Our theme for this month: “God’s Guidance”

Our Bible verse for today: “The Lord directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives.” Psalm 37:23 (NLT)

Our thought for today: “We need God’s guidance in all seasons of life.”

Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump as a person or as a President I think we have to at least admire the fact that at the age of seventy-one, when most people have long since retired, he willingly and even eagerly took-on the hardest job in the world. And, he has committed to doing it for at least four years. That’s pretty impressive.

This is June and we are just concluding graduation season. As is true every year at this time, we hear stories about ninety year old college graduates – senior citizens who never completed college as a young person but now, in their eighties and nineties, have gone back to college and earned that degree. We really have to admire the gumption and positive attitude it takes to accomplish something like that so late in life.

As I write this my wife is getting up and getting dressed to go to work. She is seventy-one, fairly disabled, and she needs a walker on wheels to get around. But today she begins her new job as a volunteer receptionist at Habitat-for-Humanity.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Likewise, a line from an old Jimmy Buffett song goes, “I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead.” Far too many people just shuffle through their days with no purpose, no direction, and no plans for the future. Yes, they’re living, but to what purpose?

What does all of this have to do with our theme of “God’s Guidance”? I believe God intends for us to live a full and purposeful life through all seasons of life. I believe that His good and perfect plan for each of us (Jeremiah 29:11) doesn’t stop the day we retire but continues right up until the moment we pass into heaven. And I also believe He wants to continue guiding and directing us (Proverbs 3:5-6) through all the seasons of our lives.

Psalm 37:23 reminds us that “He delights in every detail of our lives.” God is interested in all of it, all the time. He is interested in the plans and goals of the young college graduate, and the forty-five year old business executive, and the sixty-five year old recent retiree.

Regardless of who you are you should have plans and visions, and you should be living with purpose and eagerness. Therefore you should be constantly seeking God’s guidance for your next season of life, the next year of life, the next month, next week, tomorrow, and for today. Young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, if you’re still breathing then God’s not done with you. Your life has purpose and therefore you need His guidance.

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

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Our theme for this month: “God’s guidance”

Our Bible verse for today: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 (NIV)

Our thought for today: “Have confidence in God”.

Yesterday we started off our series about God’s guidance by considering the great truth expressed in Proverbs 3:5-6, that if your heart is right, and you truly do apply yourself to seeking His will above your own, you can trust Him to guide you. Jeremiah 29:11 expresses the same general truth in slightly different words. God has your best interests always in His mind. His plans for you are good and if properly followed by you, will always lead to your ultimate good.

These two passages combine to help us have confidence in God. You can have confidence that God is doing His part to guide and direct you to good outcomes. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will always get what you want, but it does mean you will get what God has decided is in your best interest to have. If your heart is right and you sincerely are striving to know His will and be obedient to it, you can be confident that you will experience His best in your life.

Yesterday I offered you a simple four-part prescription for how to apply Proverbs 3:5-6 in a real and practical way in your life. This morning I want to give you a simple prayer you can pray that will help to place you in a position before God whereby He can speak His guidance into your life. I’ve seen many versions of this prayer but this one comes from Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family Ministries:

“Lord, I need to know what you want me to do, and I am listening. Please speak to me through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, friends, and things that I read.” Now listen and pay attention to the things that happen next. As you read your Bible, be looking for Him to make verses and principles jump off the page at you. Consider the circumstances that are developing in your life and how they might pertain to the guidance you are looking for. Ask mature Christian friends to talk with you and pray with you as you work your way through the issue. And pray. Pray a lot.

Have confidence in God. His plan for your life is good.

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “God’s guidance”

Our Bible verse for today: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6 (NIV)

Our thought for today: “Trust God to guide you.”

In recent days, as I have been thinking and praying about the theme for this month’s devotionals, God reminded me that right now there are at least several readers of these daily devotionals who I know of who are wrestling with important life decisions and who therefore need to be confident of God’s leading. So I’m convinced that’s what I should to be writing about. And for those of us who are not in that situation right now, at some point we will be.

Proverbs 3:5-6 is one of my personal life-verses and it is certainly one of the most important passages of Scripture regarding receiving guidance from God. There we find a simple four-part prescription that helps to ensure we are approaching this correctly.

First, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Trust Him. God is good, He loves you without limit, and He has your best interests at heart. He’s more interested in your well-being than even you are. So trust Him.

Second, lean not on your own understanding. Do not rely just on your own understanding. It’s true that God gave you a mind, and He doesn’t mind if you use it once in a while, but your own thinking is often flawed. In addition to your own thoughts on the subject you need lots of prayer, plenty of guidance from the Bible, and good counsel from mature Christians.

Third, in all your ways acknowledge Him. In other words, to the best of your ability surrender your will for His. There is no better or safer place for you to be than right in the middle of God’s will.

