Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
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Vol. 12 – No. 2010 May 15, 2010
Thought for the week: "Your daily duties are a part of your religious life just as much as your devotions are." – Henry Ward Beecher
Paul Newman founded the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children stricken with cancer, AIDS and blood diseases. One afternoon he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, stopped by to have lunch with the kids. A counselor at a nearby table, suspecting the young patients wouldn't know that Newman was a famous movie star, explained, "That's the man who made this camp possible. Maybe you've seen his picture on his salad dressing bottle?" Blank stares. "Well, you've probably seen his face on his lemonade carton." An eight-year-old girl perked up, "How long was he missing?"
While watching a little TV on Sunday instead of going to church, I watched a church in Atlanta honoring one of its senior pastors who had been retired many years. He was 92 at that time and I wondered why the church even bothered to ask the old gentleman to preach at that age.
After a warm welcome, introduction of this speaker, and as the applause quieted down, he rose from his high back chair and walked slowly, with great effort and a sliding gait to the podium. Without a note or written paper of any kind he placed both hands on the pulpit to steady himself and then quietly and slowly he began to speak:
"When I was asked to come here today and talk to you, your pastor asked me to tell you what was the greatest lesson ever learned in my 50-odd years of preaching. I thought about it for a few days and boiled it down to just one thing that made the most difference in my life and sustained me through all my trials. The one thing that I could always rely on when tears and heartbreak and pain and fear and sorrow paralyzed me, the only thing that would comfort was this verse:
"Jesus loves me this I know,
For the Bible tells me so,
Little ones to Him belong,
we are weak but He is strong.
"Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so."
One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live—with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad—but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
According to legend, Dr. Faust traded his soul to the devil for knowledge and magical powers. In an updated version of the legend, Damn Yankees, an avid Washington Senators baseball fan makes a similar deal to become a home run hitting star who leads the Senators to a pennant over the Yankees.
That's one context for the latest exhaustively documented revelations that Barry Bonds broke the home run record of another cheater, Mark McGwire, by using an elaborately designed combination of steroids, growth hormones and other drugs to build muscle and power. For most watchers of the game, the new book, Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams (excerpted in Sports Illustrated) just confirmed and added interesting detail to the obvious: Bonds's late career change in appearance and his emergence as the greatest power hitter in the history of the game was the result of "juice," the slang term for illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Apparently, he began pumping up his performance and his body in 1999. That means 210 of his 708 home runs were illegal and that his true lifetime batting average would sink below .300.
Bond's record of 73 homers in a season, his unprecedented string of Most Valuable Player Awards for 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, and his batting average titles for 2002 (.370) and 2004 (.362) should be, but won't be, expunged, though they will surely be demeaned by a footnote.
He will probably never be adjudicated a cheater in a court of law, but the evidence is good enough in the court of public opinion, and he will surely end his career in disgrace. And so he joins scores of prominent athletes sentenced to the Hall of Shame for trading honor, reputation and, perhaps, their souls for the fool's gold version of immortality—the adulation of sports fans and the glory of setting records.
At the root of these unwise and immoral trades with the devil is the cheaters' illusion that satisfying an obsessive lust will create lasting pleasure, and that, in the end, they will find a way to cheat the devil, too.
The lessons go well beyond sports: Never do something that will work out only if it is never found out, never trade honor for glory, and never trade the future for today.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance. From heaven the LORD looks down and sees all mankind ... [and]considers everything they do. No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength."1
In Congress on July 4, 1776, fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence declaring the then Thirteen Colonies (now states) in North America independent from Great Britain.
Central to the Declaration of Independence are the following words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
While there are conflicting stories2 as to what happened to all of the fifty-six original signers, we can be certain that when they signed this declaration, they knew full well that they were putting their lives at risk. Furthermore, many men gave their lives in the War of Independence to gain independence from the then oppressive rule of Great Britain.
As history has clearly shown, there has always been a high price to pay for freedom, for there never seems to be a lack of despots who want to subjugate a people to their total control for their own evil and/or self-centered purposes.
Those of us who live in free lands have incredible blessings for which to be thankful. And let us be thankful today not only for these blessings, but also for all those who have given their lives to make us free, and for all those today who are risking their lives to keep us free.
As Christians, let us never forget that while freedom is a God-given right (which the Declaration of Independence affirmed), freedom has never come without a price—and will never be maintained without the high price of eternal vigilance. As Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) in restating the words of John Philpot Curran, said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
As powerful as the military might of the U.S. armed forces is, let us remember that, "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.. No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength."3 And that "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people."4 And that, when we turn from God and fail to follow his ways, we divorce ourselves from the "unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, thank you for the wonderful privilege and unfathomable blessings you have given to those of us who live in free countries. Today we pray for our brothers and sisters who are suffering under the tyranny and persecution of evil men. And grant that we in free countries will be reminded that 'Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.' Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."
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