Daily Grit by Wes Thorp

Was the Apostle Paul near his breaking point while he was in the city of Corinth?

 

Sometimes I get the impression that the spiritual giants from the Bible like the Apostle Paul and Elijah were always up, never down and never struggled.  I should know better.  Right?

The weekend sermon from our church--Ada Bible Church--resonated with me because of its openness about how life can take you to the breaking point and how God can meet me in my time of extreme need.

It's the beginning of a multi-part series of sermons on The Resilient Life, on how to bounce back after feeling life you're at the breaking point. 

My life has been pretty good and I've had more blessings than I can count.  But there have been days where I couldn't always say that.  At the beginning of his sermon, he held a tree branch to demonstrate breaking.  He bent it to

the point of almost breaking.  I have had times where I could identify with that.

I need to let the sermon marinade in my heart.  I know that I'm not immune from hard times or severe challenges again.  Perhaps, I'll run into somebody who is.  I know that there are periods where I can be afraid of what's to come.  The pastor shared Acts 18:9-10 where Jesus appears to Paul in a vision and tells him not to be afraid.  Then Jesus tells him why.

Life can turn on a dime and I know that.  I want to be ready. 

We first watched the sermon at home during supper on Saturday through ustream.com and then again on Sunday. 

I pray that God meets me as I meditate on

What are you praying for as your Saturday morning gets underway?

 

This is my prayer for starting the day.

I wish I remembered the sermon where our pastor said this.  I found his suggested prayer for starting the day so simple, but, yet, so important, that I wrote it down.  When I got home I printed it out and put it on the bulletin board in front of my desk in my study.

The prayer:  "God give me the grace to trust you today."

Who knows what the day will bring?  I just ask and plead with God to give me the grace to trust him.  It's simple.  Do I believe that he will anser that prayer?  Yes.  I am counting on it.

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Getting a good start on my day

I use this prayer that I stuck inside my Bible

What do you say to God first thing in the morning or anytime, especially when you're reading the Bible?  Here's a prayer that my pastor uses.  I've tucked it in my Bible.  I pull it out and use it as a starting point.

Can I learn something from the life of 17-year-old Melissa Branon?

 

I just read a short account of the life and death of 17-year-old Melissa Branon written by her dad Dave Branon of the Radio Bible Class and a frequent contributor to their devotional Our Daily Bread.  A longer account of the lost of his daughter can be found here.

He tells how she was an ordinary kid who tried to balance all of life's demands at that age.  She loved Jesus, went to school, had a job and friends.  Then she died in a car accident while still in high school.

Her life, her dad says is still producing fruit for the Kingdom of God, he adds.  It was a witness to the love of God.  When her story in told people are still affected.  He points to John 15:8--"By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit."

The point is made that each believers life touches others.  And our prayer is that each of our lives does it in a productive way for others to see the love of Jesus in you.

My prayer as I start my day:  "God give me the grace to trust you today."

I need to memorize Psalm 46

My first read of the morning on the web was the Our Daily Bread devotion where Joe Stowell talks about Psalm 46:10: "Be still, and know that I am God."  Lots of stuff can happen in daily life and it's easy to let that rule your life.  There are just times when you have to let God take the responsibility. You have to know he's there.  I need to marinade my heart in that Psalm and in that promise.  

Getting a good start on my day

It's early Friday morning and I'm sitting on the left end of our couch and my wife is on the right side. We follow a daily ritual where we go through our emails, read some news, go through our individual Facebook pages while drinking freshly-brewed coffee.

Almost 100 percent of the time, I go through the Our Daily Bread devotion for the day where there's a commentary based on a Bible verse or verses.

Today the devotion is based on 1 Corinthians 10:12: 

Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.

It raises the point about what happens when we turn our back on God in our daily lives.  What happens when you take him out of the equation of daily living?

For me it's easy to read a devotion with its verse and then forget it.  As I experience today, I pray that God helps me keep him at the center of everything.  

