Devotionals

The exasperating teen years, exasperating at least from parents’ perspective, was front and center in the October issue of National Geographic. Blazoned on its cover the title read: “The New Science of the Teenage Brain; but try as I might, reading the article several times, highlighting and mulling over the conclusions of the author, I frankly could not find anything NEW.

Is God really gracious; is He really good, since pain and suffering are such a large part of the nature of this present world?

If you are a careful observer most of us make vows every day. For Christians it is “I’ll pray for you. For most everyone it is “I will do this or that; or the proverbial one, “The check is in the mail. You get the point. We make vows too easily, and we forget to fulfill them even more easily.

...it will be the memory of ONE. . . . . . . and then another ONE. . . . . . .and another; each worthy of the cost of the years of labor and years of keeping on when all seemed for naught. And if it is God’s will, there will be ONE more in the future, if God keeps the vision and work of the PAYH alive.

Growing old is an inevitable condition besetting us all, and regardless of the amount of money we may spend on reversing the perpetual stream of wrinkles, worn out parts, and a rapidly expanding energy deficit, the march into the clutches of old age is relentless.

Today, the prime of your life, what will your answer be? As Joshua of old challenges us, “Choose TODAY whom you will serve, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!

What is it exactly that the Psalmist has in view in Psalm 48? “Walk about Zion, go around her, count her towers, consider well her ramparts, view her citadels, that you may tell of them to the next generation. For this God is our God for ever and ever; He will be our guide even to the end.

When I consider the fleetingness of my life, the people who have come into it and gone, the desire to measure its worth, there is only one Touchstone that has been there at every turn, one Guide who has placed me in humanly inexplicable paths with blessing, only One who knows who I truly am, and in whom I find my identity: the Living God, who calls me by name.

Many of your children or grandchildren, and so many with whom you associate are being inundated with what they are told are scientific facts proving the Bible in essence to be inaccurate, outdated, and unreliable. “Trust us, not the God of the Scriptures, is their cry.

The measure of our life viewed as one breath at a time not only speaks to its remarkable brevity contrasted with eternity, but it speaks just as powerfully to its vanity.

Those six words capture well the hardest challenge to living life Christianly or well. Life is made up of anticipations, preparations, concentrations, determinations toward one or another future event: a project, a vacation, a test, a performance, a feat to be conquered. It finally comes and then, it passes. What comes next?

This is a prayer that can be thought (prayed) in your mind even when you are in conversation with others. Very possibly such a thought-prayer will sanctify your part of the conversation to bring blessing and truth into another’s life.