Guidelines For Living Devotional

If you had the power to change something that happened yesterday, would you do it?  Of course, every one would. Yet you can no more change what has already happened than you can turn back the sun as it races across the sky or reverse the flow of sand through the hourglass of time.

Every person should have some spiritual heroes—men and women whom you admire and respect.  But I've also discovered that our heroes—the ones we have put on pedestals—also make us feel pretty insignificant and inadequate.  It's like the two cows in the field munching their cud.  As a large new stainless-steel truck, gleaming with chrome and new paint which bore the words, "Homogenized, Sanitized, Purified Milk" on the side passed by, the one cow mooed to the other, "Sure makes you feel inadequate, doesn't it?"

Some words are coined especially for use in heaven, and outside the Christian community it is difficult to really understand their meaning.  Such is the word, blessed!

One of the amazing things about life is the fact that we know so little about some things which are very common, and we take those things for granted--not sensing how very important they are to our survival.

Second by second 2000 years have trickled through the hourglass of time since Jesus Christ walked the shores of ancient Galilee.  Shortly after the death and resurrection of Christ, a faith-filled Apostle wrote, "The light continues to shine in the darkness, for the darkness has never overpowered it" (John 1:5 Williams).  John, of course, meant that Christ had come as a light in a dark world, and with His coming, man had a new purpose in living, a new hope to brighten the day.  Two thousand years later, it takes even greater faith to believe that darkness is really passing away.

If you think that you have troubles, let me tell you about Albert Kruger.  He had one of those days that will haunt him for years.  The last straw came when firemen, cleaning up a blaze that caused extensive damage to his home, greeted him at the door.  His home wasn't the only thing burned up.  By that time Kruger was pretty hot himself.  He told the firemen that his troubles started early in the morning when the family cat gave birth to five kittens, three of them stillborn.  This upset his wife and children who, in turn, upset Kruger.

Do you ever feel like the person who prayed, "God, give me patience, and give it to me right now"?  You may feel like that at the present moment.  You have been facing a particular situation or irritation day after day, hour after hour, and you feel like you cannot stand it another day.  You are thinking, "I'm up to my chin and I just can't take more of this."  It could be your husband or your wife, possibly the person you work with.  It could be your teenager, or if you are a teenager, it may be your mom or dad! There are times which confront us all when we feel our ire building, and we know that we have reached the danger zone of what we can handle.  It's the red alert.

Nothing is so frustrating as attempting to do something you know is a waste of time and effort. Right? Ask any fisherman who has toiled hour after hour, perhaps throwing his best hardware into the water, gently allowing his lure of bait to drift into the shadows where he thinks the big one is.  But, then, eventually, he concludes, "There's nothing here!  Absolutely nothing." 

In his book by the same title Phil Yancey asks the question, "Where is God when I hurt?"  If you have never asked that question, take heart.  Someday that cry may rise from your heart as you try to reconcile what happens to you with the belief that God is a good God who loves you.

Question:  Is God a divine accommodation, something or someone we have invented to make us feel good about ourselves, particularly when we know we have done wrong?  Can God be manipulated to get what we want, a kind of divine sugar daddy of the sky?  One to whom we can turn when we need a good cry, or someone to tell us, "What you have done is OK.  You're not nearly as bad as some"?