And fourth, He will make your paths straight. God has a vested interest in your obedience and in your success. He wants you to be obedient and He wants you to be successful (in the way He defines success), and He wants it even more than you want it. So once your heart is right you can trust Him to guide you to where you need to go. If your heart is right, and if you truly are seeking His will and trying to be obedient to it, He’s not going to sit back and watch you walk off the edge of a cliff. Trust Him to lead you.

This is the starting place for seeking and receiving God’s guidance. We will now spend the rest of the month exploring the subject in greater depth.

God Bless,

Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts.” Psalm 105:1-2 (NIV)

Our thought for today: “We must tell the nations about the God we know.”

As the people of God it is our responsibility to tell the nations about God. And the better we know Him, the more we have to tell. The problem, as was stated at the beginning of this series, is that many Christians have only a superficial understanding of God at best. Therefore we have little to tell others about Him.

Now that we as individuals have begun a deeper study of God, I encourage you to continue in your learning about Him. I believe you would find A.W. Tozer’s little book “The Knowledge of the Holy” a great aid in that study. Then share with others what you have learned about God. Together we can collectively help to raise the level of understanding about God in the Christian community. In the closing chapter of his book Tozer commented, “We Christians are the Church, and whatever we do is what the Church is doing. The matter, therefore, is for each of us a personal one. Any forward step in the Church must begin with the individual … To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.”

Yes, “Any forward step in the Church must begin with the individual …” And to that this Pastor says a hearty “Amen!” It begins with each of us as individuals.

God is a person who can be known in increasing degrees as we apply ourselves to learning about Him. The more we learn about Him the more enthusiastic we will be about our relationship with Him, and the more we will tell others about Him. Also, the more we know about Him, the more passionate we will become about being involved in His kingdom-building work of sharing the Gospel and serving others.

God wants to be known by His people and there is much about Him that we can know.  I encourage you to make knowing God and telling others about Him a lifelong endeavor.

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “He has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all.” Psalm 103:19 (NIV

Our thought for today: “God is sovereign”

When we say that God is sovereign we mean that He rules and reigns over all creation. He has a comprehensive plan for world history and He is fully able to carry it out. Because He is the supreme ruler of the universe, and He has perfect knowledge, and He is all-powerful, He can and will accomplish His plans in His time and in His ways.

Interestingly, He has chosen to administrate His sovereignty in conjunction with human responsibility. In other words, He works in partnership with us in order to accomplish His purposes. The problem with that of course, is that God is perfect but we are not. Therefore when we get involved in God’s activity we frequently make a mess of things. God then must take corrective action (often by other means and using other people) in order to accomplish His ends. But even with our missteps, disobedience, and rebellion, He acts as necessary to accomplish His purposes.

It is our imperfections not God’s, which create all the problems in the world. But when that happens, God simply reaches into the messes we have created and He brings good things out of them. That’s one of the applications of Paul’s statement in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” He reaches into the middle of bad situations (many of which have been created by us or by others contrary to His will) and He brings good things out of those messes.

There is much about God and His ways that we simply are not able to understand, but we do know enough about Him to trust Him. He is God, and He is good. He is also sovereign over His creation and fully able to accomplish His good purposes for creation in general, for the human race overall, and for you and me in particular.

Spend some time this morning thinking about the sovereignty of God. To really make it personal, Jeremiah 29:11-13 might be a good passage to meditate on and to praise Him for, “For I know the plans I have for you” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13 (CSB)

Our thought for today: “Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice”

Today is Memorial Day. It’s the day each year that we in the USA pause to honor those men and women in the Armed Forces who have given their lives in the defense of our nation. Unfortunately, Memorial Day is often confused with Veteran’s Day. Veteran’s Day is in November. It’s the designated day to pay special tribute to all those who have served in the Armed Forces. But Memorial Day is specifically for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, those who have given their lives in the defense of our nation.

I encourage you to spend some time today thinking about those who have died so we can be free. Say a special prayer for the families and loved ones of those who have died, especially those who have died recently.

But as important and significant as the sacrifice made by members of our armed forces who have died for us is, it pales in comparison to the sacrifice Jesus made for us. Their death helped to protect our freedom in this lifetime. The death of Jesus sets us free from the penalty of sin forever. No greater sacrifice has ever been made than the death of Jesus on the cross for our sins.

In yesterday’s devotional message we began thinking about the love of God for us. I told you that I personally believe God’s love to be His greatest attribute. That being the case, the sacrifice that Jesus made for us is the greatest expression of God’s greatest attribute.

On this Memorial Day pause and be grateful for those who paid the ultimate price so we can be free from tyranny and oppression in this lifetime. Then praise God for the sacrifice of Jesus that has freed us for eternity. There never has been, and never will be, a greater sacrifice than the one Jesus made for you and for me, and it happened because God loves us so much.

