All In A Days Grace

  Psalm 67 May God be gracious to us and bless us     and make his face to shine upon us,   that your way may be known upon earth,     your saving power among all nations.   Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you.   Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,     for you judge the peoples with equity     and guide the nations upon earth.   Let the peoples praise you, O God;     let all the peoples praise you.   The earth has yielded its increase;     God, our God, has blessed us.   May God continue to bless us;     let all the ends of the earth revere him.   You may be familiar with this prayer of blessing. Outside of the Bible you might have seen it on a plaque or heard it prayed during a benediction.   It is a beautiful blessing with a wonderful visual. Gods ...

  Scripture doesn’t give the impression that a believer is like any other person. Instead, Scripture says that the believer…the Christian… is a new person, a unique person; one who is essentially different from the person who is not a believer.   Many of us today don’t give this impression to the world.  We’ve kind of made the believer an ordinary person; someone who is just like anyone else.   (2 Corinthians 5:17) “ This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”   Instead of looking like new people in the world… We have become chameleons of sorts, that just blend into the back drop of the world.   In New Testament times and in early church history those people who became Christians were noticed by the world; and in a fairly short time, they turned the world "upside down."   The Church then came to lead the world, because the Christian person had something the wor...

  Sometimes it’s hard to step outside of our wants. Sometimes all we can see is what we believe to be the best next step. Sometimes we forget about the “Greater Good” What’s the greater good you ask? The greater good is the need that goes beyond our own need. The greater good looks ahead and anticipates how a personal sacrifice now might mean an abundant blessing to others later.  Staying focused on the greater good means we realize that our way might not be the only way . We’ve all heard “There’s no I in Team”. It’s a funny play on words but it holds deep truth. Being “team” oriented means taking other people’s ideas into account. It means moving out of comfortable and familiar places in order to reach others.   It means working together with others to create a vision for the future together. As fellow Christians we function as a team. In ministry we prayerfully follow Gods lead. We plan knowing that God sometimes moves us in directions that cause us to step...

  Faith and fear want the same things from us. They both want us to have a perception of the future. Faith wants us to feel peace in the future, fear wants us to worry about the future. Those are two very different things with the same goal; to captivate our thoughts. Two very different perspective drivers that want to lead us to very different places. Both have a destination in mind. Like getting into a cab in Mid-Town Manhattan, the first question the cabbie will ask you is “Where you going?”   Our thoughts are like cab rides bringing us to different places. We have a choice where we want to go. Our mind is continuously bombarded with random thoughts. These thoughts can be positive or negative. They can be encouraging or filled with temptation. Although we’re not responsible for the negative thoughts that pop into our minds; we are accountable to what we do with them. Do we entertain them? Do we become captivated by them? Do we become captive to them? 2 Corinthians...