Guidelines For Living Devotional

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.

Start Having Meaningful Conversations

On November 2, 1863, several months after the battle of Gettysburg, David Wills, a local judge and prominent Pennsylvania citizen, invited Abraham Lincoln to make a "few appropriate remarks" at the consecration of a cemetery for the Union war dead.  Edward Everett, then the young nation’s foremost northern orator, had been invited to speak on September 23, but Everett needed more time for preparation so fate put both of the men on the same program on November 19, 1863.

God Has A Plan For Your Life

For a moment suppose that God has a blueprint, a plan for your life.  Now if God has a plan for your life, would it not have to be a good one?  After all, He created you, and He knows you better than you know yourself.  He sees your life in the focus of all eternity while with our human limitations we simply see today.

Why Is Remembering So Important?

When we fail to remember the past, we are condemned to repeat our mistakes and failures, whether it be nationally, personally, or spiritually.  Do you believe that?  Even before the alphabet was developed in the Tigris-Euphrates river valley, parents passed on to their children the truths which they wanted preserved.  Oral history, we call it today.  Sometimes the stories were myths but most of them were factual—who did what and what happened to whom.  Those oral traditions included God’s dealings with people, and family history—battles that were fought, marriages which produced offspring, and cataclysmic events such as earthquakes, famines, and floods.

What To Do When You Fall Short

It was not without some scientific basis that the prophet Micah, some seven centuries before Christ, exclaimed, “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance?”  Micah believed that God would have compassion and would “hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:18-19).

This Is How To Overcome Failure

Long ago the writer of Scripture told us that he who does not offend in word or deed is a perfect man; and obviously, none of us qualifies.  No matter how loving or kind you are, sooner or later you offend someone.  You say or do something you know is wrong.  More likely it is a protracted dalliance with your conscience, but then you crash and burn.  That's when you come to the fork in the road.  Do you do what is convenient and try to deny the whole issue, or admit it and find help?  Sweeping the wrong aside, justifying yourself as being "human," is the path of convenience, and it's a well trod one, but it isn't a lasting solution which heals your brokenness.

If Not Now, When?

What you say can get you into far more trouble than what you do!  Have you discovered that?   It's much like the advice that the mother whale gave her young:  "It's when you are spouting that you always get into trouble!" 

What To Do When Your Faith Is Challenging

Eventually your faith will be challenged, no matter how strong or how weak it is.  It may be challenged by an agnostic professor; or perhaps more likely it will be challenged by the trials of life.  Sooner or later something happens and your heart cries out, "Lord, I just cannot handle this."  It may be a child's illness, or a marriage that turns sour, or a business deal which has not gone well.