"The Bible Says That?"

A good friend of mine recently took a group of urban teenagers to a week of Young Life Camp, an amazing experience for many who have never been outside Memphis city limits or accustomed to three meals a day.
At cabin time four nights into the trip, he told his campers, “Ask me anything.” And these young men had the opportunity to ask the questions that no one has ever let them ask and no one has ever bothered to answer.

My friend T did not elaborate on his own ideas of spirituality, but fielded the questions with Scripture, flipping back and forth through the Word in answering vital life questions. And I need to point out that my friend is not a seminary graduate or ordained minister, but a man who daily digs deep into God’s Word.

Over and over, he heard, “The Bible says that?”

It reminds me of the section in Exodus when Moses exhorts God’s people to be ready. “And when your children ask you, “What do these things mean?” (Exodus 12.26 and others) Or your co-workers or neighbors or friends. What are you going to tell them? When the opportunity comes up, there is no time for cramming. How can I do that if I don’t know what the Word says?

When God infuses the Word into a situation, God infuses His Word into hearts and changes them forever. For these young men, they comprehended the reality and truth of the Bible. It is no ordinary book, but the very words of God. They saw the Truth – perhaps for the first time. And they will never be the same.

Read His Word every day. It is the daily-ness of reading and meditating on Scripture that makes the biggest difference. In your life and the lives of everyone around you.

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved,
a workman who has no need to be ashamed,
rightly handling the Word of truth.
2 Timothy 2.15
Press on!

Don't Miss Summer

This is just a first in a new series called,
"Don't Miss Summer." Hope that you make the most of these summer months. They are an investment in your life and the lives of those around you. For the first installment, I have included a guest blogger, my husband Bill with some of his recent thoughts.

6-12-2009

I had a nice 40 mile ride on Little River Rd. in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As I was riding I saw families in and out of their cars taking pictures, fishing and playing in the river. Coming down out of Cades Cove, I caught up to a car and kept up with it for a mile or two at 35 miles per hour. Two boys stuck their heads out the windows, pointed and took pictures of me.


It reminded me of our own adventures with the girls when they were little; camping from Cades Cove in eastern Tennessee to Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. They got so dirty at times two baths weren’t enough and they made the Tide kids on the commercial look clean. We simply threw their clothes away on more than one occasion. They wore out their anoraks glissading down glaciers in the Rockies. They climbed trees, unconcerned with the rain that fell drenching them to the skin. They got way too close to poisonous snakes and skunks and bears and bison, but so did I. We fished in Yellowstone Lake until our fingers and toes could stand the cold no longer, and then we fished some more. We swam in the icy snowmelt waters of String Lake in the Tetons. We competed at roasting marshmallows even though we all knew Laura would have the best.


And we laughed and made stories for many trips to come.

A Visit to the Eye Doctor

I am on my last pair of contacts, and I have to go to the optometrist this afternoon for my eye exam. Nothing seems to be the matter with my vision, but in a couple of weeks, I will not have any contacts to wear. Why do I need to go, if nothing seems to be out of focus? Just give me the prescription.
I dislike the procedure of the eye exam. Which do you like better? One or two, two or three, three or four?
(Is this how he asks his kids what they want to eat? I wonder). Sometimes the difference between the choices is slim to none. I have to look very carefully to see the slightest variation in sharpness –are there fuzzy edges at all? Or is the choice very clear? Sometimes I don’t realize how poorly I have been seeing. What has become “normal” for me is really not how the world is.
That is where Biblical worldview comes in, discovering the reality of God in everything, big stuff and the tiniest details. What do I miss because my vision is off even a fraction?
Every day when you read God’s Word, He is refining your vision. It is not just how you see your world, but what you do about it.
“How should followers of Jesus respond? With action and hope,” says Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship.
How much do we miss in what God opens to us and what God wants to do in us and through us, just because we haven’t daily focused on Him through His Word? The reality of who God is will seep into every aspect of your life.

…one thing I know,
that though I was blind,
now I see…
John 9.25


Be Thou my vision…….

A Few Thoughts On Love

From Paul Tripp's sermon at College Church this past Sunday, based in 1 John 4.

"Love grows best in the soil of gratitude."

"It is only when God is in His rightful place in the center of our world... that we are able to love as He intended."

"Our failure is not a failure to love each other. It is a failure to love God."

"If you are God's child, you have been called to love."

I recently purchased a devotional book called Morning and Evening. I had heard mention of it several times recently, so I was excited to find it this past week on the shelves of a used bookstore. I thought I'd share with you an excerpt from yesterday's morning entry. In the words of Charles Spurgeon:

It is good to regularly weigh ourselves in the scale of God's Word. You will find it a holy exercise to read some Psalm of David and, as you meditate upon each verse, to ask yourself, "Can I say this? Have I felt as David felt? Has my heart ever been broken on account of sin, as his was when he penned his penitential psalms? Has my soul been full of true confidence in the hour of difficulty as his was when he sang of God's mercies in the cave of Adullam or in the holds of Engedi? Do I take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord?" Then turn to the life of Christ, and as you read, ask yourself how far you are conformed to His likeness. Endeavor to discover whether you have the meekness, the humility, the lovely spirit that He constantly urged and displayed. Then take the epistles, and see whether you can go with the apostle in what he said of his experience. Have you ever cried out as he did, "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death"? Have you ever felt his self-abasement? Have you seemed to yourself the chief of sinners, and less than the least of all the saints? Have you known anything of his devotion? Could you join with him and say, "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain"? If in this way we read God's Word as a test of our spiritual condition, we will often have good reason to pause and say, "Lord, I feel I have never yet been here. O bring me here! Give me the true penitence about which I am reading. Give me real faith; give me warmer zeal; inflame me with more fervent love; grant me the grace of meekness; make me more like Jesus."