Guidelines For Living Devotional

God, Can't You Just Hurry It Up?

I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. Philippians 4:11
Have you browsed popular books lately? You might be surprised what you will find, including titles like The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Getting Things Done, Think and Grow Rich, and other time management, stress-relievers. Even Christian books are getting into the “compress your spirituality into short, manageable segments” mode—small spiritual capsules that produce painless growth and ultimate victory.

Faith When There's No Hope

"According to your faith," said Jesus Christ, "be it unto you!" (Matthew 9:29, KJV). What a statement! He was talking to a man who was blind from birth. This was no mere psychological stunt; no slight-of-hand trick. Here was a man who had never seen the white clouds float by, or the smile of a child or the thin wisp of smoke as it curled over a hut in a distant village. "In the same measure you believe, it will happen to you!" Is it merely the power of positive thinking, the teaching that believing makes it happen, or is there a missing element in the whole picture?

Thank God for the Pain?

When the pain from an old back injury begins to bother him, Charles Niethold turns on a radio transmitter about the size of a package of cigarettes, which sends a message to his brain. The slight signal of the radio beam causes the brain to kick out a dose of a newly discovered hormone which effectively blocks the pain and brings relief from a few hours to a period as long as several days. "It's like someone taking a load off your back. It is just a pleasant feeling of relief," says the salesman, who has suffered from a back injury for years.

When There is No Why

"No affliction would trouble a child of God," wrote G. Campbell Morgan, "if he knew God's reason for sending it." But, of course, that is the difficult part‑‑why does God allow some things to happen? "Take it by faith!" people say, but to take by faith the rest of your life in a wheelchair is no easy matter, especially if you are a young man or woman with the rest of your life before you. In July 1967, a young woman, who was then 17 years of age, dived into the water not realizing how shallow it was.

Can You Trust Your Conscience?

How do you think a restaurant would do where people were expected to pay for what they took, and pay as much or as little as they thought it was worth? That is exactly what the owners of one restaurant decided to do. Gene and Grace Valian are owners of the Great American Breakfast and Barbecue House, and they decided to try a pay-what-you-want experiment. But it ended in failure. Some people have “just no consciences at all,” they said, explaining that most people paid “just a shade under what they would have normally paid.”

When Conscience is Silenced

Pol Pot’s death was lamented when he died—not because he was loved by fellow Cambodians. To the contrary, his death was a disappointment to many because like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, he died without being held accountable for the millions of men and women he slaughtered without cause. He died at the age of 73, forlorn, bedridden, lonely and defiant. Yes, proudly defiant. In November 1997, he broke an 18-year silence and did an interview that was carried by the Far Eastern Economic Review. In the interview, he turned to the reporter and said, “…look at me, am I a savage person?” The man who gave the world the killing fields and sent between 1.6 and 2 million people to their deaths still thought of himself as a good man.

Left by Those That Loved Them

It was late at night as my taxi made its way from the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica to the small hotel where I was staying. I was hungry, and after I checked in I made my way to a nearby restaurant. As I walked the short distance, I noticed that the streets were filled with youth, say, from ages 7 to 13 or 14. They were dirty and poorly dressed, and they seemed to be milling around with nowhere to go. Naturally, I was a bit uncomfortable.

When Life Takes a Hit

A few years ago when Planet Jupiter took a hit by a comet which left a crater larger than our own planet, people began to wonder, “Could the same thing happen to Planet Earth right here?” Others, though more pragmatic, said, “Forget Jupiter. I’m getting direct hits right now that make the chances of getting swept into space by a stray comet seem nothing!”
They say, “My marriage has taken a hit!”
“My health has taken a hit!”
“My job is about to play out on me, and I don’t know how I can feed my family!”

How to Manage Your Life

Long ago Solomon said that there is nothing new under the sun, and the longer I live, the more convinced I am that he was right. Take, for example, management.          You want to open an office in another town or city, and you cannot be on location to see whether the manager or the staff are on the job. You want to add another salesperson and when he's on the road, you have no way of knowing whether he is drinking coffee somewhere or out making his calls. What do you do? You strive to manage by agreeing on certain objectives which should be reached; then you measure progress by what is accomplished.

When You Stumble Badly

A popular Christian song goes, "He'll never let you fall..." and while the words are comforting and assuring, they can be misleading. The fact is that individuals whose hearts have been touched by the divine do, on occasion, stumble badly. Their marriages face difficulty. Their kids don't always stay out of trouble. They don't always stay on the straight and narrow. They stumble, and on occasion they fall. Why? Because God failed them, or because they failed Him?