Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
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Vol. 14 – No. 2412 June 16, 2012
Thought for the week: "A real Christian is a person who can give his pet parrot to a town gossip." – Billy Graham
The teenager lost a contact lens while playing basketball in his driveway. After a fruitless search, he told his mother the lens was nowhere to be found.
Undaunted, she went outside, and in a few minutes returned with the lens in her hand.
"How did you manage to find it, Mom?" the teenager asked.
"We weren't looking for the same thing," she replied. "You were looking for a small piece of plastic. I was looking for $150."
In one well-known study, a group of psychologists asked people living in the Dyckman Public Housing Project in northern Manhattan to name their closest friend in the project; 88 percent of the friends lived in the same building, and half lived on the same floor. In general, people chose friends of similar age and race. But if the friend lived down the hall, then age and race became a lot less important. Proximity overpowered similarity.
Another study, done on students at the University of Utah, found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he'll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you'll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We're friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble.
– Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (New York:
Little, Brown and Company, 2000), p. 35.
Cited on www.Sermons.com
Somebody said that it couldn't be done,
But he, with a chuckle, replied,
That maybe it couldn't, but he would be one
Who wouldn't say no till he tried.
So he buckled right in, with a trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried, he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn't be done and he DID it!
Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations and jealousies will finally disappear. So too, your hopes, ambitions, plans and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won't matter where you came from or what side of the tracks you lived on at the end. It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.
So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured?
What will matter is not what you bought but what you built, not what you got but what you gave. What will matter is not your success but your significance. What will matter is not what you learned but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence but your character.
What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you're gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what. Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident. It's not a matter of circumstance, but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron."1
Some time ago I read the following story in Focus on the Family magazine about a man who bought a car that had replaced warning lights with spoken instructions from a woman.
In a soft voice, his little woman, as he called her, would say, "Your door isn't closed properly." "Your key is still in the ignition." "Your seat belt isn't fastened properly."
On one occasion, he recalled how the voice of his little woman said, "Your fuel level is getting low."
The driver thanked her and, figuring he had sufficient fuel to take him fifty more miles, ignored the voice and kept driving. Soon his little woman repeated, "Your fuel level is low." The longer he drove, the more his little woman repeated her warning.
Getting frustrated, he stopped his car, searched under the dashboard, and found the appropriate wires. One quick jerk and his little woman was silenced.
Imagine the look on his face when, a few minutes later, his car sputtered and jerked to a standstill—out of fuel! One could almost imagine a grin on his little woman's face!
We all have a little voice within. It's called conscience. It can get very annoying at times, too. Sometimes we "pull its wires" and, too late, we discover we are "out of fuel."
One danger, when we ignore the voice of our conscience and don't live according to our convictions, is that our mind experiences what counselors call "cognitive dissonance." That is, mental disharmony. Because this is too uncomfortable to live with, we switch off our conscience.
When we do this often enough, our mind not only switches off the voice of conscience, but turns up the volume on the voice of rationalization and justification.
The sad fact is that if we don't live the life we believe, we end up unhappily believing the life we live. The Bible calls this having a seared conscience. It is a dangerous and self-destructive path to follow.
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please help me to realize the danger of switching off the voice of conscience and justifying what I want to do. Please help me to live the life I believe—a life that is lived in harmony with your will and your Word. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."
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