.” He’s right, and one man who left footprints stretching across 2000 miles of time was an unlikely candidate for success—a fisherman by trade. He was scarcely qualified to do more than perhaps organize the union of fisherman on Galilee until the day that Jesus walked by and said, “Follow me!” Then Peter got up, left his nets and followed Jesus Christ.

Is There a Right Way to Pray?

While the cross is unquestionably the universal symbol of redemption, Albrecht Dürer's praying hands have become the symbol of prayer.  The story, though, behind his creation of those praying hands, makes it even more poignant. Dürer was a German painter who had a friend who also was a painter, and though his friend worked hard, he never became famous. One day Dürer, looking at the hands of his obscure friend, saw in his folded hands the embodiment of what prayer is about.  Common, ordinary, unfulfilled men and women who are needy and poor in spirit, fold their hands in reverence and surrender and lift their hearts to God.
 

Your 3 Choices When Disappointed with God

When the British expositor and teacher, Joseph Parker, saw the suffering his wife endured as she lay dying with cancer, he was perplexed.  Yes, he prayed and cried out to the Lord, but day by day, her suffering increased, and finally she lay still.  When she died, for a week Parker, according to his own testimony, wallowed in the dark despair of atheism.  He said that if he had had a dog who suffered as did the one he loved, he would have put the animal out of its misery.
 

How to Find God

"God Goes Online," read the title of an article carried in the newspaper,The Wall Street Journal, nearly two decades ago.  Yes, a quick search for “God” in a web browser instantaneously brings up about 2.9 billion results!

How to Talk to a Man... or a Woman

Men and women just don't communicate the same way, contends sociologist Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand--Women and Men in Conversation.  Ever since the days of Adam and Eve, however, women have been telling us that men and women don't talk the same language. Even scientists have been telling us that there are differences in brain patterns between men and women which affect our ability to communicate with each other.  Again, no great surprise to women.  One veteran of many unsuccessful bouts to get through to a non-communicative husband wrote, and with a stroke of resignation, she said, "He has lazy speech muscles--that's all!" 
 

What Price Would You Pay for Your Faith?

Abdul Rahman was on death row with little prospect of avoiding execution. The case against him was air-tight. He confessed his crime, one allegedly committed some 16 years before. There was a public outcry as well to execute the bearded, sad-faced man for what he had done. Thousands of people rallied in the streets demanding that he be executed.  And what was the crime that he had committed? 

How to Handle Hard Things

Everything in life is relative! What seems to be a major catastrophe to some is a mere bump in the road to others. Some suffer in silence, never letting others know the pain or heartache they are enduring, while others broadcast the slightest wrong they have suffered.

How God Uses Human Failure

Living in a broken world creates a kind of spiritual skepticism in our lives, especially when we see human failure mirrored in the lives of those whom we have put on pedestals thinking of them as a cut above the ordinary. Then when they fail you, you ask, “Is there anyone who really lives the life, instead of simply of using the language and saying the right things?”

Can You Have Church At Home?

“There’s No Pulpit Like Home” read the catchy title of an article in Timemagazine, a news publication that used to be distributed pretty much all over the English-speaking world.  It told of a fellowship of believers who meet together in a home, sing and share their thoughts—their tribulations, their challenges, their problems. They talk and pray, and cry together. There is a reading from the New Testament book of Hebrews followed by more discussion. In the course of their time together, they share a practice that believers have observed from the days of the Upper Room: they break bread and take a cup reflecting on the death and resurrection of Christ. “Communion” they call it.

Have You Given Up On the Church?

“Dear Harold,” writes a regular listener to Guidelines, “as a member of a large mainline denomination, I have often been disenchanted with the liberalism that seems to pervade the church. We have one of the finest choirs and most beautiful buildings in the city. And yet, one is hard pressed to hear the preaching of the Gospel…. Such churches may be very wealthy indeed, and yet, they appear to be very poor.”