Guidelines For Living Devotional

As a boy growing up in China, William sang about the grace of God, but it was not until the cold reality of solitary confinement in prison sank in that William began to understand what grace really means.  William’s mother was an American missionary who married a Chinese medical doctor, and they worked together in China, raising their family to know and follow God.

"Exciting" says Webster's dictionary, is "to call to activity; to rouse to an emotional response" or "to increase the activity" of something.  There are certain words which are made to get down on all fours and walk, or should I say, crawl.  They are so overworked by the media that they become trite, superficial, and really without much meaning at all.

Wherever you live in the world, each morning you wake up to bad news.  Disease, disaster, death.  The narratives are bleak, yet the followers of Jesus Christ, his disciples in the here and now, are people of the Gospel and the Gospel is good news.  The Gospel is a story because God is a storyteller.  We’ve got His story of good news in His book, the Bible.

We live in a broken, imperfect world, and one of the results is that bad things do happen to good people; but when we are confronted with that stark reality, almost always our hearts cry out, "Why, God? Why did this happen to me?"

One of the problems that confronts us in asking the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is that our perspective is incomplete.  We look at the set of circumstances which leads up to the unpleasant event which triggers the question, "Why?"  It is almost like asking the outcome of a ball game when there are two important minutes on the clock, and until the game is over, you don't have the complete picture.

When Boris Yeltsin was weathering the stormy coup in Moscow which so altered the former USSR, his adrenaline was really flowing.  As he mounted the barricade outside the walls of Parliament and raised his fist in the air, he allowed his five-year-old granddaughter to climb up and stand by his side.  After all, history was being made and what a grand moment to share with this little girl, who would never forget what she had experienced.

Frustration is no stranger to the child of God.  Believers live in a world of broken pieces, and buses which are late, and budgets which will not balance, just the same as the man who is an atheist.  I contend, however, that the child of God should have some resources with which to fight frustration.  Yes, the believer has powers to cope that the atheist does not have.  Like what?

When a psychotherapist talks about guilt, he is usually talking about something which the Bible describes as conscience. He's talking about the emotion which either condemns or exonerates you of your actions.  But when the Bible talks about guilt, using the same term which psychotherapy uses, it is in relationship to your standing before God--not your feelings, which may reflect your culture and your understanding of right or wrong.

Charles Schultz, the creator of the comic strip "Peanuts" had a grasp of human nature such as do few people.  Who can't identify with the series of cartoons where Lucy is trying to console Charlie Brown?  She says, "Remember, Charlie Brown, you learn more from your defeats than you do from your victories."  And Charlie Brown says, "That makes me the smartest man in the world!"

What we need today is more leaders!  Right?  Wrong, says Joe Stowell!  And who is this negative voice?  He served for 18 years as president of Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, one of our day's leading Christian colleges with more than a century of history.