Guidelines For Living Devotional

"Keep your eyes open before marriage; half-shut afterwards," advised Ben Franklin many years ago.  Keeping your eyes open before you are married is pretty good business. The fact is that most people don't really know the person they meet at the marriage altar, and then after the honeymoon, wake up and say, "This is not the person I thought I was marrying." Before you say, "Yes!" to marriage, ask yourself ten questions which can well help you determine if your relationship has what it takes to make a good marriage.  If you are married, working through these ten issues can make yours a much better marriage.

If you are depressed, you may feel that no one else has been right where you are.  You may think that if you were spiritual enough, you wouldn't struggle with depression.

After an arsonist burned down his church, Pastor Ted Cole picked his way through the charred rubble still smoldering from the fire and sat down at the piano.  Defiantly he began playing an old hymn written more than four centuries ago by a man who knew trouble as well, Martin Luther.  Cole began gently singing from memory the third verse of Luther's, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," which goes: "And tho this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,/ We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph thru us."

Yes, No, and Wait!  Those are the three possible answers to your prayers, so says conventional wisdom.  I have thought a lot about the three-compartment answer‑‑ yes, no, and wait.  At the introduction of today's Guidelines, I freely acknowledge that God does not answer all of my prayers the way I would like.  Sometimes, in fact, He flatly denies what I have asked for.  And I, for one, am quite glad that God does turn down some of my ardent requests, because as I later look back on some of the things I once asked for, I now realize that if God had given me just what I asked for I would have been most unhappy later on.

"There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," wrote William Shakespeare some 450 plus years ago.  The Bard of Avon was not new in his contention that God has a will in the affairs of men and women—which puts to rest the idea that things happen by chance or by fate.

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." John 8:7

Philip Yancey tells how he once visited a prison, and observed that the men who were incarcerated there were caged like animals behind doors of steel, but what left the lasting impression on him was that over each door was a sign stamped in large black letters which read: Murderer, Rapist, Armed Robber, Child beater, and on and on.  The strange thing about human nature is that we all try to package and label people, and in so doing, we trap them inside a box as certainly as though we slammed the steel door shut, pinning the sign overhead.  Was that not the same rationale when a sign was affixed to the cross in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew reading, "This is Jesus, the King of the Jews"?

Is there such a thing as fate, or is fate simply the whipping-boy of human experience, a catch-all for what we cannot explain?  The Mirriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines fate as "that which remains destined to happen."  Our English word comes from the Latin fatum which meant something ordained from the gods.  It grew out of a story from Greek mythology which involves three goddesses.  The first, Clotho, or the Spinner, was supposed to weave the thread of life while the second, Lachesis, or the Disposer of Lots, determined the length of the thread.  It was the third in the trilogy, Atrophos, or the Inflexible One, who allegedly cut the thread of life causing fate to strike its sinister blow.

The greatest accomplishments in life--believe it or not--are made not by the smartest people in the world but by those who didn't know enough to quit.  They were the ones who kept plodding, who kept practicing, who kept investigating until they stumbled onto success.  That fact was driven home to me when I was studying in the university.  There were two men in my classes who were geniuses.  Their IQs were way up there.  At the end of a class, they slapped their books shut and didn't open them.  They were smart.

Ernest Hemingway, wrote, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."[1] In this, Hemmingway was right. Ours is an imperfect, broken world. You discover your spouse has been unfaithful to you for years. A doctor breaks the news that you have inoperable cancer and will lose your leg.  Your son is arrested for drunk driving.  Or, the promotion that you deserved went to someone less qualified.

 

[1] Hemmingway, Ernest. "A Quote from A Farewell to Arms." Web. 29 Oct. 2020.

When a youth lost his way and ended up having squandered the inheritance he had received from his father, he came to his senses and said, "I'm starving here; I'm going home to my father."  Jesus told the story.  We call it the parable or the story of the lost son.