I remember taking Geometry in high school, and our teacher was describing how important math was to life (I guess some of us students were questioning it at the time) and gave the example that if you were to build a Skyscraper in which the math was off just a hair at the bottom that it would result in being way off at the top. This is a clear example in how Satan works in his temptations. He isn’t going to come at you full bore because we would readily recognize the strategy and reject it. Instead he gets us to buy in to just 2% of the lie, and lets the rest work itself out until we find our lives way off from the life God would have us live. He begins in the small things to later attack the big. Charles Spurgeon once said, “When Satan cannot get a great sin in he will let a little one in, like the thief who goes and finds shutters all coated with iron and bolted inside. At last he sees a little window in a chamber. He cannot get in, so he puts a little boy in, that he may go round and open the back door. So the devil has always his little sins to carry about with him to go and open back doors for him, and we let one in and say, ‘O, it is only a little one.’ Yes, but how that little one becomes the ruin of the entire man!” Beware that our greatest deviations from God begin in the little choices that we make.

When you listen to either the world news or the local news we see so much pain and heartache. We see so much devastation, division, and destruction that overwhelms us and makes us not like the world we live within. We see people struggling with a sense of meaning and purpose finding themselves often discouraged and alone. Well, no new news here, but this is the world in which we live. We live in a Fallen World where not everyone recognizes the Prince of Peace as Jesus and desires to follow Him. Many choose the Prince of Darkness and follows him because he seems to offer selfishness and pleasure as the end goal whereas Christ offers a new life.

The trouble is we often don’t know or realize when we are being deceived. The Prince of Darkness seeks to destroy, divide, discourage, assists us in our doubts and to ultimately deceive. This is evident every time we turn on the news. This world’s Prince of Darkness loves to hurt and devastate where the world’s rightful Lord and King wants to heal and bring peace in unity. With each choice we make in our life we either are supporting the Prince of Peace who is the Light of the World, the Lord Jesus Himself, or the Prince of Darkness which comes to destroy without bias. C.S. Lewis once said,“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” Who are you turning to in your choices today? Whose agenda do you support in your choices? Ultimately to have world peace, peace must begin within our own heart, and this begins when we choose to follow the Prince of Peace, King Jesus!

Recently in our church we have been studying through the book of Philippians. There are so many great truths to realize in that short little book. There is one that sticks out to all of us and many of us can even quote the verse, but many of us may never realize the depth of its meaning because we jump off the train too quick. It is the verse that says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” We often say this verse to pump us up before facing some challenge, but the reality is Paul is writing this in the context of being a prisoner when he can’t provide for himself. He was telling the Philippian church who had just sent him provisions that he knows what it is like to have much and to have little but the secret of contentment is in the knowing that in Jesus he is and without Jesus he is not.  This was not a statement to pump or psych out the Apostle Paul during a rough patch in his journey but rather the reality that he lived within. On the outside Paul was a prisoner with much need, but on the inside Paul states he is full and filled with abundance because it is Christ who strengthens him.

We see in this short letter that Paul had a different perspective than the rest of us. He did not let his attitude be dictated by his circumstances, but rather his attitude or mood was dictated in his love for Jesus and the love he knew Jesus had for him. Circumstances change in our lives but the love of God never does, and He is always our provision.

I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Philippians 4:13

September 26

Psalm 46:10 – Be still, and know that I am God;

When I was young my mother used to tell me I had “Ants in my Pants” because I wouldn’t sit still much as I was always into something. Sadly, we have become an “Ants in your Pants” society because most of us hate being still. How many people constantly stay on their phone nowadays? We are a culture of little busy-bodies! Over time this kind of approach to life is exhausting to our body and draining to our spirit.

In this little verse, God is calling us to be still, but why? The answer is to know that He is God and not ourselves, or some circumstance or interruption in life. The reason many of us struggle with hearing from God is because our lives are too loud, too busy with our own self-will that we cannot hear as Elijah did ‘the still, small voice of God’ (1 Kings 19:11-13). Sitting in silence, allowing our minds to declutter and detox from the junk of the world is a necessary practice for spiritual sanity. Biblical meditation is refocusing the mind on God unlike the Eastern practice where one attempts to empty their mind which is actually logically impossible. We must learn to recapture the silence and the stillness of life and let the beauty of God rekindle the fire within our hearts. There is a time to be busy, but the joy you get out of the busyness of life will be determined in how connected you are with God in those still moments we create everyday. 

Recently, I was out of town on a speaking engagement and flipped on the TV searching through the channels in the hotel room. A show was on where two people were discussing some problem, and one replied to the other, “You know I’m your best friend, and I’ll tell you anything you want me to tell you.” I immediately thought how silly that was to think that was a friendship. Yet, sadly, that is where our society is in our relationships, politics, and even in our churches. We are no longer interested in the things that are true, but rather what we want to hear. The best of friends is not always saying what we want to hear, but what we need to hear. 

