Control Your Thinking

If we talk about something others are not suppose to view or participate in, we create appetites for them to view it or participate.

If people who torture and kill people and send videos and you show them you participate in their strategy. They send those to cause the public to fear them. The authorities need the information so they can take the proper action. I don’t need to see what they are doing!

If the government or media who is the governments puppets start broadcasting warnings and things to get our attention and in a few days it goes away you have to wonder what they did not want you to see or hear.

As Christians we should focus on the things we should do. Focus on the right things and the wrong things will take care of themselves. Quit focusing on what evil is doing and focus on what God is doing! Focus on that which gives you courage and you will find the courage to deal with evil when you face it. Quit allowing the media, events and politicians to captivate your mind. Back away and ask questions that free you from their focus. God gave us a mind to use. Let your mind and heart be filled with truth and good things and you will create those things!

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Mountain Climbers

The last few days have been some of the most hectic and stressful days I have experienced in a long time. I am trying to navigate through some issues that are difficult and not easy to navigate through. While doing such it is easy to be snappy and rude. One starts to feel like the whole world is against them and that life is a mountain to climb. You can see the peak but the trail is rocky, narrow and steep. The mistake is to look back and think it might be worth it to take the easier road. The trail with no resistance looks like the best choice. The danger lies not in the stress of the climb but the decision to retreat.

Look around and be encouraged at the blessings that God has given you. Find inspiration in the goodness of God. Remember His faithfulness and praise Him. Look at others and notice their plight. Feel for them and you will quit feeling sorry for yourself!

Today I watched a homeless man as he climbed under a bridge. I know he has been living under that bridge for at least two years. He walks through the day and shivers through the night. He isolated himself from others and moves through life alone. Maybe somewhere in his journey he looked down his mountain and decided to quit climbing. Maybe someone blocked him from his journey and this is the best he can do. I don’t know but I do know that all of us must decide to not quit and not get discouraged. Keep climbing, keep praising and keep loving and helping others! You will reach the peak one day. But don’t be surprised if when you reach that peak you realize it is just a foothill of the real mountains to come! But God made us to take mountains not mountains to take men!

Galatians 6:9-10 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. 10 As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

Quitting Is Not An Option!

“You see, into my ministry I brought the survival spirit. You do or die. You do whatever is necessary to win. It doesn’t make any difference what it is.” Charles Stanley

I read a CNN report on Charles Stanley and his struggles as a leader, husband, parent and follower of Christ. I have always admired him and even more today. He is a surviver and exemplifies that even when you fail, even when you are misunderstood, even when you are wrong, and even when everything is against you you can succeed if you just will not quit! Don’t quit moving forward! Don’t quit forgiving! Don’t quit loving! Don’t quit on yourself when everyone around you has! Don’t quit when you have fallen from the lofty perches of men and others use you as examples and cliches of failure! When you don’t know if God is done with you or not, don’t quit! Never give up, no never even think about giving up until you have no more breath, no more strength to move forward! You can take it! The movie “Unbroken” had a quote, “If you can take it-you can make it! Well we can take it and we will make it!

Tomorrow starts another year for me! I have no idea where it will take me but one thing I do know, I am not quitting!

The Church At War

The church is faced with a war she never wanted. The church of every generation has had its conflicts to struggle against! It is the response in crisis and conflict that determines whether the message of Christ continues in that generation. Christ is commanding His leaders to get His Church to the war! Quit fighting in and on the wrong battlefields. Leave the battlefields of politics, laziness, apathy, bickering, materialism and any other silly skirmishes that detracts, discourages and dissipates the Warriors strength. We don’t have all the answers for the cultures questions! We don’t many times even understand the conflicts. But we had better get the Church ready for the war and get her to the right battlefields! 

A church steeped in materialism, socialism, humanism, consumerism will never deliver a trapped world of lost people! 

Moving away

So many of my friends are moving to their new homes! I guess I should be happy for them. I am sure their new homes are more beautiful than their old ones. They will be happy to take up residence and know it is paid for with no mortgage payments, no insurance, no taxes and no need to worry about burglars. They all are moving close to one another and the ones they do not know are still the best of neighbors. Yes, I should be happy for them but I will miss them. Of course I am building a home there and it will soon be paid for. Once paid for I am moving on up! I still have some work to do in the old neighborhood. So I am going to miss my friends and work on making some new friends. but one thing for sure the old neighborhood will never be the same without the ones who left! The old song, “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore!” Has never meant more and understood so clearly.

John 14:^14:1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. ² In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. ³ And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

Toleration and Celebration

Toleration and celebration are becoming confused in our culture. Our nation, people and laws have tolerated homosexuals and their life styles for many years. Now we are celebrating their strange and abnormal decisions with laws to celebrate their lifestyle. Marriage is a Biblical value celebrated by the joining of a man and a woman for the purpose of producing a family. How can we demoralize our land with laws that celebrate two percent of our country who choose to enjoy a different way to live? How can we continue on this road and not realize that our children will explore the abnormal because we now celebrate it as normal? How will we ever become greater than we are when we are choosing less than the truth! In this country every person has a right to live the way they want to live as long as it does not break the laws of the land. But when the laws of our land are made to celebrate the abnormalities of our society then we have failed to understand our moral responsibilities as lawmakers!

Are you the one, or should we look for another?

As a Christian Leader you should know the difference between good and bad, moral and immoral, right and wrong. If you do not you will never be able to articulate to a lost culture the way out of their despair. As Christian leaders we must rise to the occasion and call out those things and people who drag others down. We cannot change the culture if we have not changed. We cannot lift the fallen if we continue to fall. The Bible gives us the compass to lead from and to direct others! We may not understand all of it but that which we do understand must be heeded and declared. If you do not have the courage to lead from the scriptures then leave the post and allow someone else to man it! Too much is at stake, too many lives can be lost for you to lead without courage to declare! You may need to ask yourself, “Am I the one to lead?”

High Horse

High Horse

high horse – an attitude of arrogant superiority.

One would have to get off their own “High Horse” to realize the rest of us are walking. Americans came here to be free of those who lived above other people. We don’t see ourselves arrogantly and pridefully as superior to others! But we do see those who maim, murder, burn, abuse and tolerate such as less. Too many people want America to leave our lofty ideas, our great dreams, our freedoms, our values and to lower ourselves to cowardice and silence. America is about lifting everyone up. It is about all of us having the same opportunities to reach for the grandest goals and live the best life possible. We are about defending the rights of those who have lost rights and lost dreams. While those in this world will die so others will die. We, in contrast, are a people who will give our lives so others can live. When our leaders point us to coming down from our dreams then they should be replaced with men who give us new mountains to climb and new galaxies to explore. Give us leaders who make us stretch for high places not cowards who shame us with their arrogant and superior attitude and lower standards!

Leave it There and Move on!

If you have been hurt or wronged or even perceive that you were let it go. Never use the scriptures to attack those who you feel have wronged you. The scriptures are redemptive and reconciling. Yes they condemn sin and sinners but with the goal to bring sinners to God. If you have been hurt and you carry it as a badge of righteousness you make yourself a fool. Hurts and un-forgiveness will hurt you and your family more than it will hurt the one who did it to you. Forgiveness is not for the benefit of the perpetrator but for the victim. Forgiveness releases those who have wronged you to be judged by God. As long as you judge them God cannot deal with their issues. Quit being blind by the planks of un-forgiveness and pull it out of your hearts eye! Let God make it a speck that only He sees and He is concerned about. Don’t perpetrate on your future as a perpetrator did on your past! Let it go, leave it there, move on and live large!