Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
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Vol. 16 – No. 3514 August 30, 2014
Thought for the week: "If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you and nobody for you." – Bill Bernbach
"The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it." – William James
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." – Maya Angelou
"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." – Andrew Carnegie
"To love God is the greatest of virtues; to be loved by God is the greatest of blessings." – Portuguese Proverb
"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." – John Wooden
"Successful people form the habit of doing what failures don't like to do. They like the results they get by doing what they don't necessarily enjoy." – Earl Nightingale, Motivational Speaker
Words can be very interesting. Take the word, enthusiasm, for example. Do you know where it comes from?
"En" means "to put into," and "thuse" comes from "theos," meaning God. Thus, to enthuse literally means "to put God into."
Human enthusiasm can be very fragile as it tends to come and go depending on one's circumstances. But the enthusiasm that comes from God keeps on keeping on in spite of negative circumstances.
Have you tried putting God into your life lately? He can make a big difference to your enthusiasm for living. Knowing Him can change your life.
If you have never invited God into your life, be sure to read the article, "How to Be Sure You're a Real Christian—without having to be religious, at: http://www.actsweb.org/christian.
For most people, graduation is an exciting day—the culmination of years of hard work. My graduation day... was not.
I remember that weekend two years ago. Family and friends had flown in from across the country to watch our class walk across that stage. But like everyone else in my graduating class, I had watched the economy turn from bad to worse my senior year. We graduates had degrees, but very limited prospects. Numerous applications had not panned out and I knew that the next day, when my lease ended, I would no longer have a place to call home.
The weeks ahead weren't easy. I gathered up everything I couldn't carry and put it into storage. Then, because I knew my small university town couldn't offer me any opportunities, I packed up my car and drove to Southern California to find work. But what I thought would take a week dragged into two, and then four, and 100 job applications later, I found myself in the exact same spot as I was before. And the due date to begin paying back my student loans was creeping ever closer.
You know that feeling when you wake up and you are just consumed with dread? Dread about something you can't control—that sense of impending failure that lingers over you as you hope that everything that happened to you thus far was just a bad dream? That feeling became a constant in my life.
Days felt like weeks, weeks like months, and those many months felt like an unending eternity of destitution. And the most frustrating part was no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't seem to make any progress.
So what did I do to maintain my sanity? I wrote. Something about putting words on a page made everything seem a little clearer—a little brighter. Something about writing gave me hope. And if you want something badly enough ... sometimes a little hope is all you need!
I channeled my frustration into a children's book. Beyond the River was the story of an unlikely hero featuring a little fish who simply refused to give up on his dream.
And then one day, without any sort of writing degree or contacts in the writing world—just a lot of hard work and perseverance—I was offered a publishing contract for my first book! After that, things slowly began to fall into place. I was offered a second book deal. Then, a few months later, I got an interview with The Walt Disney Company and was hired shortly after.
The moral of this story is ... don't give up. Even if things look bleak now, don't give up. Two years ago I was huddled in my car drinking cold soup right out of the can. Things change.
If you work hard, give it time, and don't give up, things will always get better. Oftentimes our dreams lie in wait just a little further upstream ... all we need is the courage to push beyond the river.
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He'd either be insane or else he'd be the devil of hell."
"You must make your choice," Lewis continues.
"Either Jesus was and is the Son of God, or else He was insane or evil, but let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
As a former law professor, I know all about loopholes.
I trained students to find omissions and ambiguities in wording — a perfectly legal way to evade the clear intent of laws and agreements. After all, that's what lawyers are paid to do. And, despite commonly expressed disdain when lawyers do this, that's precisely what most clients want and expect when they hire a lawyer.
Because long-standing traditions, the rules of professional conduct, and the marketplace support the search for and exploitation of loopholes, I don't condemn either lawyers or clients who seek the advantages of this less-than-noble and socially corrosive practice. But I have come to believe that strategies to evade the spirit of laws and promises put our integrity on a slippery slope.
Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, "There is a big difference between what we have a right to do and what is right to do." People of character often do less than the law allows and more than the law requires.
Further down the integrity slope is the common practice of misrepresenting or mischaracterizing facts, lying about true intentions, or falsely denying one's knowledge or recollection of something. Whatever moral ambiguity may cloak the use of legal loopholes, these practices are fundamentally dishonest and dishonorable.
For example, a common ploy encouraged by politicians and used by political contributors to evade limits on campaign contributions is to donate funds in the name of minor children. Falsely representing that the children actually exercised control and independent judgment isn't a clever loophole, it's a fraud.
The same is true for executives who back-date documents, workers who falsely claim to be sick, and parents who lie about their address to get a child into a better school or about a child's age to qualify for a discount.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path."1
"The Bible has changed the lives of more persons than any other book," said W. Clement Stone. "It has helped countless thousands to develop physical, mental and moral health."
In his book, None of These Diseases, Dr. S.I. McMillen said, "When God led the Israelites out of afflicted Egypt, He promised them that if they would obey His statutes [laws], He would put 'none of these diseases' upon them [diseases that afflicted the Egyptians]. God guaranteed a freedom from disease that modern medicine cannot duplicate."2
Every rule, every law, and every principle in the Bible is there, not because God is a killjoy, but for our total physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
For instance, the ancient Jews were told by God not to eat certain animal meats, including that of pigs (pork). Was this for any kind of religious ritual? No. It was because those particular animals carried diseases that caused serious sickness—such as were common in Egypt.
Still today, God's Word gives us many instructions that are for mental and physical, as well as for spiritual, health reasons. We are instructed not to be jealous, bitter, hateful, resentful, unforgiving, and so on. The greatest physician who ever lived, Jesus Christ, pointed out 2,000 years ago the importance of forgiveness. When He encouraged us to "forgive seventy times seven," He was thinking of our emotional and physical wellbeing as much as our spiritual wellbeing. Dr. McMillen also pointed out that a forgiving spirit could save us from "ulcerative colitis, toxic goiters, high blood pressure, and scores of other diseases"—all possible effects of resentment.
We disregard Gods laws to our peril. This also applies to his moral laws. For one example, think about STDs and AIDS. The reality is that we can no more break God's moral laws than we can break the law of gravity. When we try to, we only break ourselves. God also has a law of sin and death .... We also defy this to our eternal peril.
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, thank You for Your moral laws which You have given in Your Word, the Bible, for my protection and wellbeing. Give me the wisdom to understand them, the faith to believe them, and the good sense and strength to obey them. Thank You for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus's name, amen."
1. Psalm 119:105 (NIV).
2. Dr. S.I. McMillen, None of These Diseases, p. 7.
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