Our pastor sometime ago shared a prayer to pray daily:

God,  give me the grace to trust you today.  

There my day has officially started. 

Starting my Monday morning in Michigan with the "Messiah" in a mall foodcourt

Watching this YouTube video of Handel's Messiah being sung by a flash mob in a mall food court is how I'm starting my Monday morning here in the heart of mid-Michigan.  It provides focus for the week ahead.  It's about Jesus, the Messiah, all the time regardless of what happens or where it happens.  It's worth a view.

 

Do I really believe that God's strength is made perfect in my weakness?

I know that I will have a busy week filled with lots of challenges with a pretty long to-do list.  My human frailities and weaknesses could very well be tested.  And this includes more than sneaking an extra swallow of Great Lakes Red.

I love snow!

As I sit on our Lazy Boy couch with my feet up, things seem pretty manageable and doable.  But, I know the quiet of the early morning will be followed by some test and then another one.  These can be big or small.  It could be a bunch of little ones that add up to something big.

I know the limits of my strength for such stuff.  That's where this morning's devotion from Radio Bible Class becomes personally relevant.  It's about how God uses his strength to be made perfect in my weakness.

The text for the devotion is from 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 where the Apostle Paul talks about "three thorns" in his flesh and how he prayed for God to take them away.  Here's what he said:

⁸ Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. ¹⁰ That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

It's a strong message and promise.  I need God's help in believing this.  I want my heart to believe and embrace it.  I want this to be part of me.  

 

 

 

My meeting with God about James 4:1-10 and about genealogy of Jesus

Do you read the Bible at the start of your day?  Some other time during the day?

Our Daily Bread devotional

I've found that my day goes better if I start with my focus on God, who He is, what he says, what He has done and what He wants me to do.  This usually means getting up early while the house is quiet and it's dark outside.  My distractions have to be a minimum.

As I move farther into being a senior citizen and march into becoming elderly, I've learned some lessons about doing this.  I've gone through a progression of experience in my prayer life and reading the Bible.

The number one item on my "kinda, sorta bucket list" is building a strong relationship with God.  In the past, I've made lip service to this more or less.  As I see the sands of life move through the hour glass pretty fast, I know that I have to use my time wisely and on items that are important to me.  I know that it all starts and ends with God.  This is one item I need to get right.

My practice for the past year or so is to start my day with my MacBookAir in my lap and a visit to the Radio Bible Class website.  I view this site as one big collection of jumper cables to connect the reader to God and everyday life.  This is a treasure trove.  It's a start point for me.

Today, the Our Daily Bread devotion on the site is based on James 4:1-10.  It's all about

Discover The Word

the  consequences of putting yourself first in what you do, think and say.  My biggest problem, as the devotion writer says, is the one I see when I look in the mirror.  What's the answer?  Putting God first.  That means I need to know what he's thinking, how he helps me get there and what happens when I don't get it done.

The second part to my time with God today centered on the genealogy of Jesus as given in the Bible.  I actually listened to a segment of RBC's Discover The Word which is a daily and short discussion of some chunk of God's Word.  There was five women mentioned in his line of ancestors, both Jews and Gentiles and one is a prostitute.  What does that mean?

It means that son of God comes from a line of people that is inclusive of all ethnic groups, male and female, single and married, rich and poor.  There's hope for everybody.

There's a lot to digest here.  I am not filled with profound and scholarly Biblical insights.  I know that I have to take my eyes off myself and put them on God and that my Savior who gives me hope came to this earth for everybody.

 

Resetting my spiritual compass on a Sunday morning in mid-Michigan

It's Sunday morning and it's about an hour or so before I start getting ready for church.  I find myself in need of resetting my spiritual compass to regain a proper focus on my life and the direction that I was to go.  With everything happening all around, it's easy to get distracted.

