Steve Simms's Blog, page 193

What does skin color mean?

Scientifically we have race all wrong. In reality, white is the blending of every color and black is the absence of color.

To feel like you’re better than someone because of your skin color is total nonsense.

“Take the lowest place,”
That’s what Jesus said.
If we all did that
He could be the Head.

For creative, hopeful and inspiring ideas about race, check out this.

inspirational wake-up thoughts

When something deeply inspires you, you’ll be like an elephant and never forget it.

Counting sheep will put you to sleep. Counting the elephants in the room will wake you up!

If you make your home your happy place, you’ll have no need to imagine it. You’ll get to live there!

May your happiness be as big as an elephant!

Let this herd of uplifting elephants trample the negativity in your life.

Paying attention to the uplifting elephants in your room, can change your life. They’re not irelephant!

When obvious, optimistic observations are overlooked, they become inspirational elephants the room.

Persistently reading positive platitudes will gradually produce a positive attitude in you.

5 inspirational wake-up thoughts

When something deeply inspires you, you’ll be like an elephant and never forget it.

Counting sheep will put you to sleep. Counting the elephants in the room will wake you up!

If you make your home your happy place, you’ll have no need to imagine it. You’ll get to live there!

May your happiness be as big as an elephant!

Let this herd of uplifting elephants trample the negativity in your life.

Paying attention to the uplifting elephants in your room, can change your life. They’re not irelephant!

When obvious, optimistic observations are overlooked, they become inspirational elephants the room.

Glad to be overjoyed

The next time you see someone who is obviously overjoyed, let yourself share in the delight. Being overjoyed becomes a common occurrence when you believe that delight is your destiny.

Dogs are often overjoyed and freely frolic without embarrassment. We could learn a lot from them. If you playfully frolic and do a silly dance, you’ll soon begin to feel happier.

Make your mind a glad-theater. Fill it with heart-felt dreams and treasured memories.

Life offers many opportunities to be overjoyed, but they’re often overlooked. There are many encouraging elephants hidden in plain sight in the rooms of your life. Noticing them will cheer you up!

Being overjoyed is often misunderstood and seen as inappropriate. The truth is: Everyday invites us to delight. Even when you’re overwhelmed, you can still find reasons to be overjoyed!

Be a “glad-iator” for joy. Fight against the thoughts and feelings that try to keep you from delight.

They’re many words for happiness: gladness, bliss, felicity, jollity, delight, jubilation, euphoria, cheerfulness, joy. Choose one and look up its definition.

For the most part your conscience won’t let you be bad and be glad at the same time. Choose glad.

The “you-niverse” of self-focus & resentment

The “you-niverse” is tiny and confining. The universe is huge and liberating. Think outside your self-box.

Freedom from anxiety and compulsion comes through self-forgetfulness. Self-centeredness can’t achieve it. Self-absorption creates loneliness, not happiness. Self-centeredness and joy refuse to coexist.

To drive you don’t focus on smudges on the windshield. You look beyond them. To be happy don’t focus on self, look beyond it. To be self-concerned in ‘my, my, my”–causes many unnecessary problems.

To be self-absorbed is to be caught up in an ongoing whirlwind of tormenting thoughts and emotions. Self-focus causes you to obsess over your feelings and self-analysis, leaving you to bask in anxiety. Other-focus creates compassion.

Self-absorption always results in a distortion of the truth. Self-detachment brings truth into focus. Self-focus intensifies your needs and desires. Self-detachment sets you free from them.

The fuller you are of yourself, the emptier you are of unrestrained joy. Instead of insisting that your opinions are right, treat people right, with kindness and respect. To truly understand a situation, we must detach our self-interest from it. The more you distance from self-focus, the better you will understand various points of view.

Detachment lets you forgive those who hurt you, while appreciating what you learned thru the pain. Resentment is a bear trap that many people step into and drag around their entire life.

To resent is to allow the pain from a past experience to be “re-sent” thru your heart, every time you think about it. You can’t have both contentment and resentment. I choose contentment.

Self-pity is a lonely city–population 1. To forgive is to give up your perceived right to accuse or blame someone. It doesn’t require forgetfulness.

It takes courage and strength to forgive. Holding a grudge is a symptom of weakness.

