Guidelines For Living Devotional

A Waste of Suffering

In his book, Why Us? Warren Wiersbe tells of visiting a dear friend whose world had come apart.  Her husband had gone blind, and then her health failed.  As she struggled with an incurable disease, followed by a stroke that caused her to give up employment, she was forced to remain at home caring for her husband when she actually needed care herself.

Living with the Past

If you had the power to change something that happened yesterday, would you do it?  Of course, every one would. Yet you can no more change what has already happened than you can turn back the sun as it races across the sky or reverse the flow of sand through the hourglass of time.

Four Steps to a Stronger Faith

Everybody should have some spiritual heroes—men and women whom you admire and respect.  But I’ve also discovered that our heroes—the ones we have put on pedestals—also make us feel pretty insignificant and inadequate.  It’s like the two cows in the field munching their cud.  As a large new stainless steel truck, gleaming with chrome and new paint which bore the words, “Homogenized, Sanitized, Purified Milk” on the side passed by, the one cow mooed to the other, “Sure makes you feel inadequate, doesn’t it?”

What God Sees When He Sees You

To what degree is it legitimate for airport security officials to embarrass passengers, provided their discomfort gives everyone the assurance that the flight you are on is a safe one?  That’s one of the very issues that confront travelers today. 
You may have seen the article with the caption, “Before takeoff, scanner takes it all off.” The caption underneath the headline read, “New imaging machine peers through clothes to search for dangerous items. Critics say it’s a virtual strip search.”

In His Arms

In his book by the same title Phil Yancey asks the question, “Where is God when I hurt?”  If you have never asked that question, take heart.  Someday that cry may rise from your heart as you try to reconcile what happens to you with the belief that God is a good God who loves you.

God of Our Own Making

Question:  Is God a divine accommodation, something or someone we have invented to make us feel good about ourselves, particularly when we know we have done wrong?  Can God be manipulated to get what we want, a kind of divine sugar daddy of the sky?  One to whom we can turn when we need a good cry, or someone to tell us, “What you have done is OK.  You’re not nearly as bad as some”?

Does God Know Where You Are?

Have you noticed that invariably when you connect with someone who answers your call on a cell or mobile phone, you immediately ask, “Where are you?” Whether it is your teenager who is checking in with you, your husband who is on a business trip, or a friend you haven’t heard from for a while, you want to know where the person is, so instinctively you ask, “Where are you?”  Inversely if you get a call that originates from a friend who calls you on a cell phone, you are asked, “Do you know where I am?” Knowing this establishes an identity and a personal connection.

One Question for God

If you had an opportunity to ask God just one question, what would it be?  Would you ask how old the universe really is—a question that would put to rest once and for all the debate about the age of the Earth?  Possibly.  Or would you ask a theological question—say, about free will versus the sovereign will of God?

Vengeance: He's Got This!

“I am from mainland China,” writes a friend of Guidelines who tells how someone introduced him to Jesus Christ.  “Miraculously, I was filled with peace and happiness,” he says as he began to study the Bible.  But some of what he read in this book troubled him, especially what Jesus said.  He wrote, “I find it impossible to love my enemy and pray for the person who hates me.  My culture teaches me to pay an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  But Jesus said, ‘Do not resist an evil person.  If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’”

Leaving the Getting Even to God

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! Do the same thing to the other person that he or she first did to you.  It’s in the Bible, right?”  If you are saying the right to extract vengeance or to inflict on someone the same injury they inflicted upon you is biblical, I have to say, “No, that’s not in the Bible.”
            “Just a minute,” you may be saying, “isn’t there something in the Bible about “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth?”  In response to that question, I would answer, “Yes, there is!”  But it doesn’t mean what you think it means.