True Love

My daughter has started a blog and now is planning a new blog study on True Love. Here's more information from her on the study (and I hope you'll join her on her journey through the study of love):


What is the opposite of love? The answer may surprise you: selfishness and self-seeking. Why?

This question along with many others will be answered in the new blog study True Love. In this study, we will answered the questions of What is love? Why should we love? How to love? by looking at Jesus’ life and His wonderful word.

I hope you can join us on this incredible journey.

This study will start on November 9th at Living Water devotional blog www.well-of-life.blogspot.com

No praise due

“I was but a Pen in God's hand,
and what praise is due to a Pen?"

Richard Baxter

Crow hopping

My first horse was a white gelding with splayed hooves from some previous pleasure and a limp from a wire cut on his left hock. Obviously, 7-Up had a mysterious prior life.

He had one pink eye and one with a black patch, like eyeliner. He was basically ugly but he made up for that by being pretty dense, too.

His focus for his day was eating hay and avoiding double riders by throwing out a little crow hop when my little sister climbed behind the saddle. (A crow hop happens when the horse bucks straight up.)

I thought that he’d be delighted to be with us after his dark past. We never allowed him to founder and we guarded him from any wire cuts. He was our first horse so he got lots of brushing and some apples on the side. There was always plenty of fresh water and lots of room to roll and run. He had a good life but he still crow hopped.

We came to God like 7-up came to us, a little beat up from our previous life, and we get treated pretty well. God gives us freedom and new life and hope. He loves us and shows us a better way.

And then we crow hop. We think he’s asking too much when he says something crazy like “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”

We think God is burdening us with his commands. But when we have an obedience problem, we really have a love problem.

The stethoscope

Thanks, Marcia, for this clip!

Focus

Before focusing on your rights,
take a careful look at your responsibilities.

-Ken Sande
Peacemaker Ministries

Home

When my grandmother was gripped by the claws of Alzheimer's, she spent a few months in a nursing home. But every day her cry was, "I want to go home."

Finally my uncle brought her home and made arrangements for in-house care.

But Grandma kept wandering through her house of 20 years, saying, "I want to go home."

By this time she had forgotten her husband and didn't recognize any of her 11 children. At her funeral, her pastor told us through teary eyes that she had finally gone home.

This world has many joys and many troubles. Even in our daily schedule, do we cling to what the psalmist wrote?

One thing I ask of the LORD,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Psalms 27:4

We know that God promises to hear our requests. Is this our request: to dwell in his house? Do I ask to move in, to risk the transparency of intimacy, so that I may gaze on his beauty and seek him?

Do I long to go home?

Choices made today

This week, I've discussed some choices I made in innocence as a young person. I see God's grace to me, because I had not been well-prepared to dissect the logic and arguments of more worldly choices.

Yesterday I shared a chapter from Ken Ham's new book, Already Gone. It affected me profoundly as I am raising teenagers today in a world quite different from my teenage years.

Ham's argument is that we are losing our church-going children from conservative, Bible-believing churches. Although they are sitting in the seats right now, they are already gone in their mind.

Church has become irrelevant to them.

We see the results of that in our culture. We see a large number of church-going youths leave church and God when they leave home.

How can we help these young people?

They are faced with choices. Do they believe the Bible is true? Do they believe God is more wise than college professors? Where do they find truth?

The world welcomes them. Can we offer them a cool drink of living water and the hope of abundant life instead?

I highly recommend this book. I've been anxious to review it for weeks now. If you have any influence in your own family or if you care about young people in your church, you should read this book.