Things I Came Across This Past Week August 7-11 2017

Quotes:

Get God's plan before making your own plans.

Your primary way of building yourself up should never be tearing others down.

Carey N 

Truth for the day:  "Every person will suffer one of two things:  Either the pain of discipline or the pain of regret."

God gave you a gift. Find it, embrace it, and then share it with the world.

Wise men are not always silent, but they know when to be.

Spiritual maturity isn't about how much you know. It's about how much you love.

“No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted” - Aesop

We can see only relatively . But internally, in our hearts, we commonly assume that what we see is the way things are, and that others, if they were seeing accurately, would see things the way we do. 

Mark Labberton 

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

When you choose to forgive those who have hurt you, you take away their power.

From Books:

A Grace Revealed
By Gerald Sittser
I long for that kind of spirit to permeate my own story, and I feel reasonably certain you feel the same way. How can we get there? Does it depend entirely on our own efforts, our initiative and creativity and persistence, our faith and goodness? I don’t think so.

......In order for our lives to be characterized by such a spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit must be working in us. Paul links this work of the Spirit to the new covenant promise God spoke through the prophet Ezekiel: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. (Ezekiel 36: 26–28)

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3: 17–18)

This vision of transformation is no mere theological abstraction. We truly need the Holy Spirit, as much as we need food and oxygen and sleep, companionship and affection. The reason is simple enough: we are not God, and we do not self-exist.


......It strikes me as strange that people who know they are utterly dependent on physical, emotional, and social resources outside themselves for their very survival still think they can manage on their own in the spiritual life. They embark on some quest to find the “god within,” though they would never embark on a similar quest to find the “air within” or the “food within” or the “community within.”

Union with Christ
By Rankin Wilbourne

 In the Garden of Eden, this was what the serpent called into question—the goodness of God (Gen. 3: 4–6). And that question remains today underneath every temptation we face: Do you believe the Lord intends good for you? If only we could see how much God desires our good, then we would never choose against God’s will for our lives. Therefore, the remedy to our deepest wound and the antidote to Satan’s most venomous lie is a sure and certain confidence in the goodness of God toward us. Only those who believe in his grace will have the power to obey him. Because we are relentless in trying to justify our lives, because we will use anything, even our virtue, to keep God at a distance, we can’t hear this song of grace too loudly or too often. We always need to hear it at full volume. All the way up. Undiluted. In all of its shocking candor. Grace abounds. I’m thankful for those writers who, against the fear that such talk of God’s lavish grace will lead to a life of license, dare to keep turning up the volume on grace—all the way to full blast. Amazing grace. This is the song that breaks into our hearts and changes everything. Grace changes everything. Believe the gospel of grace. Come and rest.

Hearing From God
By David Stine
What has God spoken to you in previous seasons that you can stand on in this season? If you do not have anything that you know He spoke, spend some time this week listening for His voice and asking Him to lead you where He wants you to go. If it is still unclear,look at the desires that are in your heart, and if they line up with God’s Word and what you believe would please Him, I encourage you to walk in that direction. As I mentioned earlier, if you keep your heart humble and your ear listening for His voice, He will redirect you if you ever step off course. I believe as you step out in faith with God, you are going to be amazed at His goodness.

Here is a link to a good read from Harvard Business Review
how-you-define-the-problem-determines-whether-you-solve-it


With the passing of Glen Campbell this past week here are a few videos of him to enjoy.

I'm Not Gonna Miss You


Back Home In Indiana

Wichita Lineman

Jesus At His Baptism And What It Means For Us

The following is an excerpt from 3-2-1 The Story of God, The World and You by Glen Scrivener.

Let’s return to a scene we touched on in the last chapter: Jesus’ baptism. This was his grand unveiling –a public launch event at the Jordan River with hundreds in attendance. The people were there to be washed in a religious ritual. It was a confession to God and the world: ‘I am a mess,’ ‘I’m a failure,’ ‘I’m filthy and I need a bath.’

We all know that there is a mess out there in the world. These people were confessing to a mess in their own hearts. So they came to be washed –that is, to be baptised. Stunningly, while they were all confessing to their filth, the Son of God shows up. And he doesn’t judge them, he joins them. He lines up with the messy people –shoulder to shoulder with all the moral failures –and he gets baptised. What is he doing? He’s joining us in our failure, so we can join him in his family.

