Guidelines For Living Devotional

When you are only five feet three, and someone who is six feet five towers over you, you quickly learn what intimidation is, especially when the giant leans over you and threatens you.  We'd much prefer enemies about our own size, giving us an equal chance; but of course, life isn't always fair.

A Sunday school teacher, trying to impress the boys in her class, told the story of David and Goliath. In the class was one boy with an attitude. He thought he was pretty tough himself, so the teacher stressed how big Goliath was, picturing him as so big and tall that he would have dwarfed Yao Ming, the seven-foot five giant of a basketball player—China's import to the Houston Rockets at the time.

A senior citizen, eyeing a parking spot that had just been vacated at a mall, was slowly backing up his aging luxury car, to get room to maneuver into the spot when a teenager in a small, red sportscar came from the other direction and zipped into the spot.  Jumping over the side of his little car, the youth called out, "That's 'cause I'm young and fast."  The old man revved up his engine and plowed ahead—straight into the little sportscar folding it up like an accordion.  Then, turning to the horror-stricken youth, he said, "That's 'cause I'm old and rich."

Haste is the parent of nine-tenths of our mistakes!  Do you believe that?  If you question that fact, think back on some of the wrong turns in life which you took, decisions that you made without thinking through the consequences.  Those panic-driven decisions are the choices which we live to deeply regret.

Doug Nichols describes it as "what seminary can't teach."  It's one of the lessons learned in the school of experience which is otherwise described as "the school of hard knocks."  In 1967, Doug, who founded a Christian ministry known as Action International Ministries, was serving as a missionary in India.  When he contracted tuberculosis, he was eventually sent to a sanitarium to recuperate.

John Redman tells the story of a farmer who came to town and asked the chef of a new French restaurant if he could use about a million frog legs.  "Oui!" he responded enthusiastically, but he quickly asked, "Where in the world would you find so many frogs?"   "I have a pond at home that is filled with them," replied the farmer, adding, "they drive me crazy night and day."

"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen," begins an old song, but today the words might be more accurate:  "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.  Nobody knows but my best friend, my neighbor, my mother, my dentist, and some woman I sat next to on the bus yesterday."

The distinguished French painter Pierre Auguste Renoir was afflicted with arthritis that gradually crippled his hands.  Little by little his hands became gnarled and twisted, and it became increasingly painful to just hold a brush.  Anyone who has been strong and then has had pain begin to cripple him can relate to what Renoir went through, but Renoir's pain didn't go away with a few aspirin.  Eventually holding a brush became a painful challenge.  At last, the arthritis put him in a wheelchair and the easel had to be lowered for him to even reach it.

Have you as a parent ever felt like giving up on a teenager when he turned his back to you and God and went the route of the Prodigal? Then today's devotional is just for you.  Is it possible for a parent to separate behavior from acceptance?  Not only is it possible, it is absolutely necessary.  Sooner or later almost every parent has to say, "Look, kid, I love you, but what you are doing isn't ok.  You reject the behavior, not the person.

"There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal; no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem.  It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake, a sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all...If only you could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world..." so wrote poet Emmett Fox as he described the power of love.  Yet his words contain a fatal flaw, "if only you could love enough..."