God Bless,

Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8 (CSB)

Our thought for today: “Love is God’s greatest attribute”

Everything about God is great and everything about God is perfect, but God’s love is His greatest attribute. All of God’s other attributes help us to better understand and appreciate the depths of His love for us. For instance, since God is self-existent, His love had no beginning; because He is eternal, His love has no end; because He is infinite, His love has no limit; because He is holy, His love is perfectly pure; because He is gracious, He loves us even when we don’t deserve to be loved.

God is also incomprehensible, and so His love is so deep and so expansive that we simply cannot fully appreciate the scope of it. Fortunately we can see manifestations of His love for us which help us to begin to grasp the scope and significance of it. Paul expressed the most important manifestation of God’s love in Romans 5:8 where we read that even though we were sinners, God sent His Son to die for us. Certainly the most famous expression of this great truth was given to us by Jesus Himself in John 3:16 when He told us, “For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life.”

Another important manifestation of God’s love for us is described by the Apostle John in 1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear …”

Fear comes from the belief that someone or something may cause us harm. It is a painful and troubling emotion that arises from the belief that we will be hurt or harmed in some way. But God loves us too much to hurt us. Even in those times when He must discipline us or allow us to suffer the consequences of our own poor choices, He does so out of His great love for us and with the intention of bringing us back into the center of His good and perfect will (which is the best and safest place for us to be).

God’s love for us is so great that He desires our everlasting welfare, and He will always act towards us in ways that are in our own best interest. If we truly understood that, there would be no sense of fear. Instead we would know Him as the God of all comfort and we would have complete trust in Him.

I believe love to be God’s greatest attribute. Spend some time this morning praising Him for the good and perfect and unlimited love He has for you.

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “For it is by grace you have been saved, though faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)

Our thought for today: “God is gracious”

A.W. Tozer offers a good definition of God’s grace. In his book “The Knowledge of the Holy” he writes, “As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace that God imputes merit where none previously existed and declares no debt to be where one had been before. Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefit upon the undeserving.”

Grace moves God to “bestow benefit upon the undeserving.” The first and most important benefit of God’s grace for us is that it makes it possible for us to be saved and to spend eternity in heaven instead of in hell. We do not deserve salvation. It comes to us as a free gift from God and entirely through His grace. But as is true of any gift, we have to be willing to receive it. We have to accept it.

A second benefit of God’s grace, beyond salvation, is that He chooses to bless us in an infinite number of ways, even though we don’t deserve to be blessed. He simply requires obedience from us (which is in our own best interest to begin with), and then He blesses us far beyond what we deserve or could reasonably expect. It would take many pages to cite even a fraction of the Bible verses that describe the abundant blessings of God which come to us because of His grace, but here are just a few:

“Test me in this way, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.”

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

“And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.”

Those are examples of God bestowing benefit upon the undeserving. Our God is truly a gracious God who loves to pour out His blessings upon His people. It’s so much more than we deserve. But He loves us, and He loves to bless us, and He does so because of His great grace.

God Bless,
Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is:

Our theme for this month: “Knowing God”

Our Bible verse for today: “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish.” 2 Peter 3:9 (CSB)

Our thought for today: “God is merciful”

Yesterday we considered the truth that God is just and that sin must be punished. We read what Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:10 that we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to answer for our conduct, be it good or bad. We also learned that on that day, if we have placed our faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, we will be declared righteous and granted eternity in heaven. That happens because of the mercy of God.

God is infinitely merciful. Mercy is an integral part of His nature. By nature His desire is to forgive and bless. His justice requires Him to hold people accountable for their actions, but His mercy moves Him to want to forgive and bless rather than to discipline and punish.

This is what Peter was referring to in 2 Peter 3:9. God does not want to punish and condemn if such action can be rightly avoided so He has provided the opportunity for salvation through faith in Jesus. He is also extraordinarily patient with us as His Holy Spirit works in our lives to draw us to Christ. As Peter wrote, it is not God’s desire that any should perish.

This is not universalism. The doctrine of universalism teaches that nobody is condemned, regardless of their conduct and regardless of their beliefs about Jesus. God doesn’t want anyone to be lost and so they aren’t. But that’s not what the Bible teaches and that’s not what Peter was saying in this verse.

God is extraordinarily patient with us before pronouncing judgment because He wants us in heaven instead of in hell. But if you reject Jesus, you will go to hell. Therefore all throughout your life the Holy Spirit works to draw you to faith in Christ. In a thousand different ways He orchestrates events in your life so you will hear the Good News of the Gospel and have many opportunities to place your faith in Christ. He is patient as the Holy Spirit works on you, and that patience comes from His mercy.

God loves you. He wants to bless you and He is extraordinarily patient, but you do have to cooperate. So what are you waiting for? Come to Him today and be blessed, because He is merciful and He wants to bless you.

God Bless,

Pastor Jim

Our mailing address is: