Some perspective...

People were created to be loved.

Things were created to be used.

The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.

Where are you from...

Where are you from?

I am from a place where everyone really does know your name and they are, in fact, almost always glad you came by to drink coffee and share some news.

From a place where you live long in the shadows of cotton pickers and beloved grandparents.  Where people trust people and know their banker by name.  It's a place that never seems to wake up despite the advance of technology and time.  

I'm from a place where country music and Gospel are the soundtracks of our days and King James Bibles are the script we just keep reading and living year after year.  

From a place where going out for fast food is a treat and where vacations are planned years in advance.  A place with a community library, a rural route and a full service gas station.

 I'm from a place where a revival is still news in town and when a new restaurant opens we all take guesses on how long it will stay.  

This is a place where everyone once was a Democrat and now just about everyone is a Republican and yet no one seems to have changed one thing they believe.  

It's a dinner of leftovers with your folks after a day of working in the yard or in the field or at the factory and it's knowing that some good people go to church and some good people don't.  It's believing in things like hard work, tough love and redemption.  

People still get baptized here and people still drift away.  

It's a place that most people want to leave when they are young and few actually do.  Most of those come back even if just to die.

From a town where everyone knows the undertaker personally and where people are still new even if they have lived here 30 years.  

Some people might say it's a backward place and in a lot of ways they would be right.  

Yet there is something special about knowing people truly and loving a place deeply and realizing that nowhere else would quite be home.

Influence matters...

With the death of Whitney Houston this past weekend, worldwide attention was focused on her troubled life and untimely death.  The vast majority of us will never be known to the world outside of our small circle and, yet, we all still have an influence.  How will the people I interact with from day to day remember me?  The people who see me at work, at leisure or at a sporting event?  What about my closer friends?  What about my family who most likely knows me better than anyone else?

Hopefully we are doing our best to leave favorable impressions on everyone we meet.  If every professing Christian left a Christ-like impression on the world imagine the kind of world we would live in.  We would have a world with fewer broken families, fewer relationship scandals and fewer people enslaved to the darkness of the world.  Rather than discord, a spirit of harmony would grow between all people.  Evangelism would be much easier because people would be seeking us out to discover the joy we have in Christ.

Remember that everyday we influence others.  We cannot control that fact, but we can control what type of influence we will be.  Let us commit to do what is right and change the world for good.

“The righteous are those willing to disadvantage themselves in order to advantage the community.” 

"Christ still needs His witnesses; He needs those who are prepared, not so much to die for Him, as to live for Him.  The Christian struggle and the Christian glory still exist."

-William Barclay on Matthew 5:10-12

"If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave."

—Fulton J. Sheen

"It is perilously easy to have amazing sympathy with God's truth and remain in sin."

-Oswald Chambers

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.  It has been found difficult; and left untried."

-G.K. Chesterton

Is it just me?

Several times in my life I have given people advice to go in one direction, and then I have promptly turned and gone in the opposite.  Sometimes this advice was relational, sometimes behavioral, sometimes spiritual.  What is about human nature that makes us defy good judgment and common sense and invite disaster?  I think the answer to that question lies at the heart of who we are as people.  We are rebellious given our fallen state and it was rebellion that caused the situation to begin with.

Parents will tell you that often times the fastest way to get a child to do something is to forbid it.  Even as children, we want to know if we really will get punished; if we really will be injured and heartbroken.  I think back over the vast majority of sins I have committed in my life and, largely, they were intentional acts of disobedience.  One might argue that intent behind the thought, word or action has a large part in determining whether it is sinful at all.  Why do I choose evil when I know what the consequences will be?

Some might say because sin brings pleasure for a season and I think the Bible would agree with that.  After several run-ins with serious sin, however, it looks like we would be tired of the pain and emotional turmoil.  John Wesley taught the doctrine of Christian Perfection: that we can reach a point where we cease to sin or even desire sin.  How can this be?  I believe this point can only come when we have matured to a point to see sin for what it is: evil that separates us not only from God but from each other.  If we can fully realize that essential truth then we have a much great opportunity to look temptation in the face and refuse its offer.

I am still growing in that direction and I hope you are as well.  Let us press forward and onward toward the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

"The temptation of the age is to look good without being good."

—Brennan Manning