LifeRocks

Correction is good for the soul. We all desire to be and do what is good, which requires constant correction of our corrupt heart. This correction must come from an external source who knows our hearts and knows how to guide us to goodness. God knows you, loves you and sent the ultimate Corrector to lead you to eternal goodness and salvation. Will you follow Him and let Him correct your heart? You think about it, let's talk about it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Hello world! I have this wonderful feature on my smart phone. It’s called autocorrect. I use it, rely on it, and you do as well. Except a smart phone, in the hands of a dumb operator, complicates matters. The smart phone has not made me smarter, but I have made it dumber. By using the autocorrect feature every time I propose a word or spelling, it tries to correct me, and I dismiss it, and it preserves my bad spelling now as the default alternative.

Websites have been dedicated to humor, in terms of autocorrect. You may have heard the answer to “How are you?” Somebody wrote “Germans are attacking me,” when all he meant to say was “germs are attacking me.” Or the young lady who wrote to her boyfriend, said, “You are my rock, you are my knight, you are my shining armpit.” She wanted to say “shining armor,” knight in shining armor—came back armpit, and she was in trouble after that. I have a couple of bad cases of wrong spelling being proposed by my smart dumb phone. I’ve said “Hello” to people in all ways; it says “hell” to people, “Hell, hell to you.” It came because I was writing a talk on hell, you might want to visit that site, on how to get to hell, and it’s preserved my bad entry. I’ve tried to load previous backups of the good dictionaries, and they say it only preserves bad entries throughout, unless I restore the factory settings, the factory original dictionary.

Now what has happened to my smart phone has happened to you. Because your heart has been corrupted. And it preserves all the bad downloads and all the bad defaults. And therefore we have a challenge. How do I go about restoring the original factory settings of my heart, the lexicon of your heart? We’ve got to send it back to the factory, to the manufacturer, the maker-designer. Because your heart governs everything: your attitudes, your actions, your thoughts. So I’d like to suggest to you how you can restore your factory default as the best, and will completely override everything that you have inscribed in your heart, and give you a brand new, clear, clean heart.

First of all, you’ve got to admit that your heart has been corrupted. Second, you’ve got to admit that you’ve got to send it to the factory. And the One who’s put your heart together, your whole being together, says, “I will not only be your Maker and Designer, I’ll be the Savior of your heart.” Because “auto” in Greek means self, you cannot self-correct. You’ll only preserve bad thoughts, bad ideas, bad attitudes. God says, “I will send you my Savior. I’ll give you a brand new heart, a clean heart, a clear heart.” And once you’ve been reconstituted with the new download of the factory, every time you inscribe something bad, something wrong, something sinful, you can confess your sins and you will be wiped clean and a new factory default starts. Would you like the Maker/Designer to be the Savior of your heart? To be the Corrector of your life? You cannot correct yourself. The Lord Jesus says, “I will be your Savior. Restore the factory default. And every time you do something wrong, think something wrong, feel something wrong—you just confess, and I will rewrite a brand new original factory download for the rest of your life.”

If you liked this talk, let us know! Send it to your friends, communicate with us. We’ll give you further details.

Support the show

What is your self-brand? Do you identify yourself by your talents, skills or appearance? These are all good things, but you are much more than these. The only brand that adequately fits the depths of your character is the brand that comes from your Creator. He knows you, loves you and wants you to see the brand that He has given you as His creation. Do you know the brand that He has for you? You think about it, let's talk about it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Hello world! Selling products and services is the lifeblood of any business. After a product or service is conceived, it’s developed, it’s made, it’s branded, it’s marketed—but unless it is sold and bought, the product or service has become a failure. Now what people have done is they’ve taken the marketing side of it and applied it to people. They think you are a product or service. In fact, in today’s job environment when competition is so high, they suggest that you retool yourself for today’s environment, and you’ve got to brand yourself. You’ve got to target your life with effectiveness and how to nail your career with assuredness as you present yourself and branding yourself.

But let me ask you; are you simply a product or a service? You’re much bigger than that, you’re a person! Maybe we should reduce you to skills and talents, but you are deeper than that. You’re a person. And the image and brand stuff, you know that’s very temporary. It’s good for career development literature; it is not good for character, because character continues—image changes. If you’re reduced to products and services, that diminishes your personhood. If you’re reduced to skills and talents, that diminishes your uniqueness. And if all you are is your image and brand, that’s too temporary, too subjective, too relative, too short—you need objective value. I know executives are trying to pursue personality-fronted brands, and they fall into corruption and indiscretion, because they want to by all means to keep the image alive. But they are deeper than that. And everybody finds out.

Is it possible for you to be branded, from outside yourself? So that you don’t deceive yourself and delude yourself, but rooted deep inside yourself, because that gives you confidence and hope. Not simply as a career move, but as a character move. For this I want to suggest that God’s branding of you is just right, because it’s objective, it’s outside, it’s long, and it’s rooted deep inside you, from which you can gain confidence and go on. God’s view of you is positive and negative—it’s both optimistic and pessimistic. It’s both high and low. On the positive side, you are a creature, endowed with dignity. He thinks the world of you. You are a testament to His creativity. Now philosophy has tried to reduce us into simply being one of the many constituents of reality. Instead, God says, “You’re unique, like nobody else.” He thinks the world of you—you’re much more than simply your brand, your image, your talents, your skills, and simply being a product or service. You are a person.

On the negative side, however, we are sinners. We fall short of God’s branding of us—we even fall short of our own branding of ourselves that we know deep inside of us. And so God places a new brand value on you. He sends His one and only Son, the Lord Jesus, to give us a new brand—not the marker for curse because we’re sinners, but the mark of the cross. He gives you a new brand. He forgives our sins. He gives us salvation. He gives us a new brand by which you might live, and I might live. His brand is how you want to brand yourself.

