Have you ever felt like your life was in a pit? Perhaps your marriage has grown stale, your job is going nowhere fast, your passion for God and the church is waning, or you seem to lack fulfillment and meaning. Let me ask you—how deep is your pit? 20 feet? 100 feet? 1,000 feet? I have good news for you. Whatever the depth of
When a symphony or band warms up, it sounds like chaos. If they are warming up individually, it sounds like a hodgepodge of people whom you would think don’t know how to play at all and couldn’t make anything sound beautiful. However, under the director’s guidance and leadership, they blend together to make beautiful music. A symphony is an elaborate composition of a masterpiece, sonata
D .L. Moody said, “Those who say they will forgive but can’t forget, bury the hatchet, but they leave the handle out for immediate use.” Have you ever noticed that when we get upset about something, we begin hashing up all these things that have happened in the past? Things we thought were long forgiven and forgotten suddenly flood our minds and stir up
Pilots often suffer from vertigo when they cannot see the horizon. In such a situation, every pilot must decide whether to trust his senses or the information from his instrument panel. The same is true in life. We live in a culture that calls things once regarded as good evil, and things that were once regarded evil good. We have lost sight of our
A group of scientists and botanists were exploring remote regions of the Alps in search of new species of flowers. One day they noticed through binoculars a flower of such rarity and beauty that its value to science was incalculable. But it lay deep in a ravine with cliffs on both sides. To get the flower someone had to be lowered over the cliff
Someone once said: “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” Ships are built to go out into the open sea, enduring the waves that toss them about and sailing smoothly on calm water. We can either stay in the harbor and be “safe” as a believer, never doing anything bold or courageous for the Lord. Always
The Gulf of Mexico is filled with oil rigs, so whenever a hurricane takes aim on the area, all focus turns to anchoring the rigs. Let me ask you a question. When storms approach, or even make landfall on your life, where do you anchor your rig—your heart? If our hearts are not secured, they can be wrecked or swept away when storms rush
Did you know that back in the days of the Roman Empire fragrances were all the rage? They would celebrate their victories with huge parades and burn incense on the altars, which would fill the entire city with its sweet-scented aroma. Even those who could not be part of the celebration would smell the incense from afar and know their army had been victorious!
So many people begin a new year by declaring they have a “resolution” that they are going to make changes in their life. Especially after a particularly bad year, we just want to start over. As we all know, most people fail in keeping resolutions because either they choose something that is too difficult for them to do in their own strength, or they really
The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel (which means God with us.) Isaiah 7:14 To the Israelites, who had been looking for a redeemer for 400 years, “God with us” meant their Messiah had come and would save them from the oppression of the Romans. How little they knew what His coming truly meant. We celebrate
