Guidelines For Living Devotional

Over 500 times the Bible refers to the glory of God. God is called the "Father of glory" (Ephesians 1:17). Twice Jesus is called the "Lord of glory".  And the Holy Spirit is called the "Spirit of glory."  Coming to understand who God is and how He has shown us something of Himself is akin to watching a small child unwrap a Christmas or birthday gift as his eyes are filled with wonder and excitement. I will long remember watching a grandson rip open the box containing the drum set that he had so wanted.

Have you ever stopped to think that today is the smallest division of God-given time?  Seconds, minutes, hours are artificial, man-made time divisions, but the period of time from dawn to dusk is the shortest division of time on God's clock.  Time is a strange thing in itself.  It is something like fence posts or telephone poles you pass as you drive down the highway, but like a fence it encloses our lives, and between the two poles of life and death we are very much prisoners of time.

What's your goal in life?  And if you get there, will you really be satisfied?  Tough questions, right?  But isn't that what fulfillment in life is all about?

Can a person who is single trust God for His very best in life--whether it is in the choice of a mate or finding the grace of God to cope with single frustration?  If the promises of Scripture are true, finding the will of God regarding marriage has to be among the most important decisions an individual ever makes in life.

Do all singles wish they were married?  No, not any more than all married folks wish they were single. Some of the most frustrated, angry, and bitter individuals I have ever met are those who wanted to marry, but never did.  I'm thinking in particular of some individuals who went outside of God’s plan for sexual purity, lived with someone, but ended up alone and with a broken heart.

If you want to know how tolerant you really are, don't look at your own mistakes.  Rather, look at the mistakes of your worst enemy.  Don't measure your tolerance when you put a scratch on the new car‑‑because the parked one was way too far out from the curb.  Measure your tolerance when your spouse backs into the left rear fender of your car.

When it comes to courage, you cannot chart it.  You cannot put it on a line graph.  You cannot measure its specific density. When it is displayed, a person is a hero, and when it is missing, a person is called a coward.

There was something about the stranger who walked with those two men, which fascinated them.  The location was a dusty road that led from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  It happened almost 2000 years ago.  Jesus of Nazareth had taught the multitudes for three years.  He had done some fantastic things. He had healed the lame and the blind.  He had taken a little boy's lunch and then fed a multitude of more than 5,000 men, to say nothing of the number of women and children.

I was almost asleep when my wife exclaimed, “It’s obvious that a male wrote this book,” as she closed the book, one a publisher had asked us to evaluate. My wife, Darlene, is pretty low-key and cuts an author quite a bit of slack for individuality.  “Why do you say that?” I asked.  “Well,” she explained, “what he says is good, but it’s factual, and cut and dried. There’s no emotion or feeling in what he writes.” And with those observations she clearly defined one of the big differences between men and women.

"It began as a simple, or simply terrifying, pledge taken by a small group of friends feeling overwhelmed by all the things in their lives," writes Elizabeth Weise.  She explains, "Over a potluck dinner two years ago, they made a pact: Buy nothing new except food, medicine and toiletries for six months."[1]  When a major newspaper did a feature on the unique experiment, the idea exploded. In a matter of a few weeks more than 700 people from countries as diverse as Japan, the Philippines, and Brazil have put their names on an Internet list to do the same thing.

 

[1] Elizabeth Weise, "USATODAY, March 23, 2006, March 26, 2006, D-1.