 The Gospel-writer Luke describes the scene: When all the people were being baptised, Jesus was baptised too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’ Luke 3:21-22

Normally heaven is closed to us. We don’t naturally have an angle on divine realities but here God is opening up to us and the picture we see is both strange and wonderful. When ‘the Jesus-God’ opens up, we see a loving union of THREE.

Here is the Christian vision of God and it’s utterly unique. For Christians, God is a Father loving his Son (Jesus) and filling him with his Spirit. At first glance we see THREE, but look closer and we understand how completely united they are. We see Jesus, but instantly we see that he is the Son of a Father and filled with his Spirit. We notice the Spirit, but the Spirit seems to be flowing from the Father to the Son. We hear the Father, but the Father is sending his Spirit and rapt in delight for his Son. When we understand each person, we realise how utterly dependent they are on the other two. They are THREE, but these three are one –forever united in love.

At the Jordan River we see what it looks like when heaven is ‘opened’. This is what there has always been. Before there was a world, there were these THREE in perfect harmony.

The night before Jesus died, he prayed publicly. Addressing his Father, he said, ‘you loved me before the creation of the world’.  What’s deeper than the universe? What’s the foundational principle of existence? Jesus says he was there before the universe began. What was it like? According to Jesus it was a Father pouring out love to his Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. If you could open up heaven and look inside you would see precisely what they saw at the baptism: Jesus the beloved Son of the Father, filled with the Holy Spirit. The deepest reality of all is this union of love.

......The Tri-unity (or Trinity) is the loving unity of these three: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The word is not so important; its significance is cosmic: it means that love really is ultimate. The universe has come from love, been shaped by love and is made for love.

.....Jesus is the one from heaven who comes to us with an unparalleled view of God. ‘The Jesus-God’ is not a God we would have imagined by ourselves. No-one would invent ‘the Trinity’ as a religious comfort blanket. Jesus brings to the world the strangest and most surprising vision of God.

You Are More Than The Bad Choices You Have Made

“By faith Moses, when he had grown up,refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin,”
Hebrews 11:24-25

The phrase that gets my attention is "passing pleasures of sin". There is something we find enjoyable about committing sin, otherwise we wouldn't do it. I mean, I'm not using my common sense if I keep doing something that isn't enjoyable. 
So sin does bring pleasure to us. 

But the word before pleasure is passing. It is a passing pleasure. We find pleasure in certain sins but it is a passing pleasure. 

 But the part I want to mention is the part that we don't listen to when we are tempted. Not only is it just a passing pleasure but, after we do it eventually there is a price to pay, there are consequences. Guilt, regret, are just a few of the consequences we experience. Not to mention that sometimes our lives are even changed. 

I don't know if I haven't met one person who isn't living with regrets or some type of guilt. And this is where I want to try to bring some encouragement. Eventually the enemy of our souls will come to us and tell us that all we are is the sum of all our bad choices we have made in life. If we are not rooted in God's Word or God's love for us we will believe it. We may do other activities to try and drown out that voice but it will still be there. And the strange thing is, the activities we do to try to forget about our guilt and regrets usually lead to more guilt and shame. 

But, God's Word says we are more than the bad choices we have made in life. 
God's Word says in spite of the bad choices we have made, God still loves us. 
The Bible is full of people who made bad choices. Peter, Paul, Matthew, Moses, just to name a few. The difference was they went to God or I should say God came to them and initiated the restoration process. And now when we think of them we don't think of all their wrong choices in life, we think of the right choices they made. The same can be true for you.

So here is what I propose:
1. Get into God's Word and start learning about His great love for you.
2. You've made some bad choices in life. We all have. Go to Jesus and ask for forgiveness. I have found that God is more eager to forgive us than we are to be forgiven.
3. Develop a relationship with Jesus. The Bible says there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Begin to live for Him.
4. Ask Him to help you to live for Him. 
5. Remember, you are more than the bad choices you have made in life.


 Here was a tweet I came by the other day.
"No person, no situation, no tragedy, and no sin can separate you from God’s ruthless love."
 @jamesbryansmith

You see, the One who never made a bad choice took all of our wrong choices upon Himself on the cross. He bore the punishment of all our bad and wrong choices so that we wouldn't have to. Jesus is the reason we aren't just the sum of all the bad choices we have made in life. 

Troy