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A 73 year old Iowa resident Aldin Straight needed to visit his ailing brother, who lived on the other side of the state.
There was no one who could drive Mr. Straight to his brother’s house.
He himself didn’t feel capable of driving there he can’t read road signs when he drives faster than 20 M.P.H..
So, Mr. Straight did what he could.
He rode his lawn mower 240 miles across the state of Iowa to be with his brother.
Talking about being commited.
Elton Trueblood wrote, "It used to be that Christianity was a revolutionary faith that turned the world upside down. But today Christians sit in Sunday morning church services looking at their watches, wondering what time dinner will be served, or thinking about the kickoff. And we hope that church won’t interfere with the things we would really rather be doing."
Zig Ziglar said, "A study of three hundred world-class leaders, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sir Winston Churchill, Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., revealed that 25 percent of them had serious physical disabilities and an additional 50 percent had been abused as children or were raised in poverty."
(From a sermon by Ricky Nelms, Daniel, 7/29/2010)
THANKFULNESS/CONTENTMENT:
One day a father of a very wealthy family took his son on a trip to the country with the firm purpose of showing his son how poor people live. They spent a couple of days and nights on the farm of what would be considered a very poor family. On their return from their trip, the father asked his son, "How was the trip?"
"It was great, Dad."
"Did you see how poor people live?" the father asked.
"Oh yeah," said the son.
"So, tell me, what did you learn from the trip?" asked the father. The son answered: "I saw that we have one dog and they had four. We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden and they have a creek that has no end. We have imported lanterns in our garden and they have the stars at night. Our patio reaches to the front yard and they have the whole horizon. We have a small piece of land to live on and they have fields that go beyond our sight. We have servants who serve us, but they serve others. We buy our food, but they grow theirs. We have walls aro...
"When you deify work, you apostatize from Jesus Christ."
-Oswald Chambers
"The only way to keep true to God is by a steady persistent
refusal to be interested in Christian work and to be
interested alone in Jesus Christ." -Oswald Chambers
"I will stick to Christ as a burr to a topcoat!"
-Katerina Von Bora (wife of Martin Luther)
A FLAG OF RAGS
In the final years of our imprisonment, the North Vietnamese moved us from small cells with one or two prisoners to large rooms with as many as 30-40 men to a room.
We preferred this situation for the companionship and strength we could draw from our fellow prisoners.
In addition to moving us to new quarters, our captors also let us receive packages and letters from home.
Many men received word from their families for the first time in several years.
The improved conditions were a result of public pressure put on the North Vietnamese by the American public.
In our cell was one Navy officer, Lt. Commander Mike Christian.
Over a period of time Mike had gathered bits and pieces of red and white cloth from various packages.
Using a piece of bamboo he had fashioned into a needle, Mike sewed a United States flag on the inside of his shirt, one of the blue pajama tops we all wore.
Every night in our cell, Mike would put his shirt on the wall, and we would say the pledge of allegiance.
I know that the pledge of allegiance may not be the most important aspect of our day now, but I can tell you that at the time it was the most important aspect of our lives.
This had been going on for some time until one of the guards came in as we were reciting our pledge.
They ripped the flag off the wall and dragged Mike out.
He was beaten for several hours and then thrown back into the cell.
Later that ...
THE RELATIONSHIP IS WHAT COUNTS
Wayne Cordeiro, a preacher in Honolulu, HI writes:
Some time ago some wonderful people in our church gave Anna, my wife, and me a dinner certificate to a nice restaurant for $100. We thought, Wow, a hundred bucks. Let's go for it.
We found a free evening. We dressed up. I took a bath, used deodorant and cologne--the whole thing. I even washed and waxed my car, because we wanted to take it through the valet, and I didn't want my Ford Pinto to look bad.
The night came, and we were excited. We went to this ritzy restaurant and walked in. They gave us a nice, candlelit table overlooking a lagoon adjacent to a moonlit bay there in Hawaii. Oh, it was nice. And we thought, for a hundred bucks for just the two of us, we could eat high on the hog. So we ordered the most expensive thing there. It was wonderful.
When the bill came, I said, "Honey, why don't you give me the certificate."
She said, "I don't have the certificate. I thought you brought it."
I said, "You have to have it. You're supposed to have it. You're the wife!"
She said, "I don't have it." And I thought, We are in deep yogurt.
Here we are. We look rich, we act rich, we even smell rich. But if we don't have that certificate, it invalidates everything.
Cordeiro adds: "There are times in our lives when we can look holy, we can act holy, we can smell holy. But without a relationship with the Lord, we've forgotten something. It's relationship that validates everything else."
(From a sermon by Michael Luke, Do You Have It and Does It Have You? 7/23/2010)
BE FOUND DOING YOUR DUTY
The time was the 19th of May, 1780. The place was Hartford, Connecticut. The day has gone down in New England history as a terrible foretaste of Judgment Day. For at noon the skies turned from blue to gray and by mid-afternoon had blackened over so densely that, in that religious age, men fell on their knees and begged a final blessing before the end came. The Connecticut House of Representatives was in session. And as some men fell down and others clamored for an immediate adjournment, the Speaker of the House, one Colonel Davenport, came to his feet. He silenced them and said these words: "The Day of Judgment is either approaching or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for adjournment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish, therefore, that candles may be brought."
(Winning the New Civil War, Robert P. Dugan, Jr., p. 183)
At the end of life God requires faithfulness - The demand to trust Him even at the edge of life.the call of God is not too hard for us to do. And there is always a reward that awaits the faithful. Amen.
(From a sermon by Arsenio B. Segismundo, Unto the End of Life, 7/28/2010)
