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April 1 - May 1, 2015
Jesus never ran away from his detractors or persecutors. He chased them.
Courage is putting yourself into defenseless positions.
Courage is doing what is right regardless of circumstances or consequences.
The greatest moments doubled as the scariest moments. They were one and the same.
Fear, then fun.
Are you living your life in a way that is worth telling stories about?
Too many of us pray as if God’s primary objective is to keep us from getting scared. But the goal of life is not the elimination of fear. The goal is to muster the moral courage to chase lions.
I’m concerned that the church has turned into a bunker where we seek shelter when we’re actually called to storm the gates of hell.
the alternative to fear is boredom.
It took a setback to get us where God wanted us to go. It took a God-ordained opportunity that came as a really well-disguised problem.
Opportunities often look like insurmountable obstacles. So, if we want to take advantage of these opportunities, we have to learn to see problems in a new way—God’s way. Then our biggest problems may just start looking like our greatest opportunities.
If we did an honest assessment of our prayer lives, I think we’d be amazed at the percentage of prayers aimed at problem reduction. Most of us pray that God would keep us out of pits with lions on snowy days.
It’s our past problems that prepare us for future opportunities. So someday we may be as grateful for the bad things as the good things because the bad things helped prepare us for the good things.
We pray for comfort instead of character. We pray for an easy way out instead of the strength to make it through. We pray for no pain, when the result would be no gain.
Sometimes an unanswered prayer is God, in His sovereign wisdom, sparing us the pain of unintended consequences.
Maybe we need to quit praying safe prayers.
When I get into a spiritual or emotional slump, it’s usually because I’ve zoomed in on a problem.
So how do we zoom out? The one-word answer is worship.
Don’t let what’s wrong with you keep you from worshiping what’s right with God.
Worship is zooming out and refocusing on the big picture.
worship isn’t circumstantial.
“Your focus determines your reality.”
What right do I have to complain about anything?
basically two types of people in the world: complainers and worshipers.
Complainers will always find something to complain about. Worshipers will always find something to praise God about. They simply have different default settings.
The circumstances you complain about become chains that imprison you. And worship is the way out.
It’s the bad days that help us appreciate the good days.
Sickness helps us appreciate health. Failure helps us appreciate success. Debt helps us appreciate wealth. And the tough times help us appreciate the good times. That’s just the way life is. I’ve also learned that our worst days can become our best days.
Adversity is often the seedbed of opportunity. Bad circumstances have a way of bringing the best out of us.
Adversity can produce an increased capacity to serve God.
God is in the business of recycling our pain and using it for someone else’s gain.
If you don’t have any problems, you don’t have any potential. Here’s why. Your ability to help others heal is limited to where you’ve been wounded.
Trials have a way of helping us rediscover our purpose in life.
God breaks us where we need to be broken.
Benaiah didn’t know if he’d win or lose, live or die. But he knew that God was with him.
The unknown doesn’t scare them.
security scares lion chasers more than uncertainty.
lion chasers are more afraid of lifelong regrets than temporary uncertainty.
In the short-term, it increases uncertainty. But in the long run, it reduces regrets.
“Perhaps the LORD will act in our behalf.”
They don’t need to know what is
coming next because they know that God knows.
They don’t need explanations for every disappointment because they...
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But what if, instead of spending all of our energy making plans for God, we spent that energy seeking God?
Life is infinitely uncertain. And you need to couple that with the fact that God is infinitely complex.
all we can do is accept our finitude and embrace uncertainty.
Faith doesn’t reduce uncertainty. Faith embraces uncertainty.
maybe faith has less to do with gaining knowledge and more to do with causing wonder.
Complications are often a byproduct of blessing.
We’re control freaks. But faith involves a loss of control. And with the loss of control comes the loss of certainty.