Paul warns Timothy of the same issue. He states there will come, and in our age has come, a time when people will not be interested in truth or sound doctrine but will only be interested in what they want to be true rather than in truth itself. This web of deception has crept into the walls of churches and infiltrated the ranks. It has distorted a true view of who God is for so many because there is so much preaching that is according to “our own desires” verses the truth of sound doctrine. C.S. Lewis put it this way, “If you don’t listen to theology, that won’t mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.” There are a lot of wrong ideas about God, even among believers, because so many have deviated from the truth of Scripture.

II Timothy 4:3-4…For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

Have you had to recently walk through a dark time in your life? Maybe it came in the form of a broken relationship, a unwanted diagnosis, a loss of a job or even the death of a loved one. These periods of our lives can be daunting, overwhelming, and so very painful. We wonder where do we turn or who do we turn to for help and companionship through these times.

Many times we need the companionship of a close friend or even a professional counselor, but no matter what we are going through or how dark the valley, there is always God. We may not understand our circumstances, but we can lean on One greater than our circumstances. He has stated many times in Scripture that ‘He will never leave us or abandon us’ (Joshua 1:5; Hebrews 13:5) God is a God of comfort and companionship during our darkest trials. David experienced this when he faced Goliath. He later wrote Psalm 23 that speaks of God being there ‘even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’ I imagine when he was penning these words he was reflecting how God had accompanied him into the Valley of Elah to slay a giant enemy. Whatever you are facing and no matter how dark the valley, God is there, even when we don’t feel Him, to be our constant companion to lean on during our times of trouble.

Psalm 23:4 NIV – Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Have you ever had a question about life and someone responded, “just have faith”? In the angst of having a question it can be quite discouraging when someone gives you such a pat answer. So what does it mean to have faith?  

There are two types of faith that we can discuss: Blind Faith & Evidential Faith. Blind faith is how many describe their faith. Sadly, many believers, give this definition which is having no reason to believe something, but believing it anyway. It’s almost like a badge of honor to some. This understanding of faith is absurd, furthermore dangerous, and why people do crazy things in the name of religion!

The Biblical understanding of faith is one of evidence. It is not faith or reason, but rather faith and reason. Reason reveals the bread crumbs to follow and faith sees the inference. We have all watched the CSI shows where one rationally finds the evidence, and then can infer the most probable outcome. It is the same way with faith according to Scripture. As Ravi Zacharias once put it, “God has placed enough evidence before us to make Christianity a rational endeavor, but left enough out to make it a relational experience.” There are in fact reasons for faith such as the reliability of the Bible, existence of God, the person of Christ, and ultimately His resurrection.

Hebrews 11:1 NLT – Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.

Today, as I write this, I celebrate my grandfather’s birthday. He was born August 20^th, 1928. He would have been 91 years old today. He passed away in 1995, but forever left a mark on my life. So many memories and stories to tell that will forever be a part of my life. He didn’t leave me with great riches of material things, but he left me rich. Rich in the things that matter. I’m forever grateful for his legacy that he left behind.

He was an old school cowboy. A giant in size and personality. Full of fun and laughter, and massive in strength. He was a gentle giant, not that the giant couldn’t be riled, but in nature he was gentle and kind. I remember him singing in church as a stood next to him. I remember him knocking a cow down with just a stick telling us boys to get off the fence because we looked like a bunch of black birds on a highline after she put us up that fence. I remember three weeks before his unexpected passing his desire to go to heaven. I remember the loss I felt when he arrived.

So many people today want the cotton candy lifestyle, but my grandfather was a steak and potatoes kind of life. He was real and those type of people are becoming harder and harder to find. He wasn’t perfect, and he would be the first to admit this, but he knew God. He knew the love of Jesus in a real way. He wasn’t pushy in his faith, but he also didn’t budge in his beliefs. He is the kind of person we need more of in a society of sugar and cream.

When I was young a piece of advice my grandfather gave me was this: Fear God and anything that can eat you! It is why the words “Shark” & “Grizzly” catch and keep my attention today. As a young boy that sounded like pretty sound advice to me, and now as a man it still sounds pretty commonsense. The truth of it is we humans spend a lot of our times trying to figure things out, trying to outwit the next person, make the big bucks, drive the fancy cars or have the dream house, but all in all those things are temporal at best. What is the thing we fear the most in life? For many it is reputation or failure, but we must ask what are we trying to compare ourselves to in the end. We must learn to consider what really matters in life. I have been to both the funerals of those that have money and those that didn’t, and their funeral was the same minus a few flowers I guess.

We must begin to ask ourselves what really matters regarding life. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the wisest man in history, other than Jesus, King Solomon writes the verse below. Basically when all is said and done we are to fear God and keep His commands. Why is this the case? Because God is all that matters in the end. When death comes, and death surely will for all of us, how have we feared God. Now this fear is not the type of ‘scary afraid’ but rather a ‘stand in awe’ type of fear. The greatest way we can fear God today is to place our faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, who is God and became man so that we could become children of God. The only way to escape the judgment of our bad deeds is to find forgiveness in the life and the work of Jesus who stood in the judgment on our behalf.

Ecclesiastes 12:13-14

When all has been heard, the conclusion of the matter is: fear God and keep His commands, because this is for all humanity. For God will bring every act to judgment, including every hidden thing, whether good or evil.