Who do you tell your 'good news' to?!

Thirsty?!

John 7:38
"If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Rivers of living water will brim and spill out of the depths of anyone who believes in me this way, just as the Scripture says."

Hang in the battle...

Psalm 27:13-14
I'm sure now I'll see God's goodness
in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
Take heart. Don't quit.
I'll say it again:
Stay with God.

What do you see?

Many people claim that they have seen truths in the Bible. Actually, only those who resolve to do God's will have seen them. Only they can claim that their and thorough. The Lord has to do much work in us before we can “resolve” this way.

Do not think that light comes without a price. Every seeing is accompanied by a high price; we have to pay a price to see. Sometimes God has to bring a person through two or three experiences before he sees something. Sometimes God has to bring him through six or seven experiences before he sees something. God's light often comes to us in a reflective way. First it shines on something else, and then it is reflected to us.

God's light is often reflective light. We must see light from one angle before we can see light from another angle and then a third angle. Sometimes we need to go through a few experiences before we can see light. If we are disobedient in one thing, we miss the revelation. Watchman Nee

Four ptarmigans.

A classic example of two friends who grew careless with their relationship.

Jimmy Johnson & Jerry Jones played football together in college, & then years later when Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys he brought his old friend Jimmy Johnson in to coach them. The Cowboys won two Super Bowls with Johnson as coach but Jones fired his old friend & replaced him with Barry Switzer because they couldn't get along.

Bill Walsh called it, "A classic example of two friends who grew careless with their relationship."

Many years later Jones & Johnson patched things back together but they both realized that each of them had contributed to the relational disintegration.

How are you tending to your key friendships these days?

Proverbs 17:17
Friends love through all kinds of weather,
and families stick together in all kinds of trouble.

In the beginning...

Genesis 1:1

On a closer reading I think it says to, 'LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR.'

Leviticus 19:18
Love your neighbor as yourself.

Try gathering together with other Christ-followers in your neighbourhood...

Therefore the newly popular paired concepts of "gathering and sending" represent a falsehood if they are understood in such a way that the gathering of the people of God is only the precondition for its true task: being sent into the world.

Those who think this way show how foreign the Bible has become for them, for in the Bible the prophets and apostles are sent precisely in order to gather the people of God.

"Mission to gather the people of God" would be a biblical idea, for it is certainly clear that only a people of God that has allowed itself to be gathered into unity and unanimity could convince the world. Gerhard Lohfink

Jesus moved my cheese

Psalm 55:16-18
I call to God;
God will help me.
At dusk, dawn, and noon I sigh
deep sighs—he hears, he rescues.
My life is well and whole, secure
in the middle of danger
Even while thousands
are lined up against me.

Can you handle the truth?

Those who want to be brutally honest are usually more brutal than honest.

Would you want to get shaved by a razor blade in the hands of a 3-year-old?

God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.

Are you looking for a better place to live? A better place to love?

Like where you live & live where you like.

One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias… Meanwhile, the place we actually are is dismissed or demeaned as inadequate for serious living to the glory of God. But utopia is literally “no-place.” We can only live our lives in actual place. Eugene Peterson

Life is not always a beach.

The place where you live, the actual street & neighbourhood is very important in God's eyes.

Why not invest some of your life there?

Break free

Imagine your life as a journey. You are walking, knapsack on your back, making good progress, until suddenly, you reach a brick wall that stands in the way of reaching your destination. What do you do? Do you turn around and avoid the challenge posed by the barrier? Or, do you take the opposite approach and throw your knapsack over the wall, thus committing yourself to finding ways of getting through, around, or over the wall? Alan Gettis

Go all in as a Christ-follower.

There is this false twisted idea out there among religious people that somehow you gotta have it all together to have a relationship with God, that like somehow God’s only looking for people who have no problems, and have it all nailed down, and can put on like the happy face all the time.

Yet the scriptures speak directly against this kind of thinking. I mean Jesus is just straight ahead and said "come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden". I mean the essence of salvation is crying out to God and admitting "I don’t have it all together," its admitting, "I am lost, I am hurting, and this sinful nature that I carry around with me have really screwed things up for me, and God if you don’t show me the way home, if you don’t fix thing if you don’t step in, I am dying here."

