Guidelines For Living Devotional

God Has A Will And Plan For Your Life

There's good news, friend!  Life is not a matter of chance or fate.  Winning is not the equivalent of standing in front of a slot machine when you feel lucky, or picking the right five or seven numbers in the lottery.  Some 3,000 years ago David wrote, "My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.  All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (Psalm 139:15,16). 

Are You Demanding Anything From God?

Armin Gesswein called it, "One of the rarest prayer promises in the Bible," referring to the words of Jesus to the disciples in the Upper Room when he said, "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you" (John 15:7).

Do You Really Love Him Whom You Call Savior

"Simon, son of John," Jesus asked Peter, "do you truly love me?" (John 21:16).  When Jesus asked that question, Peter must have thought, "Hey, just a minute.  How can you ask that after what I've been through with you?  Remember, I was the one who even followed you to the house of the high priest after You were seized in Gethsemane."
            If Peter thought it, he didn't voice it.  Yet when Jesus challenged his answer by asking the same question three times, Peter was disturbed.

4 Guidelines To Keeping Your Identity In Marriage

Have you ever stood on the banks of two great rivers and watched them merge?  When two rivers come together, there is a great deal of turbulence before the waters flow smoothly.  That's the way it often is when two become one and forge a new family.

How To Build Strong Family Relationships

My son, Steve, is a rock climber, something that is much too much for me.  I'm like Sir Francis Chichester, who said, "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills but I will not take my carcass thither."  Anyway, Steve and two of his friends were climbing the highest peak in Switzerland when they stopped to catch their breath and noticed three climbers on the face of an incline a short distance from where they were.  As they watched, the lead climber suddenly lost his footing and fell. 

The Impact Of Being Honest

A reporter from a Toronto newspaper was asked to do a story on garages which made unreasonable charges.  The reporter pulled a couple wires lose in the electrical system of his car and drove into garages asking for an estimate on repairs which varied from $25 to over $400.  After he got the estimates, he declined to have the work done, drove around the corner and hooked up the wires, and went on to the next garage. 

Is There a Correlation Between What I Say And Do?

Your bank's cash machine has gone berserk, giving out 20's as if they were 5's, yet your receipt shows no sign of overpayment.  You immediately know that something is wrong.  You asked for a withdrawal of $100, but it gave you $400.  What do you do?  Would you a) Use the emergency telephone to alert the bank.  b) Take the money and run,  or c) Call your friends and tell them to get back there too, as you go to the end of the line for a second run at the machine yourself?

Is This Your Wake Up Call?

"Wake-up calls" is the term applied to them--those close brushes with death which may come by being a participant in a near-fatal car crash, a heart attack, being a passenger on a plane which is hijacked, or waking to the smell of smoke in your house, or about anything when you know that death stalked you but you didn't fall prey to its grasp.

This Is The Importance Of Saying No

The word that a parent uses most often when there is a toddler in the house is, "No!" and the expression that kids use is, "Why can't I?" not really listening for an explanation.  The word "No" draws the lines of battle.  And that line is intact from the cradle to the grave.  The reality is that a lot of life is circumscribed by the negative prohibition, "No!" 

How Important Is It To State The Obvious

"I have just heard your commentary about the tongue," wrote a listener.  This friend added, "I am one of those who … is brutally frank.  I know the truth is bitter, but my greatest defect is to tell a person what wrong he has done which he ought not to do.  Is it unchristian?"  It's amazing to me how many folks such as the woman who wrote feel compelled to point out people's flaws.