lifestyle-religion

Question: What do you do when your plans crash and burn, when you are no longer in control of the situation? Get angry or up tight? Start throwing things? Have a pity party? Blame others?

The love of God should be sufficient for all.

The Wilmington Seventh-day Adventist Church will be hosting Mary Grace this Saturday at 11:30 a.m.

Have you ever heard someone say, “You believe what you want, and I’ll believe what I want. We are both right?” That is, more or less, an “all-gods-are-equal” theological framework. But even someone who claims to be a Christian may say something like that. In theological terms that is called “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

To love your neighbor can be difficult at times, but we are commanded to love our neighbors. How we do this is based on what we know about the love of God as shown in our own lives and in the lives of others. We as believers should know the love of God by the way He has shown His love towards us.

If I were to ask your closest friends, would any of them say that you were an encourager? In these days of political pessimism, financial negativism, and moral decline, finding encouragement in most situations is difficult at best. Let’s talk about it. A few years ago, Jason Quick gave a great example from the realm of professional basketball (The Athletic, 7-6-19):

The world we live in is constantly changing, some changes have been good others not so good. Communication by email, cell phones, travel, and our day to day living have vastly improved, but what has been the cost? We no longer know how to relate to one another. We have gotten comfortable addressing one another through social media and other indirect ways rather than being civil and talking out our differences.

In the Gospel of Matthew, an incident is recorded in the life of Jesus that is worth some thought. The disciples of Jesus were in a boat crossing the Sea of Galilee at night when a storm arose (they do that fast and without notice on the Sea of Galilee!) and the disciples seemed to be fighting the waves, the wind, and the water. Jesus had been praying on the mountaintop, but saw they were in trouble and came walking to them on the water. The disciples, terrified by the storm, thought he was a ghost, but when he spoke to them, they calmed down, even though the storm did not.

When we for the first time were investigating life in this central Florida community where we now live, one of the places our good friend Bob showed us was the archery field and the targets on the field there. Just seeing those targets brought back the memory of a little kid (me) about 12-years-old at a summer camp in southern Ohio called Camp Arrowhead, just outside of my hometown of Jackson, Ohio.

When I was a child, I remember spending the summers often with my grandparents in Tennessee. My grandfather, in the later years of his life, left his grocery business to serve as a church-planting missionary in the area between Nashville and Knoxville in that state. One of his strategies for starting a new church was to go into a town to see if there was a church building that, for whatever reason. had closed down.