Write to us! If you liked this talk, share it with your friends, visit our website. Let’s continue the dialogue.

Support the show

The unaudited life is not a healthy life. Where do you stand when you examine your successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses? Have you fallen short of your own expectations and desires? Do you long for a chance to reorder your life, to have new courage, new motivation? There is hope for a new direction for your life, one that is available to you at no cost from the God who created and loves you. Will you trust Him to give you new direction? You think about it, let’s talk about it.

TRANSCRIPT:
Hello world! My bachelor’s degree was a “B.Com,” a Bachelor of Commerce. The original “B-dot-com” in Business, as it were. Those few years seemed like a big waste—especially when I went through a course on auditing. The “B.Com”—we were just being calm and youthful, immaturity and ignorance. My professor, who was not interested in the subject or the students, got us all a “pass” because that helped his success rate with the authorities and his popularity with the students. The auditing course has since become much more important as I attempt to live by the principles of good accounting.

Just like there could be auditing of companies and organizations and businesses, there could be an auditing of us, our lives, our souls. The religions and the philosophies have told us about this. In fact, leadership literature has much about this as well. Socrates, the great philosopher said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Others have said you need to look at your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, your threats, your personality and temperament, your scales and talents, and then know a bit about yourself.

That is only internal self-auditing. That’s a great place to start. In fact, my takeaway from the philosophers and religions goes this way: “The unexamined life is not worth living,” is followed by, “The unaudited life is not a healthy soul.” So if you don’t audit yourself, you don’t know yourself, but if you don’t know yourself, you can’t audit yourself—you’re caught in a bind. And therefore, we need to go to external auditors, just like businesses and companies go to external auditors, who do not have a conflict of interest in examining us.

In the same way, I am going to recommend that you go to an external auditor. An internal self-audit would be subject to your own prejudices, to your jaundiced view of yourself—but an external auditor who knows everything about you, who does not have anything to gain from you, who strengthens your soul but gives it free of cost, is God Himself. And as He audits your life, your soul, you will notice, because He notices, you have fallen short of His principles, His expectations. But you have fallen short of your own expectations, of your own principles. And the immediate, severe, and eternal consequence of having fallen short is what I’m going to call the non-repairable self-identity. Your life never simplifies. It never heals. It never congeals. So the external Self Auditor, without a charge, without conflict of interest, recommends a course—a direction for correction. He says, “I will send my Son without cost to you, all you’ve got to do is receive Him. And if you receive Him, you’ll have a brand new life.” You’ll become a new creation, so that all your life processes and life structures can be restructured. You’ll have new impetus, new motivation, new courage. You will be clean in your audit.

Audit yourself. Because the unaudited life is not a healthy one. If you liked this talk, let me know. Send it to your friends, get on our website, and let’s begin our dialogue. I’m waiting to hear from you.

Support the show

Just like technology, your soul, too, needs updates. As a human you are broken, imperfect and in need of an external power source to guide you to true goodness. God, who created and loves you, offers to fully update, restore and lead your soul to goodness. With His updates, He will show you who you were created to be, what your purpose is and how you can live well. Are you in need of a life and soul update? Will you accept His update?

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello world! Today, I speak on “Updating Your Self.” Not “upgrading your self,” that comes later on. Just your version 1.0. Updating yourself even to be at 1.0. Updates are when a business sends communications to you to update your applications. Upgrade is when you’re hoping for and wishing for, like in a technology upgrade or an airline travel upgrade. Well updates, you’ve heard of news updates, keeping you aware of what’s happening on the hour, every hour. You’ve heard of house updates, because your house got a little old-fashioned; or your clothes or wardrobe update.

But today I speak on soul update. Life update. For example, you’re a person of principle, but you’re not able to keep your own principles. You’re a creature of dignity, and you live yet the most undignified life. You’re a person of beauty, but there is a side of you which is terribly ugly. You need to be updated.

Now like me, you probably get app updates all the time on your smartphone. And for some reason, I’m not sensitive to those. You know, the present version of it seems to be fine. I am, however, talking not only simply of an application update, but an operating system sort-of update. And that we’ll come to a little later on in the upgrading of your life. But right now you are not even meeting the potential of version 1.0. For example, you are very smart, but you are not good. You’re very educated, but you don’t have character. Maybe you’re very, very rich, but you don’t have an identity, which allows you to use your wealth really well. Your own dignity, your own principles, your own convictions are broken by you. And so God sends you an update option. He sends you the update, because you’re not automatically checking for them. It’s a manual update. And you’ve got to say, “Yes.” And you’re going to click that you agree with this option, and then it runs through the processes throughout your entire life and makes you more at ease with what you are, who you are, right now.

This is not yet an upgrade, that comes to 2.0, and I’ll talk about that later. But this is simply being 1.0 at your best. For that too, you need to know your Creator. The One who created you. The One who can bring life to the fullest inside who you are. And then when you trust Him as your only Savior, you not only have life to the fullest now, but life forever. The Lord Jesus said, “I’ve come that you might have life.” That’s version 1.0 in its best. A little later on, we’ll talk about how you can have fullness of life. So that you have a new creation, a new orientation, a new identity.

Would you like to update your life? Just click “yes,” and God takes on His role of updating you from this very moment. Join me as my friend on Facebook, or write to me via email. Contact me on the web. I’d like to help you update your life.  

Support the show

Hello world, welcome to LifeRocks. I am thrilled to announce we are launching our “You 2.0” series as a podcast! With the New Year just around the corner, perhaps you are looking for a self-update or enhancement. Join us for a 13-part series about auditing, reforming and updating your life for a happy, healthy “You 2.0.” You think about it, let’s talk about it. 

Support the show