How Did This Happen?

I can’t believe these politicians, why can't we get someone of character! I don’t feel good, I think it is stuff they put in food nowadays! My company let me go because of this terrible economy. Little David failed his test; those teachers must not be doing their job.

Now it may be just that. Or it may be that have a diet consisting of nothing but Twinkies and soda, spend more time surfing the web than actual doing our job, never once have checked if little David is doing his homework and constant vote for candidates that benefit ourselves rather than ones that show integrity.

Could we consider for just a moment that we might have some responsibility for our fate?

Human beings have a bad habit of finding everyone at fault for a given situation other than themselves. We can see others specks so much better than our planks. But consider what the scripture says:

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.

Galatians 6:7

We may not like it but the course of our lives is much

more determined by the choices we make that the whims of fate. We are products of our choices. We can't expect good things in our lives if we don’t do anything to make them happen. We can’t deceive ourselves into thinking our negative behaviors will leave us clean and unaffected.

This is especially true in our spiritual lives. If I don’t go to Bible class, never read my Bible, only pray when it's expected, and only pay attention to the lesson when it is something I like, how then can I ever expect to grow? You can’t reap without sowing! Before we bemoan the state of the church, our nation or even our own families, we first must turn the gaze inward and look it to see if may our own action (or inactions) are the reason in the first place.

The best thing about this is we CAN change ourselves. I may not be able to fix Washington, the school system or the economy but I can work on me.

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog