I suppose the title might be confusing for the message today. After all, we as Christians should have hope. I want to focus on attitudes this week. As salvation is a journey and not a one time experience we often find ourselves in the wrong places if we have taken our eyes off the Shepherd. We might experience something in life and adjust our hearts in a certain way just to get by, but we’ll be in error. I suppose that it’s human nature to do what we have to do in enduring something. As an example, we can have a loss in life where a loved one is taken and set our heart against God because we refuse to admit that He is Sovereign. … Read entire article »

            Many years ago I worked for a company in another city. It was a great company with good pay. Many of the employees there were occasionally called out after hours to repair things and so we also made overtime pay on top of a good salary. One employee there who worked third shift was also known to be moonlighting. As a young man, someone had to explain to me what that was. A coworker explained that it meant he worked a second job besides his full time job with our company. The position he held was one of a control operator where he monitored the gas pipeline system. During the night, while all of us slept he was there to make sure the pressures were maintained. Then, when the world … Read entire article »

          I’ve been thinking about guilt this week. What do you think causes us to feel guilty about something. A man I once went to church with brought up the subject and asked me about our conscience. He wanted to know if our conscience was really molded by the Holy Spirit or by outside influences that we respected. It is an interesting question. To further clarify what I’m talking about, consider someone who is unsaved and belongs to a street gang. This man may not be a moral person (according to God’s Word) but he may actually have standards of right and wrong. His gang may believe that they should uphold every member and never do harm to one of them. He may believe that it is … Read entire article »

If you read last weeks message you know it was on wisdom. This week I’d like to go a little deeper with that topic. It often seems to be lacking in our lives and God has provided it to all those who will seek it. Let’s begin by looking at the Book of Proverbs. To begin with we need to know how important wisdom is. This book is full of wisdom but in chapter four Solomon wrote about it specifically. In this he refers to wisdom as “she”. You may remember that Solomon was called (by God) the wisest man who ever lived. When he became King God came to him and told him He would give him anything he asked for. Solomon asked for wisdom to rule and God blessed … Read entire article »

              This week I was pondering the fact that some people never seem to be able to connect the dots in life. It’s as if they go through life in a fog and live according to what they’ve learned instead of what they should have figured out. They react instead of being proactive. I believe that is why children who were abused grow up to be abusive parents. There is a part of life that we do learn from but sometimes it seems that we just are missing some logic.           Take the news story I heard this week for example. It was on the radio and was about the crash test dummy program. The reporter told about the advancements in automobile safety over the past ten … Read entire article »

  We have just celebrated Passover here at our home. We began doing this a few years ago after studying the Jewish Holy Days. A friend of ours who is a Jew invited us over to his home and went through the ceremony. He reminded us that Passover was the longest continuously celebrated event in the history of man. For over four thousand years people of God have gone through this ceremony. This time when we celebrated it we had small children with us. It was not the quiet serene event that it had been in past years with these children present. However, I realized that many of the things done in the ceremony are there to teach children about God’s deliverance, so I didn’t mind. We have all pondered on Holy … Read entire article »

           I have been doing a lot of thinking about human nature lately. It seems that no matter who we are we all have common shortcomings and weaknesses. Isaiah wrote that we all, just like sheep, have gone astray and followed our own ways (Is 53:6). I am just like you in that I don’t like to admit weaknesses. Some days I’d prefer to hide behind a mask and pretend that everything is better than it really is. Maybe we have even been taught by society to keep a smile and at least act nice when things are really bad. I conclude, after reading God’s Word that He wants us to live truthfully and honestly in this world.           If you and I are surrounded by people … Read entire article »

           I want to tell you about some incidents that occurred this week. Well, these past two weeks, actually, I had all sorts of technologies that failed me. I have a company Blackberry that went absolutely bizerk. It began by losing all my contacts in my address book (500 of them). I reset it and reloaded. Then a few days later it happened again. I reset it and only half of them came up. I began to try other type re-settings and called our Help Desk. They restarted my account in the server and when it was put back not only did it not have my contacts but I could no longer get email. The eventual solution was to completely wipe it clean of all software … Read entire article »

          This week, while listening to a conversation between two people I heard something remarkable. There was an issue between the two and as he had always done, one of them apologized to the other. It was a scene that didn’t particularly strike me as unusual in any way. I have often had to apologize to someone for something I had done wrong. But the response from the other person absolutely astounded me. They told the first person that if the issue was small enough to be fixed with an apology it would have been too small to even bring up.           It was as if the planet came to a screeching halt! I jumped to find something to write on before the thought escaped me. No one even … Read entire article »