And this kind of thinking is all through out the scripture, its over and over again God says to us "When you come to me, you come to me with all your junk, you come to me with your problems, come to me all screwed up all messed up, let me take care of it. Jesus, even sets out looking for people, he even says this; he says, 'I’m not looking for the healthy, I come for the sick.'" Rob Bell

Are you engaged in some personal refection time?

Hail prosperity!

We fail to see the place of suffering in the broader scheme of things. We fail to see that suffering is an inevitable dimension of life. Because we have lost perspective, we fail to see that unless one is willing to accept suffering properly, he or she is really refusing to continue in the quest for maturity. To refuse suffering is to refuse personal growth. Henri Nouwen

May all your expectations be frustrated.
May all your plans be thwarted.
May all your desires be withered into nothingness.
That you may experience the powerlessness and the poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God the Father, the Son and the Spirit. (Jean Vanier)

Those who wish to sing always find a song.

Who's making beautiful music in your neighbourhood?

Sometimes life is a cliffhanger...

Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging. Mary Daly

Invite a neighbour over. Volunteer at a local school. Try going without a car for one week by committing to walk or ride your bike instead.

A little adventure won't kill you...

John 8:23-27
Then he got in the boat, his disciples with him. The next thing they knew, they were in a severe storm. Waves were crashing into the boat—and he was sound asleep! They roused him, pleading, "Master, save us! We're going down!"

Jesus reprimanded them. "Why are you such cowards, such faint-hearts?" Then he stood up and told the wind to be silent, the sea to quiet down: "Silence!" The sea became smooth as glass.

The men rubbed their eyes, astonished. "What's going on here? Wind and sea come to heel at his command!"

Never say never

Jesus has a sneaky habit of exposing our dogmatic attitudes and stiff rules and stretching our understanding of what life in God's kingdom really is like.

He did it repeatedly to Peter, is he chipping away at you?

Matthew 16
From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done."

Acts 10
About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

'On belay?'

"Belay on."

'Ready to climb.'

"Climb on."

'Climbing.'

Life's climbs can not only be exhilarating but also frightening at times.

Who is belaying you on life's steep slopes?

Do you have adequate protection in case you fall?

Are you ready to lead a climb?

Romans 12
Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

Don't burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don't quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

Control Freak?!

(noun) - a person who's behavior indicates a powerful need to control people or circumstances in everyday life.

How's that working out? How happy are you?

Are other people really the problem?

Leave the crowd and become a disciple.

Mark 8:34-37
Calling the crowd to join his disciples, he said, "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; I am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how.

Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?

Do you think that putting others first will feel like dying?

Death to self.

It's not the end of the world...

John 12:24-25
Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.

In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.

How people grow

We all need to be stretched, to get out of our comfort zone, to learn to rely fully on God.

The most powerful agent of growth and transformation is something much more basic than any technique: a change of heart. John Welwood

By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with him, make us fit for him—we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that's not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

There's more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!

Are you "For-Prophet" or "Not-For-Prophet"?

Jeremiah 15:19-21
Use words truly and well. Don't stoop to cheap whining.
Then, but only then, you'll speak for me.
Let your words change them.
Don't change your words to suit them.
I'll turn you into a steel wall,
a thick steel wall, impregnable.
They'll attack you but won't put a dent in you
because I'm at your side, defending and delivering."
God's Decree.
"I'll deliver you from the grip of the wicked.
I'll get you out of the clutch of the ruthless."

You gotta know where to find life

NOTHINSGONNASTOPIT!

There's nothing like the written Word of God for showing you the way to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one way or another—showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live God's way. Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks God has for us.

still crazy after all these years

They claim that I am unbalanced, unsound and a little bit crazy. While I plead guilty to that last charge, I am confident that God will raise up other unbalanced, unsound, and crazy writers to cry with me the French Easter liturgy: L'amour de Dieu est folie! (The love of God is folly!) Brennan Manning

Galatians 5:16-18
My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness.

These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

Jealousy is a terrible disease. Get well soon.

Galatians 5:26
Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

the long and winding road

Sometimes it's an unexpected path to joy.

Isaiah 41:10
Don't panic. I'm with you.
There's no need to fear for I'm your God.
I'll give you strength. I'll help you.
I'll hold you steady, keep a firm grip on you.

get thankful

Philippians 4
Celebrate God all day, every day. I mean, revel in him!