Marching Forth!

I went out this evening to a neighborhood church to hear a man who has been faithful for many years in God's service, Bill Wilson.  He has been in full-time ministry for 42 years, 30 of which in a rough area in New York city.  He runs the largest Sunday School in the world and is still going strong.  With 160 full-time staff and many volunteers, his ministry not only buses in thousands of children every week to Sunday School, but visits the 22,000 kids who attend Metro Ministries every week outside of church.  This post really isn't about Bill at all but something that he said. He preached out of 2 Cor. 5:14 tonight:  " For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead... "  Most of the message centered out of the word "constraineth," which has three meanings of equal relevance and strength:  1) to be forced to do something, 2) to be kept away from something, 3) and to be kept in somethin...

The old saying goes, " You learn something new every day ."  I suppose there is the potential that you could learn something new on a daily basis, but it is likely we learn many new things every day.  Yesterday the song "The First Noel" was stuck in my head and I wondered:  what does Noel mean?  I looked it up and found out that "Noel" means "Christmas."  Maybe you didn't know that either.  Now there's one new thing you've learned today.  Congradulations! There's a part in the song which speaks about the wise men bringing gifts and says they " offered there in His presence their gold and myrrh and frankincense ."  A thought sprung to my mind as I sang:  if I had gold, would I give it to Jesus?  Would I travel far to give what is precious to me?  Jesus never asked for gold.  Seated now at the right hand of the Father Jesus has no physical needs or financial shortfalls.  He says in His Word, " If you love me, keep m...

This evening I was blessed to share with those in attendance at Calvary Chapel El Cajon about my recent trip to Australia.  The hardest part was trying to compact two months to a manageable size and convey a little of the culture and spiritual make-up of Australia.  Towards the end of sharing time I spoke about waiting for God to reveal the next step.  For a lot of us, waiting is synonymous with inaction or boredom.  If we are waiting in a grocery store line we feel hindered from our purpose of buying items.  A line at Disneyland prevents us from enjoying the ride immediately.  Whenever Laura and I would take the high school group to Six-Flags Magic Mountain, we would often come up with games to play to pass the time.  Most of those games were more annoying than just standing silently for hours! We often see waiting on the LORD at the same way:  annoying and bothersome, our goals and plans remaining incomplete until God moves.  This is not ...

I do not believe there is such a thing as a near miss with God.  From our vantage point things may appear to be close calls, but nothing sneaks past the God of heaven.  Have you ever lost your grip on something breakable but caught it before it hit the ground?  Perhaps your eyes grew big as you breathed a sight of relief, knowing that irreversible damage would have been done.  God's grip never slips.  Nothing outsmarts Him, overpowers Him, or catches Him off guard. Southern California is in the middle of the first winter storm of the season.  Rain has been falling lightly but steadily all day, and the wind has been blowing strong from the west.  As we sat in the house, above the sound of raindrops there was a sudden crash that seemed to hit the house.  Running to see what happened, to my surprise I saw my parent's 90 foot pine tree lying across the back yard.  It had been uprooted by the strong winds, and crushed a wooden gate and wheelbar...