Like barnacles on a boat, we can be carrying biases and be completely unaware of them. It takes courage to find them and scrape them off.

To confuse the things of God & the things of Caesar is to cross into idolatry.

The twisting and distorting of conscience is of human origin. Conscience itself comes from God.

To ignore God’s daily presence and power is perhaps a stronger form of atheism than the verbal denial of His existence.

No matter how much you cater to your crater of inner emptiness, only surrender to the living God can fill it.

Too many church goers believe more in material power than they do in spiritual power.

Church services are built on what is controllable, but God wants us to experience Him in ways that are beyond human control.

The living Jesus can only be encountered and obeyed through your own personal experience.

“U” thoughts for you

The universe is incomplete without “u.” Your life is significant.

You are “you-nique.” You’re a priceless, one-of-a-kind work of art.

When you’re headed in the wrong direction, you have the right to make a “you-turn.”

In the great race for conception, your sperm won. That makes you a winner!

The human self is like a spoke on a wheel. It doesn’t function very well all by itself.

More than matter matters! What’s unseen is often more important than what’s seen!

Self-interest can easily substitute for truth without your awareness.

When life shuts off your “you-tilities,” prayer can restore power.

To follow yourself is to go in circles. To ignore your own desires frees you up to follow Jesus. (Experience: The Joy Of Early Christianity.)

Lifeless tradition stands in opposition to humble, heart-felt, spontaneous, Spirit-led Christianity.

Compassion is a much better counselor than anger can ever be.

Take awhile & smile

A journey of many smiles can begin with a grin. Take some time today to go the extra smile. Make a frequent smile a regular part of your daily lifestyle.

If you’ve lost your smile, you won’t find in in your teeth. You’ll find it in your heart.

Before you judge a smiler for being “too happy,” walk a mile with a smile on your face. Happiness doesn’t require a perfect norm.

Happiness is often only a smile away. You haven’t missed the boat. It’s not too late to get on board with happiness. It’s not erratic to let yourself be ecstatic about the gift of being alive.

Even when you’re
Going through a trial,
You can smile awhile.

To embrace joy, repeatedly run a smile across your face, at a very slow pace. Smile after smile, keep putting them on your face.

Cheer up, because if you’re reading this, you’re blessed today with the incredible gift of life. Positive thoughts are mood makers that you can use to elevate your attitude. Words attract and repel. Find words that attract inner peace and repel misery.

Our feelings and desires are frequently false, distracting us from truth. All feelings, desires, and behaviors are not equal. Discernment matters.

Words read,
Heard or said,
Can fill your head
With joy or dread.
Don’t be misled.

Give no room to gloom.

Yesterday ended last night. There’s no need to drag it through today. If you don’t learn to enjoy today, you probably won’t enjoy tomorrow either.

The amount of joy in a house isn’t based on its square footage. Happiness has little to do with happenings, but much to do with a grateful heart.

When you wear a grin, circumstances won’t look as grim. Joy happens in the heart. A closed heart misses out.

Happy humor flushes misery from the mind. Don’t forget to flush! Heart-felt humor is a tension tamer.

Maintaining a wholesome sense of humor is a vaccine against anxiety. Humor is everywhere. Learn to see the funny the surrounds you. Heart-felt humor is often hidden in plain sight, just like the elephant in the room.

Too much focus on achievement can delete much enjoyment. A sunrise in your eyes can make you realize the wonderful prize a new day brings you.

Without a healthy sense of humor, it’s easy to become a gloom-and-doomer. Life’s full of humor, but most people only notice a tiny portion of it. See more happy humor. People who want to have fun need a big dose of kind, heart-felt humor.

If you find humor in your problems, it’ll be easier to solve them. Heart-felt laughter helps you cruise through life and ship worry away. Finding heart-felt humor in a difficult situation can crack up the pain and dissolve it away.

Facing pain playfully reduces its impact. Silliness eases its effects. Too much analysis produces humor paralysis.

Heart-felt humor helps me appreciate and embrace the seriousness of life. Cheerfulness is medicine; sadness is poison. Humor happens through out your day, but most of it goes unnoticed.

