If you just read the title of this and are still reading, you don’t have time for cute stories or complicated formulas, so I’ll just get to the point, if that’s OK.
If you are in a situation where you are at a complete loss as to what to do, it’s because you need to reset your glance and your gaze. You have allowed your gaze – your long-term focus – to become set on your circumstances, your prayer request, your frustration, your pain, your desperate desire for change, or something other than the Lord. You’re glancing at God, asking Him to fix whatever you’re gazing at.
Nice try. I understand why. But it doesn’t work that way. Reset your gaze on God, and your glance on the world around you.
That’s what it means to wait on the Lord.
That’s what it means to praise, or to worship
Yes, that’s in the Bible. [click to continue…]
In the 2004 version of The Alamo, there’s this scene where Billy Bob Thornton, as Davy Crockett, looks over the fort wall at Santa Anna’s approaching horde. There, standing next to Colonel Travis, Crockett mutters grimly… “We’re gonna need a lot more men.”
Sam Houston… we’ve got a problem.
Problems come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Oh, to have the impossible-looking situations we faced in third or seventh grade! But every now and then, you and I are faced with circumstances that go beyond a headache or a flat tire.
We’re in grad school, friends. And we’re getting the third degree. [click to continue…]
Tense Truth: Jesus, the Light of the World, will sometimes allow us to experience seasons of darkness in order to teach us to trust Him, not guarantees. But He warns us not to turn back to that other kind of darkness – a world of evil or self-initiated “light” in order to find quick-fix relief.
First I’ll give you the pieces, then I’ll put them all together.
- A couple of weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend and he made a profound statement: “When your world is dark, the temptation is to turn deeper into the darkness for relief.” So true. And yet it makes about as much sense as digging your way out of a hole.
- Someone once asked me if I’d ever had a midlife crisis. I blurted out instantly, “Yeah, I’ve had about a dozen of ’em.”
- I’ve noticed a recurring pattern lately. I’m dealing with a significant number of professional men, all of whom could be classified as successful. In fact, they’re geniuses at what they do – so good, they can do it without a lot of thinking. And yet they’re bored, restless, or even depressed. Before my very eyes, they’re starting to act dead-before-they-die. In fact, my most common deep spiritual advice to them is, “You’re not dead yet!”
- Have you ever noticed that people who are living “in the darkness” are also the loudest to predict a dark future? Wonder if that’s just a coincidence?
More than once somebody or something has rocked my Zippity-do-dah world and faith and, for lack of a better way of describing it, “turned the lights off.” What’s ironic is that it didn’t happen because I’d screwed up or was somehow running from God. In fact, the darkness happened while I was pursuing the Lord and, by all accounts and purposes, growing. [click to continue…]
If you just read the title of this and are still reading, you don’t have time for cute stories or complicated formulas, so I’ll just get to the point, if that’s OK.