That Good Part

"Do not pray for easy lives! Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle." --Phillips Brooks. I can do all things through Christ who strenthens me. (Philippians 4:13)

Have you read an Elisabeth Elliot book this year? Only five months left! The disciple who means to compel every one of his thoughts to surrender in obedience to Christ would do well to test himself by asking: 1) Whose glory do I seek? 2) Is this for or against the knowledge of God? 3) Am I giving mind to wholesome precepts? 4) Am I morbidly keen on mere verbal questions and quibbles? 5) Is it more important for me to understand than to obey? 6) Is it more important for me to know than to believe? 7) Will one side of the question inconvenience me? 8) Do I reject a particular truth because it will inconvenience me? (Elisabeth Elliot, Discipline: The Glad Surrender, Revell, 1982)

So what do people need to know? Leaving room for the Holy Spirit to insert things He knows need to be said in each unique situation, a basic outline to help keep you on track is a good thing to get on paper. Not to be used as a script, but to help you hone in on the most important points you want to share with someone, so they come away knowing who you were, who Jesus is, and what He’s done in your life. Here’s some suggestions for what they need to know: 1) That you realized you needed a Savior : Spare them every detail; we can glorify the slime as much as the Savior sometimes. But make it clear that you realized that you needed something you could not do for yourself, and no one but Jesus could. 2) That the Bible revealed to you who that Savior was : The impersonal part of our testimony. When our testimony focuses solely on our circumstances, it is easy for those who hear it to discount our conversion as something only we needed. The Scripture says all have sinned and fallen...

Today in a ministry meeting we had a time of testimony. It was cool, just a bunch a chicks sharing what Jesus had done in their lives, a group of gals I trust with my dirtiest laundry, although I’m sure they are grateful that I didn’t trot it all out to be aired. I taught a study on 2 Peter chapter 2 a few months back, and my senior pastors wife asked me to share part of my testimony in the study, since the text deals with false teachers in the church. As a backslidden believer, I had immersed myself in every wind of doctrine, some of the worst not coming from the new age teaching I dabbled in trying to heal myself of chronic illness, but from the highly visible, best seller Christian teachers. It was a destructive season of life. However, as only God can through the forgiveness we have from the Cross, He not only redeemed my Christian walk but called me to the ministry of “having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather exposing them.” (Ephesians 5:11). ...

I know, Chamber's again, but this is huge..... Jesus did not commit Himself to them . . . , for He knew what was in man —John 2:24-25 Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. However, though no longer deceived, our experience of disillusionment may actually leave us cynical and overly critical in our judgment of others. But the disillusionment that comes from God brings us to the point where we see people as they really are, yet without any cynicism or any stinging and bitter criticism. Many of the things in life that inflict the greatest injury, grief, or pain, stem from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as facts, seeing each other as we really are; we are only true to our misconceived ideas of one another. According to our thinking, everything is either delightful and good, or it is evil, malicious, and cowardly. Refusing to be disillusione...