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Every Day Bible

Written Prayer

A written prayer of A. W. Tozer taken from the Moody Handbook of Preaching:
O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
I’m impressed by the wisdom of this petition. While I’m grateful for our ability to spontaneously approach the throne, there is something special that is lost when we don’t occasionally take the time to prepare words for our creator.
Have a favorite prayer you’d like to share?
Categories
Ministry

Idling in Intellectual Neutral

Came across this quote in a class I’m taking:

Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. (William Lane Craig)

At the same time, I suspect there is another number of Christians who are idling in emotional neutral. Their hearts are beginning to harden. They rarely feel; they always reason. Pangs of sadness for the hurting are absent, only a dim satisfaction with the current status quo.

If only our hearts and minds were in gear!

Categories
Fluff

Satellite Launch in Florida

A couple of weeks ago in Florida, we got to watch the launch of a weather satellite (GOES-P)…what a show! Here’s the video we shot with a little Flip camera:

As best I can tell, we were about 6.5 miles south of the launch pad. (See the other videos on the site for the footage that other people shot on the beach). That would fit with the ~30 seconds it took for the sound of the launch to reach us…a sound that was incredible!

Here’s the official NASA video of the launch. Really cool:

Space.com had a neat article about the payload as well. Enjoy!

Categories
Every Day Bible

The Resurrection of Jesus

The message of the resurrection is that this world matters! That the injustices and pains of this present world must now be addressed with the news that healing, justice, and love have won…If Easter means Jesus Christ is only raised in a spiritual sense–then it is only about me, and finding a new dimension in my personal spiritual life. But if Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead, Christianity becomes good news for the whole world–news which warms our hearts precisely because it isn’t just about warming hearts. Easter means that in a world where injustice, violence, and degradation are endemic, God is not prepared to tolerate such things–and that we will work and plan, with all the energy of God, to implement victory of Jesus over them all. Take away Easter and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring problems of the material world. Take it away and Freud was probably right to say Christianity is wish-fulfillment. Take it away and Nietzsche probably was right to say it was for wimps. — N.T. Wright

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Every Day Bible

Observation: What drew the most ‘amens’?

Enjoyed visiting the ol’ alma matter for Lectures today. Something stood out to me in one of the lectures I attended. The speaker made several comments that were met with yells of “amen.” Within a minute’s time, he made two statements that each were met with an enthusiastic response.

The first statement: “We need to realize that everything–it is all about Jesus.”

The second statement: “We need to remember that the church is worth fighting for.”

The “amen” offered to the second statement was easily twice as loud as the first. That caught my attention.

There are several ways I could interpret this:

  1. We are living in a time in which people have not defended the church against slander, and it is really, really, really important we start defending her. Or,
  2. We like the idea of fighting for something better than we like the idea of personally living for Jesus.

I’ll leave the discussion as an exercise to the readers.

Categories
Every Day Bible

What’s your focus?

“In the average crisis, the crisis itself gets the attention God should have had. Helmut Thielicke said that during the bomb raids on Stuttgart he used to hear two kinds of prayers rising from the bomb shelters. Most prayed, “Lord, save us from the bombs!” and only a few prayed, “Lord, save us from the bombs.” Most believers cannot really get their minds on God when the crisis looms large. And preaching on a crisis will probably leave people talking more about the crisis than it leaves them talking about God.”

Miller, Sermon Maker p 130

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Every Day Bible

The Presence of God in Preaching

When preachers lose track of God, their sermons get pushier. Not only that, when God is most absent in their lives, they are all the more present. The quieter God gets, the louder they get.

Barbara Brown Taylor raises the same issue:

Sometimes I think we do all the talking because we are afraid God won’t. Or, conversely, that God will. Either way, staying preoccupied with our own words seems a safer bet than opening ourselves up either to God’s silence or God’s speech, both of which have the power to undo us.

So we lose God when he’s quiet, because we’re too loud. We run from him when he gets loud, because we cannot stand the storm of his coming. Either way, we often come to the pulpit without him, having no clear remembrance of our last real conversation.

From Calvin Miller’s “Sermon Maker” page 18.

Categories
Every Day Bible

Confederate Dollars

A Christian who tries to accumulate toys, money, and possessions during life is like a Union soldier who tried to stockpile Confederate currency at the end of the Civil War.

Not only was he a traitor, he was a fool, for his prize was worthless!

Adapted from The Treasure Principle by Randy Alcorn.

Categories
Every Day Bible

A funny thing about change

“Nobody wants to change until the  pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”

Adapted from Comeback Churches.

Categories
Book Reviews Ministry

The Fruit of Repentance?

In reading Randy Alcorn’s The Treasure Principle: Discovering the Secret of Joyful Giving, I stumbled on this little realization. In Luke 3:10-14, John the Baptist is describing works that show the fruit of repentance. In this text, he interacts with soldiers, tax collectors, and all men. The advice given to each is from the same category. See if you identify it.

He commanded the tax collectors not to over—reach and collect more  than they ought.

He commanded the soldiers to be content with their wages and resist the temptation to extort the poor.

He commanded all men to share their possessions with those in need.

All people were instructed to show evidence of their penitent hearts based on their stewardship. Stewardship reveals values. Values reveal hearts. Where your treasure is, Jesus said, there your heart will be also.

Would John the Baptist see fruit of repentance in my check register? How about yours?