To help with that process this morning and many other mornings, I went to the BillyGraham.org website. As a young child, I remember watching his crusades on a small black & white television in our very humble living room.  My mother who faced impossible odds to support us and who worked incredibly hard would stop everything to hear his message.  I know that she found hope in what he had to say.

This morning I watched an online video summary of his ministry as seen after 60 years.  His message has touched people around the world.  I find it like a set of spiritual booster cables attached to the terminals on my soul.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: I'm not afraid of being dead, it's getting dead that bothers me

I'm drawn to people with stories who are facing these bigger than life-sized challenges.  And that's why I added the blog of Pastor Ed Dobson to the blogroll on this blog.  You'll find it by scrolling down in the right margin.Are you facing a bigger than life challenge today?  I think of the people in Marysville, Indiana who lost everything to a tornado over the week.  Their whole town was wiped out.  There are people facing severe health problems with huge suffering and no answers in site.  The list could go on and on.

Pastor Dobson has a nasty, degenerative disease called ALS.  Hearing it described, it sounds like wading through the fires of hell before you die.  He writes about it in his blog.  Now like a lot of blogs, it hasn't been updated in a few months.  But his posts are timeless.  He's a real guy who's facing a disease that can shove you through the door to the dark side.

I found this quote on his blog:

I’m not afraid of being dead. It’s getting dead that bothers me. For me, “getting dead” involves choices about wheelchairs, communication assistance, feeding tubes and breathing assistance. It’s not pleasant when I think of the future. Of course, I try to ignore it but the underlying reality is always there. 

He does share how he deals with this.  It's very real.  He's not always, "Glory Alleulia" and "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "Thank-you God for giving me this disease."  

Even though his blog hasn't been updated in a while, I will keep it in my blogroll as a reminder on facing obstacles.  I've seen a few, but none like his.  Perhaps, others might find it helpful.

 

Starting my morning in Lansing, Michigan with Isaiah 53

My week is just starting and I want to keep a right focus.  That's why I went to the Radio Bible Class website which is actually a collecting point for their various sites filled with biblical devotions and resources.

I landed on their Day of Discovery site which billboards their many video productions and features their most current one on Isaiah 53.  Why does this interest me?  Three biblical scholars sit down in Israel and talk in a very understandable way about how the coming of Jesus was predicted centuries before he came. He was described in a

 

very detailed way, including his physical appearance, what would happen to him and his overall mission.

Why is this important?  Jesus is real. He was then and he's real now.  He offers hope and like everybody else I need all I can get and I need to have the real deal.  This video backstops that with the evidence that comes from Isaiah 53.  So, if you see me walking around Lansing with my head in my iPad, I'm trying to let the meaning of this passage seep into my heart.

Doing this is probably more important than voting this year

I know that our country is in trouble and my first reaction for a solution is to troll through the list of candidates for the answer and this time I'm not finding it.

I found this page at the Billy Graham website asking for people to commit to praying for country and saying that our people have veered away from God and that our problem is one that will be solved only through changed hearts.  

Hearts aren't changed for the better through politics.  That only happens through God.  It posted this Bible verse:

"If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14, NIV).

This is the answer, I know.  Oh, I'll still vote, but I don't want to get distracted from the source of the real answer.  It's God.  That's the only way we will get real change in this country.

Cinnamon and God on a Monday morning in mid-Michigan

My first stopping point on the web in the morning is usually the Radio Bible Class website where there is a feast of devotional materials about God, the Bible and daily living.  I usually go first to the online version of Our Daily Bread to jumpstart my thoughts about my relationship to God.

Today, it was written by Bill Crowder, one of their regular staffers and writers who wrote today about his love of cinnamon everything and he mentioned how he never gave much thought about where it came from until he ran across the fact that most comes from Sri Lanka.

 

Then he talks about how quite often he fails to think about the source of all the good things in his life.  He talks about his family and how they've been a gift.