Worry anticipates bad. I invented the word “worglee” to remind me to anticipate good. When you train your heart to enjoy each moment, you feel no need to search for happiness outside of yourself.

There’s something good about everybody. It’s fun to take the challenge and try to find it.

When you see life like a theme park ride or a video game, its challenges become exciting. Without curiosity life can become a boring monstrosity.

Give no room to gloom. Setting aside gloom will brighten up your room. Being brave enough to face the elephant in the room gets life unstuck.

Affectionate humor is one of life’s greatest experiences. Kindness and laughter are a powerful team! If you’re looking for comedy, the best place to start is with your own behavior.

Although negative emotions often seem like monsters, they’re really nothing but pesky feelings.

A bad mood isn’t caused by your personality. It’s caused by you letting frustration disrupt your life.

Your mood has accrued from the thoughts you’ve deposited in your mind. To improve your mood withdraw the painful ones.

What you’ve viewed has helped make your bad mood. Now focus on viewing what produces inner peace.

If a thought or behavior isn’t giving you joy, why continue it? What good is free time if you don’t enjoy it?

The unexplored power of the Bible

The Bible is a microscope that reveals much astonishment that is unseen to the naked eye. It’s also a telescope. When Jesus feels far away, reading it will bring Him very near and let you hear His voice.

The Bible says that Christ-followers are “taught of God to love one another.” How is God teaching you to love? The key to understanding the Bible isn’t a commentary, a seminary, or a preacher. It’s simply, regularly reading it with a hungry, humble heart.

One book enlightens, connects with, and heals my heart, like none other. After 50 years of reading it almost everyday, it still sets my heart on fire. I’m not very good at figuring out the Bible (there’s a lot I don’t understand), but it’s great at figuring me out! I read the Bible because it connects me with the living Jesus and works deep inside me to align my heart with love, peace, and joy.

The Bible, read daily (with humility), will work like a plow–breaking up the hard, stony ground in your heart and extracting the distractions. (See Mark 4.) To read the Bible with just your head isn’t much better than leaving it unread. Read it with an open heart! Hard soil in your heart won’t grow the fruit of the Spirit until you till it. “Break up your fallow ground “

When the Bible contradicts my opinions, feelings, and desires (which is quite often) it causes me to rethink many things and changes me from the inside out. Reading the Bible for the Holy Spirit’s dialysis will purify your heart, but reading it focused on human analysis, tends to puff you up with pride.

Focus on the words in the Bible that enlighten you, instead of leaning on your own understanding, trying to figure out the ones that don’t. Reading the Bible to analyze it, is to trust in your own understanding. Reading it to let it analyze you, is to be inwardly healed and transformed.

The Bible says to “lean not on your own understanding,” yet many people ignore those words when they read the Bible. Too much Bible teaching and not enough open-hearted, Bible reading, tends to make us dependent on man rather than on the Holy Spirit.

I’ve never liked Bible commentaries. I’ve tried using them a few times, but found that they distracted me from being taught the Bible by the Spirit. I believe that God will speak directly to anybody who will consistently read the Bible with an open heart.

Read the Bible like a love letter instead of like a text book — with an open heart, not just with an analytical mind. The best commentary on the Bible is the living Jesus. When He explains it to me, the words burn in my heart.

Open the Bible.
Open your heart.
Read till Jesus
Heals your hurt.

I’m a phone.
The Bible’s my charger.
As I ponder it,
Jesus’ power flows into me.

Continually speak, ponder, and do the written word and the living Word (Jesus) will flourish within you. (See Joshua 1:8.) The Bible’s full of wake-up words that will rouse you to new life, when you read it with an open heart.

A human heart can be hard, shallow, distracted, or flourishing with compassion. How’s yours?

To avoid being deceived by false prophets, continually saturate yourself with the Bible and avoid preachers who contradict it.

Some of the 1st Christ-followers wrote down their experiences with and insights about the living Jesus. Their words are life-changing.

Most of the sermons I’ve heard contained very little Bible, but lots of a preacher’s analysis, opinions, and stories. “Why is it that some Christians, although they hear many sermons, make but slow advances in the divine life? Because they neglect their closets, and do not thoughtfully meditate on God’s Word.” –Charles Spurgeon