Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
To receive the email edition of Weekend Encounter (without charge) click on the Subscribe button.
Privacy policy: We do not sell or rent subscriber's e-mail
addresses to anyone. We value your privacy.
Global Communications Outreach:
Learn how to be a missionary right from your own home and have a vital part in worldwide gospel outreach by becoming an ACTS People Power for Jesus Partner. Click HERE There is no charge.
Vol. 13 – No. 3011 July 23, 2011
Thought for the week: "We must become the change we wish to see in the world." – Mahatma Gandhi
"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." – Martin Luther King, Jr.
"When you believe and think I can, you activate your motivation, commitment, confidence, concentration and excitement—all of which relate directly to achievement." – Dr. Jerry Lynch
"The first great gift we can bestow on others is a good example." – Thomas Morel
"The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things." – Ernest Dimnet
"It's the little things that make the big things possible. Only close attention to the fine details of any operation makes the operation first class." – J. Willard Marriot
"In 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned America that it was headed for danger if we did not recover our sense of 'civil courage.' Is the American church up to the task?" – Chuck Colson
The English test had only one question: "Write an essay on 'The Most Beautiful Thing I Ever Saw.'"
One of the students finished his essay in less than a minute. It read in its entirety: "The most beautiful thing I ever saw was just too beautiful for words."
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our [the U.S.A.] Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
A sobering fact—and figures—on abortion: The Guttmacher Institute has released figures on the total of the nation's abortions in the 37 years since the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. Sometime in 2010, a doctor somewhere in the United States performed the nation's 53 millionth legal abortion. The current rate is about 1.2 million abortions per year here in America. C. Ben Mitchell, professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, TN, put the number in understandable terms: "Fifty-three million is the population of a medium-size country. Imagine the outcry if the people of Spain (46.1 million people) were destroyed by another nation."1
Furthermore, as Chuck Colson of BreakPoint reports: "The statistic has everyone reeling: According to a recent survey, forty-one percent of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion. Forty-one percent. Nearly half."2
I don't want to drive up to the Pearly Gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor's children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived.
What's causing the growing hole in our moral ozone? Why are cheating and lying so common in schools, on the sports field, and in business and politics? Apparently it's a thing called pressure.
Kids are under pressure to get into college, athletes and coaches are under pressure to win, and, according to a survey by the American Management Association, the pressure to meet business objectives and deadlines is the leading cause of unethical corporate behavior. The desires to further one's career and protect one's livelihood are the second and third reasons people lie or cheat.
In other words, we take ethical shortcuts to get what we want. DUH!
Why are we so willing to shift responsibility for every form of human weakness from ourselves to the system? We don't blame the liar; we blame the law. We don't blame the cheater; we blame the test.
The implication is: Don't expect me to be ethical when personal interests are at stake.
Please!
What we call pressures today used to be called temptations. Everyone knew that the test of character was our ability to resist them. Calling enticements pressures doesn't change anything.
We must believe in and expect integrity and moral courage and not surrender when our principles are challenged. We need to expect good people to do what's right, even when it's difficult or costly.
Yes, lots of people act dishonorably in the face of pressure. But pressure is an explanation, not a justification. Pressures, temptations—call them what you will—are part of life. Sure, it would be helpful if we had less pressure, but it's far more important that we have more character.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"Instead, we will hold to the truth in love, becoming more and more in every way like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church."1
Dr. William Barker tells about the actor, Ben Kingsley who "starred as the main character in the motion picture GANDHI. He spent months preparing for the role, visiting the various Indian locales Gandhi had frequented. He even learned to spin cotton thread on a wooden wheel while holding conversations as Gandhi did.
The physical resemblance between Gandhi and Kingsley was almost startling. After filming a scene in a village south of Delhi, Kingsley stepped out of a car, and an elderly peasant knelt to touch his feet.
Embarrassed, Kingsley explained that he was merely an actor playing Gandhi. 'We know,' replied the villager, 'but through you he will surely live again.'"2
As Christians, if we truly follow and serve the Lord, we will become more and more in every way like Christ. May God help us to so live that others will see the likeness of Jesus in us—as this is by far the most powerful and effective witness of our Christian faith that any one of us could ever have.
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, in the words of the song writer, 'I have one deep supreme desire / that I might be like Jesus / to this I fervently aspire / that I might be like Jesus / I want my heart His throne to be / So that a watching world may see / His likeness shining forth in me / I want to be like Jesus.'3 Please help me to so live that people will always see Jesus in me and thus be drawn to you. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."
1. Ephesians 4:15 (NLT).
2. Dr. William P. Barker, Tarbell's Teacher's Manual, (Elgin, Illinois: David C. Cook Church Ministries, 1994). Quoted in a sermon by Rev. Billy D. Strayhorn, "One in Christ". www.epulpit.net/billy112.htm
3. Thomas O. Chisholm.
8. Receive Daily Encounter E-mail ... Without Charge
Daily Encounter, a without charge weekday e-mail inspirational from ACTS International is now going to 404,000+ subscribers. Scores of letters from around the world have come from readers saying how much they are being helped by this brief, practical devotional.
Over 100 million e-mail Daily, Weekend and Prayer Encounters are delivered to subscribers every year!
NOTE: Some ISPs (especially AOL) now use e-mail filtering software that allows you to add e-mail addresses to your 'buddy', 'safe', or 'approved' list. Please be sure to add acts@actsweb.org to yours so you won't miss any issue of Daily Encounter.
One of ACTS greatest needs is Prayer Partners to stand with us as we seek to share the gospel with millions of people around the world through E-mail and the Internet and to win the lost to Jesus. If you would like to be an ACTS Prayer Partner, please subscribe to the Prayer Encounter list. Approximately one prayer report is e-mailed monthly. Thank you.
NOTE .... please hold all prayer request until after August 7 as David is on vacation. If you have a special prayer request please submit it to David Clark at: www.responda.co.uk/prayer.php. David is not on the ACTS staff but is offering this as a service to Daily and Weekend Encounter readers.
Helpers Needed: If you can help David pray for prayer requests, please could you go to: www.responda.co.uk/member.php
Weekend Encounter and Daily Encounter are just two of the ways the nonprofit organization, ACTS International, is working to improve the spiritual and emotional life of many thousands of people around the world.
Every weekday Daily Encounter is going to 404,000+ subscribers, and every week Weekend Encounter is going to almost 8,000 subscribers worldwide—many of whom are in places where it is forbidden to spread the Christian gospel and message. Plus we reach several hundred thousand more every week through our advertising. As a result every day we are seeing an average of 5-6 salvation responses from around the world—almost 3000 in the past 12 months!
If you find value in the Weekend Encounter and/or Daily Encounter, we hope you will be comfortable donating at least $26. That's only 50 cents a week for an entire year (tax-deductible in the U.S.). You can donate in one of the following ways:
Oprah Winfrey: "Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi." – Oprah Winfrey
1. Bible concordance and Bible helps
2. New Hope Crisis Counseling with trained
lay/volunteer counselors. www.newhopenow.org 3. E-Word Today for a daily Bible reading
4. To find your ZIP+4 Area Code in the U.S.A.
5. How to find and write to your U.S. Representative
6. ASK ... Smart answers fast
7. Send a greeting card without charge for all occasions
8. To check the weather in your area
9. Hoax Web Sites
10. Plus many more sources of helpful information
"Because the world is hungry,
go with bread.
Because the world is filled with strife,
go with peace.
Because the world is filled with deceptions and lies,
go with truth.
Because the world would die without,
go with the love of God."