This morning I'm reminded of last week when I was asked how many members were in my immediate family.  It started with two and we are now at seven and if I count Latte The Pup, it's eight.  They are verification of James 1:17 where God talks about the source of all good things.

 

Most important thing I could ever share as articulated by Jeff Manion of Ada Bible Church

What do you do when you struggle with your personal identity?

What does this mean?  Maybe you just retired and when from somebody with an important job to being somebody with no job.  Maybe your nest just emptied out and your identity as a parent just took a dramatic shift.  Maybe your health just took a dive after being healthy all your life.

For me, I let myself be defined all my life by having a father who abandoned me and my mother and never came back.  I never even got a hello from him or any kind of acknowledgement ever.  That became a big part of my core identity and greatly affected the way I viewed myself.

Last September, I heard Jeff Manion of Ada Bible Church just down the road from us give a sermon about personal identity.  It helped me reset my internal compass.  Click here for a video link to what he said:

 

 

This guy from North Carolina helps me get my mojo back

For me, it has been hard to sift through all of the stuff happening in modern-day life and in our culture. I found my enthusiasm for the future slipping away drip by drip by drip.  This guy from North Carolina has helped me reset my compass to the true north. My son-in-law is from North Carolina and he's a pastor and a pretty neat guy.  But this is a different fellow.  Watch this short video clip where he lays it out clearly.  Thank-you God for Billy Graham.

Trying to take yesterday's sermon on Zechariah and Elizabeth into my week

I pray that God will help me take what I learned from yesterday's sermon at Ada Bible Church into my week.  I find it easy to get distracted during the week and let sermons get set aside and ignored.

The sermon was based on the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth from Luke 1.  Are you familiar with it?  I've probably heard it a few hundred times over the years.  It seems like it's part of the Christmas ritual.  Kids' Christmas programs have the story and it's read during church services at this time of the year.

It revolves around an old couple where the man is a priest in the temple and who has to exercise those from time to time.  They were older.  According to our pastor, Jeff Manion, they were probably around 65, not old, just older.  They with chidless, a situation in those times which was looked down on and put them in a position of shame.  Their prayer, apparently, was for children.

While on duty in the temple, the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah and told him that their prayers had been heard and answered by God.  Being 65 years old myself, I could understand his reaction to the angel who said that he and his wife would have a child.  And, it would not be just any child, but the one who would prepare the world for the coming of Jesus Christ.  Think about this.

They prayed for a child and at the beginning of their senior citizen years, God says "okay" and gave them John the Baptist as their child.

So what?  What does that mean to me?  That's what I will be thinking about and meditating on between now and next Sunday.  Our church has two inside pages of their bulletin called Beyond The Weekend to help personalize the sermon and to help make it more real to those who hear it.

One of the first questions it raises is "what prayer have you been waiting for God to answer and how long have you been waiting?  This story shows that God responds to people who wait and that he makes good on his promises.

I'm working on this.  I've got six days to work this over in my heart.

Do you feel like you're too broken for God to use you?

It's easy to feel like you're broken in too many pieces for God to use you for anything.  Can anybody relate?  Listen to this testimony from an Indian singer during a Franklin Graham rally in that country.  Pretty powerful.

 

Listening to news about Satan on a Sunday morning in Michigan

Do you ever think much about Satan or whatever you call him, the Devil, Lucifer?

Has he ever touched your thinking about life and about your relationship to God? 

That's the topic of today's devotion in Our Daily Bread.  Pastor Joe Stowell writes about how Satan is the father of lies about anything that can make us doubt God.

Has that ever happened to me?  I'm thinking about it as I get ready for church.  I know that God's Word is the only effective weapon against Satan.

 

Can you be lukewarm and still be a Christian?

As I get ready for church this morning, I watched this video with Francis Chan, the author of Crazy Love, who raises the question about what the Bible says about being a lukewarm Christian, a person going through the motions, but hasn't had a heart change.  This is thought-provoking.  I have to watch it again.