Guidelines For Living Devotional

What is a Blessing?

What is a blessing—the kind which God gives?   You can be blessed when you aren’t very happy because God’s blessings go far beyond feelings of happiness.

Does God Care if I Fail?

Where does the Holy Spirit fit into the plans of a life successfully lived?

What's Your Plan?

It’s amazing what marriages, families, and friendships have in common with successful businesses.  Planning and execution work pretty much the same way for them all.  

When God Seems Silent

 Amy Carmichael called it the "age-long minute," the period of time between when you pray, asking God to undertake, and the moment when His strong arm moves on your behalf.  The "age-long minute!"

Guidelines for Grieving

 “Ever since our mother died, my sister won’t talk about it.  It seems that she wants to just seal that part of her life off and pretend it didn’t happen,” confided a friend, wondering what he could do to help his sister.

Setting Frustration-Free Goals

Frustration is no stranger to the child of God.  Believers live in a world of broken pieces, and buses that are late, and budgets which will not balance, just the same as the man who is an atheist.  Let's go back to the source of much of our frustration--goals that are not reached, accomplishments that are not realized, and expectations that are not met.  The result: frustration. 

A Way to Pray in Times of Frustration

When I was a teen my parents tried to encourage me to learn to be independent and to develop the handy skill of sewing.  They told me that they would buy fabric for any piece of clothing I was willing to sew for myself.  Other clothing would have to come out of what I made from my part-time job at a shop in the mall.

Getting Beyond Your Frustration

"Dear Mr. Sala, I need help!  I am 34 years old, and I have not accomplished or feel that I am accomplishing any of my goals.  I attend college in the evenings.  I have done very well in bringing up my grade standards, but I seem to come in contact with situations that I cannot control or have the faith to overcome.  That is why I am writing.  I am faithless.  I thought I really believed in God, but I do not.  I don't even believe in myself.  I have listened to your Guidelines.  Can you please send me help or suggest help that is real?"  Signed, "With great frustration…"  Can you relate to that letter?  You bet you can!

Loving in Slices

“I can’t love people in slices,” says King Arthur in Camelot, “I take the good with the bad.”  Maybe that’s why King Arthur presided successfully over a vast array of knights and we seem to preside over the dissolution of relationships gone bad.  Can we love people in slices, choosing what we like, rejecting what we dislike?  There’s a problem with that philosophy—nobody, myself included, is completely lovable.  In every person there is a diversity of attitudes, habits, and mannerisms—some of which are wonderful, and some of which must surely be annoying to the most holy saints.

Is God Really to Blame

When British rock star Liam Gallagher’s father took a hammer and struck his mother, he blamed God.  “I stopped believing in God because of what happened to me,” he said, explaining that he and his mother and two brothers were forced to move into an apartment and start another life.