Guidelines For Living Devotional

"I am sixty-five and I'm lonely and have never found peace."  So wrote the famed British author, H. G. Wells, on his 65th birthday.  Despite his fame and fortune, Mr. Wells, according to his own statement, felt alone and troubled.

"How good must you be for God to love you?"  Ever have that question come to your mind?  Recently it came to the mind of a listener who wrote and asked if God performs plastic surgery of the heart to take away the scars of childhood.  The listener told of being born to parents who didn't love her, so they gave her up for adoption.  The adopting parents told her, if you are good, we will love you.  She went to church and got the message, "If you are good, God will love you and take you to heaven when you die."  She told of the time when she invited Christ to be her Savior, and then she knew she could not be good enough for God to love her‑‑she desperately wanted God to love her, but knew she could not be good enough.

When I was in college and my roommate started dating, it was easy to tell when he fell in love.  For one thing, he walked around glassy-eyed and his nose actually turned red.  We also knew that something was going on when he stood in front of Judy's picture for hours at a time making strange sighing noises.

Planet earth with its diameter of 7, 926 miles (measured through the poles), rests basically on nothing, yet the earth races along its elliptical orbit around the sun in exactly three‑hundred sixty‑five and a-quarter days.  Isaac Newton defined this force in his "law of gravitation" when he said that the gravitational force is directly proportional to the product of two masses (e.g., the Earth and the Moon) and inversely proportional to the distance between them squared.  The entire universe is held in harmony by an intricate system of balances and tensions.

Some 239,000 miles in space lies the amorphous chunk of rocks and minerals we call the moon.  Unlike the sun which is a boiling mass of gases and fire, the moon is cold and dark.  It's lifeless, yet who would be convinced of that fact on a night when the full radiance of the sun is reflected from it to our world?  But the light of the moon is only a reflection which comes from a far more powerful source, the sun.

A generation ago, Dr. Harry Ironside wrote a book entitled, Holiness: The True and the False.  Ironside hit upon an important truth--people always counterfeit the real thing.  Trying to reproduce the characteristics of holiness without understanding the nature of the real thing, though, is much like counterfeiting money: it's fraudulent and a practice which can get you into a lot of trouble.

Cartoonist Bob Thaves pictured a couple sitting in front of their television, cans of beer in their hands, junk food at their elbows.  The caption reads:  "There is no problem with your set. The rubbish you see on the screen is real.  Please adjust your standards downward."

It's an old story but one that still brings a chuckle:  Three preachers were at a conference, and prompted by a message on "besetting sins," late one evening the three began to reveal some of their secret flaws.   One said that his besetting sin was that he enjoyed an occasional drink.  Naturally, he explained, he didn't like folks in his congregation knowing about it so he was quite discreet in his drinking.

If you should pick up a book by Erling Kagge, you would find a drab, monochrome cover imprinted with only the title of the book, a subtitle and the author's name. The title: "Silence!"  The sub-title, "In the age of noise," and the author, Erling Kagge.  And like myself, you may be asking yourself, "And who is Erling Kagge and why did he write the book?"

When the Dutch woman, Corrie ten Boom was a prisoner of the Germans, confined in a concentration camp where most prisoners were executed, there were times when she would say, "Lord Jesus, I know this problem is way too big for you; I'll have to worry about it myself!" Then she would smile and say, "How foolish!"  The reality is that we are often confronted with issues that are troubling and we struggle with them as though there is no help from heaven and the burden is much too great for God to do anything about.