IS FEAR CONTROLLING YOUR LIFE?

Fear takes a hike when love comes to town! Faith, which the Bible says is based on love, always supplants fear. Now, that doesn’t mean that people of faith never face problems without fear showing up. Coming to spiritual faith is just the first step in overcoming our deepest fears – but it’s also the biggest and the most liberating. Through a growing understanding of God’s plan for their lives, a new intimacy with God through prayer, and a spirit of joy and courage even in life’s toughest moments, people of faith are able to gradually face up to the issues that have caused them anxiety. What begins as a spiritual experience, grows out into every other aspect of their being – soul, mind, and body. That’s what the Bible means when it says that we can be totally transformed by the renewal of our minds. To put it another way, as you daily learn to line up our emotions and thoughts with what God is doing deep in your spirit, you will begin to experience freedom and release from anxiety. Of course, if you have suffered from serious or debilitating phobias, therapy may be necessary and helpful, particularly if it helps you to identify the hidden causes of some specific fear. Counseling, combined with personal support, can be very helpful in the process of healing. But, in the end, it’s the new life of Christ within you, the nature, character and power of Jesus working out through you, that really sets you free. So, don’t give in to your fears – they’re not part of God’s plan for your life. Claim the promise of his word, that your life can be totally transformed. Learn to line up your thinking with what the word of God says about you and watch fear take a walk…

Prayer: ‘Father, please help me to be filled with your special brand of love, so that faith is mobilized in my heart, and fear is evicted. I want your strong love to fill every part of my existence today.’

ARE YOU A COMPOSER OR A POSER?

Alexander Borodin was a nineteenth century Russian composer, a member of “The Mighty Handful,” a group of that nation’s five leading composers dedicated to producing a distinctly Russian music. His opera, Prince Igor, is thought by some to have been his most significant work.

Borodin, however, always considered himself no more than a part-time musician—a “Sunday composer,” as he called himself. His training and professional career were in organic chemistry. He worked as a researcher in that field, writing scholarly articles and delivering lectures in Russian universities and throughout Western Europe. But on weekends, as a hobby, he wrote string quartets and symphonic poems—and Prince Igor. It’s that music that became his legacy to the world. Likewise . . .

- Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher from Brantford Ontario whose wife was nearly deaf, and at least in part as an effort to assist her to hear better, he invented the telephone. What started as weekend tinkering to solve a domestic communication problem revolutionized communication for all.

- The Wright brothers built bicycles in Ohio, but when business was slow they fiddled around with the idea of flying. It was just a sideline. Then came that December day in Kitty Hawk, and the Wrights would forever be associated with flight.

“We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. . . . (Let us) use it in proportion to (our) faith.” (Romans 12:6)

The gifts that lie within many are too great to be confined to a single avenue of expression. Some of you are just ‘posers’ because day in and day out are willing to be satisfied with pretending that all you are is presently what you are doing. The interests that drive some are too varied and rich to be satisfied with punching the same clock for forty years. And, for a certainty, the needs of the world go well beyond the contribution any of us can make to meet them in a mere eight hours per day. We need more “Sunday composers.”

Are there dreams still hidden in you?

What are you doing next weekend?

DISCIPLINE DETERMINES DESTINY

The choices we make not the chances we take determine our destiny.

Whether in the home, in the school, or in society at large applying healthy discipline is about developing accountability. Somebody has said there are three stages in growing up: dependence (when I a need others for everything), independence (when I think I need others for nothing), and interdependence (when I know I need others for the important things in life). The aim of parental discipline is to teach children to make decisions responsibly, with an awareness of their accountability to others. Maturity says: I am free to make my own choices, but I am not free to escape the consequences of bad choices, and others will also benefit or suffer through my choices. In the end, we discipline our children so that they will learn how to discipline themselves.

In Proverbs 13:18 it says, ‘He who ignores discipline comes to poverty and shame, but whoever heeds correction is honoured.’

That’s God’s goal when he disciplines our lives. He is teaching us to discipline ourselves. He wants us to be able to measure for ourselves the long-term effects of our choices. We shouldn’t run from God’s discipline, we should embrace it. Why does God cut back a fruitful tree? So that it bears more fruit in the long-term.

Prayer: ‘Lord, thank you for taking time to discipline my life and guide my steps. Help me to learn that self-discipline brings success, and that I am never held back from my true destiny by my own weakness.’

DO YOU KNOW HOW VALUABLE YOU ARE?

We all long to have value, to feel worthy of love and respect. There are two kinds of value, however: ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ value. If we say something has ‘intrinsic’ value, we mean that it has value in and of itself – it is valuable simply because it is what it is. We find intrinsic value, for example, in things that are beautiful, costly or rare. A painting by Vincent Van Gogh has intrinsic value because it is a thing of rare artistic wonder. On the other hand, we say that a thing has ‘extrinsic’ value when it has value simply because it can perform a certain function. This kind of value is based on the performance of some task, or living up to some expectation. Extrinsic value is fickle: once a thing stops performing properly we discard it. There are millions, even billions, of people in this world who feel that the only value they have is the extrinsic kind. If they stop ‘doing the job’, if their performance fails to match up, they think they’ll be thrown onto the scrap heap. Human beings crave intrinsic value. We want to be loved and prized for who we are, not for what we can do.

Romans 3:23-24 ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.’ (NIV)

That’s the good news of Christianity. It’s not by our works that we’re made right with God. He doesn’t love us because we’ve earned it. His love, his acceptance, is based purely on his grace, his favour. We were fallen, yes, but we still worth dying for, simply because he chose to love us! You have intrinsic value, because God thinks so much of you – don’t forget that.

Prayer: ‘Lord, thank you that I do not earn my way to heaven. So, the pressure is off. You have done the hard work for me. Thank you that I have value because God loves me.’