Guidelines For Living Devotional

Grace is getting what you don't deserve; justice is getting exactly what you deserve, and mercy is not getting what you really deserve. David knew that, and that's why, following his affair with Bathsheba, he pled for God's mercy. "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions."

Along with many other dictionaries, The Oxford English Dictionary takes more space to define the word touch than any other word. Its vast gamut of meanings can hardly be compressed into a single dictionary definition. Without touch you lose one of the most important of all the five senses.

"Dear God, I'm having a tough time financially, and I'd like a refund on some of the money I've given to you. Do you think you could arrange it for me?" In reality that's what a single mother of four children had in mind recently, but the church who had been the recipient of the money tends to feel that God doesn't make refunds.

When times are tough and money is tight, disagreements often erupt. And when discussions take place, almost always we are quick to inform the other person that the mess belongs on the other side of the disagreement. A word that prominently figures is the personal pronoun you, as in "YOU are responsible for this mess," or "If YOU hadn't spent so much on that stupid car we wouldn't be in trouble." Another variation is "YOU charged too much on our credit cards."

Probably no other generation in history has been more committed to living for the moment than is our present one, or put in somewhat less refined terms, no generation has been more committed to squeezing every ounce of pleasure and fulfillment out of living than the present one. Now all of this is not bad, but the constant emphasis on self produces a distorted picture of the individual's true worth. The end result is a selfishness that produces a marked disregard for others, and totally distorts a person's actual importance. Nothing is much smaller than an individual's world who shuts others from the heart as well as the hand and purse.

There are only three things you can do with it: spend it, save it, or give it away. Only three choices. Yet when it comes to the bottom line of disagreements, you'll probably find it, almost every time. It's money! No matter how much they have, or how little they have, people don't agree on how it's spent. Playing a prominent part in at least 85% of all broken homes, the handling of money is one of the most explosive issues that confront people today, especially in times of recession and inflation.

When the level begins to sink in the honeycomb of life, it does not merely affect one aspect of your life--say the physical or the emotional. It affects everything--your body, your emotions, and your spiritual nature all at once. There has been a blind spot in our thinking that compartmentalizes life. You have aches or pains. "That is physical!" you think. You are sure that aspirin or an antibiotic will be enough to cure it, but it does not work that way. The physical may merely be the cause of tension, and aspirin or antibiotics would merely be treating the symptom--not the cause.

Have you ever had the experience of having to drive a considerable distance with an empty gas tank? You knew that you were running low on fuel, but you were late for an appointment, in a hurry to get somewhere, and you kept thinking, "Yeah, I've got enough to get there," but you were unconvinced. You kept glancing at the fuel gauge, then your watch. The fuel gauge was slightly above empty, then the red warning light came on, then your fuel gauge rested solidly on the empty mark. Your stomach grew tighter and tighter.

A school teacher asked her students to do at least one good deed every day. She explained that the next day she would ask them what good deeds they had done. The next day the dialogue between the teacher and the students went like this: "Michael, what good deed did you do yesterday."

It happened so very quickly! My wife and I had spent 16 hours on the overnight train from Donetsk, Ukraine to Kiev. For days the temperatures had hovered about 10 to 25 below zero centigrade. Everything was covered with frost and ice. We disembarked from the train and began to follow a friend through the crowd when trouble came very unexpectedly.