Illustration results for ezekiel 16

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WORLD HUNGER COMPARED TO AMERICAN DIET

Most of us have no idea what it is like to be really hungry. We might use the expression "I’m starving!" But the truth is far from that.

• People who starve to death each year in the world: 11 million
• Overweight U.S. adults: 34 million

• Average calories consumed daily,
• North Americans: 3500; Africans: 2100

• People who are continually hungry; Ethiopia: 20%, Sudan: 20%, Mozambique: 30-40%,
• American adults currently on diets: 19%

(From a sermon by Gordon Curley, Joseph the Authentic Leader, 11/18/2010)

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WHAT WILL YOUR GRANDCHILDREN SAY?

Max Lucado shared this in Outlive Your Life:

A few years back, three questions rocked my world. They came from different people in the span of a month.

Question 1: Had you been a German Christian during World War II, would you have taken a stand against Hitler?

Question 2: Had you lived in the South during the civil rights conflict, would you have taken a stand against racism?

Question 3: When your grandchildren discover you lived during a day in which 1.75 billion people were poor and 1 billion were hungry, how will they judge your response?

I didn’t mind the first two questions. They were hypothetical. I’d like to think I would have taken a stand against Hitler and fought against racism. But those days are gone, and those choices were not mine. But the third question has kept me awake at night. I do live today; so do you. We are given a choice--an opportunity to make a big difference in our lifetime.

(From a sermon by Gordon Curley, Forgotten, 11/18/2010)

“O God, Don’t Let That Be All There Is?” John 1: 14-18 Key verse(s): 14-18: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The recent news story of the pregnant Missouri woman who was lured to her death and then robbed of her unborn baby is one of the most tragic stories to cross our news wires in a very long time. Even though we have been confronted with other horror stories such as the hunters murdered last month in northern Wisconsin and the recent murder of eighteen American soldiers in Iraq by a suicide bomber, this story seems unsurpassed in its gripping and horrible result. How could anyone do such a thing? To brutally kill a woman about to give birth and then to violently rip a child from a mother’s womb seems a crime beyond conscience, even in a culture like ours so attuned to death and violence. Time and time again our minds come back to that terrible picture of a little, innocent child, violently taken, cold and in shock, from the warm security of a womb he was not ready to leave, the only home he had even known, without any chance of ever hearing that familiar heartbeat or feeling the gentle and loving touch of his mother again.

Perhaps the hardest thing about this story is the hardness of the crime and the total vulnerability of the mother and child, and the utter helplessness of both mother and child. These are the things that continue to haunt our thoughts and feelings. Yet, despite the gruesome scene painted upon our minds by such wanton and senseless violence, we do find some relief. The baby is not lost and he does find his way into the loving arms of his father. It is a gruesome story; but one with an ending that is just and happy. Although the memory of the killing and the kidnapping will never go away, over time the picture of a father holding his “Christmas” baby is one that will rest upon our hearts as well as our minds.

God’s hears those prayers and it is in just such situations of hopelessness and helplessness that his almighty power is born. It is there that God leaves his treasure. In Mary and in all of us, as Christ is born anew within.” (Sermon Illustrations, 1999.)

Hopelessness and helplessness! When you and I were born into this world we were, in a very real sense, just like that little baby robbed from its mother. Born into a world of sin and violence and already bearing the shock and cold of our parent’s sin, our birth was not clean or holy. It was not the kind of birth that God had intended for us from before time. Ours was to have been a warm and comfortable birth; one that resulted in a close and perfect relationship with our Heavenly Father. But, rather than laying in His bosom, we were stolen a...

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