Walking The Walk

As busy as the holidays can be, sometimes it offers us a chance to enjoy a change of routine.  Some people get a little break from work or a break from school, and it's a good time to think about our daily routine the rest of the year.     At the beginning of last year, I encouraged my congregation to get into a daily habit of reading the Bible.  In fact, a few people challenged themselves to read their way through the entire Bible in 2024--a little at a time.  Now I don't know how many of them have followed through with that.  That can be a daunting challenge.  But I've kept up pretty well.  I've flipped back and forth between a few different reading plans.   I really enjoy The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible --that's the one I've used primarily.  It takes about a half-an-hour each morning, and there's a selection from the Old Testament, a selection from the New Testament, and something in there from Psalms and ...

"A person’s wisdom yields patience; it is to one’s glory to overlook an offense." ~Proverbs 19:11 We make decisions about how we interact with people.  We decide how we're going to react in a situation.  We decide what we're going to say.  We decide what we're going to do.  Those decisions we make in every situation in our life is ours to make.  We are (or should be) in complete control.   But we can't control what other people do.  We can't control what other people say.  We can't control the behavior of other people. And I know what you're thinking--well thank you very much Captain Obvious! These things are obvious, yet we spend so much time complaining about what other people say and do, and making excuses for how we've reacted to them.  Too often we read motives into other people's actions that may or may not actually be there, and when we do that it escalates issues because it skews our perception of what's actually going on.  ...

"Set you minds on things above, not on earthly things." ~Colossians 3:2 Every week I get an alert from my phone asking me if I'd like to view my phone usage report.  I always ignore it.  It's one of those annoying features that I'd shut off if I knew how, and it's not quite annoying enough to figure out how.   But I looked at it a few weeks ago.  I was stunned! I could not believe how many hours A DAY I was spending on my phone!  Four hours!  That's 28 hours a week!  The other stat that surprised me was how many times a day I pick the phone up and look at it.  And the report showed me what I was doing on my phone and for how long.  I guess it shouldn't be surprising.  We use our phones for everything from calls, to emails, to texts, to social media and entertainment.  We play games.  Most people grab that phone and look at it whenever they have a spare moment.  We just can't be bored for one second anymore.  Even...

  "Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." Galatians 5:25 Earlier this week at my weekly Bible study, we were looking at Galatians 5:16-26.  We talked about the acts of the flesh in 19-20 and then the fruits of the Spirit in 22-23.  We had a great conversation about these verses--the challenges of the flesh and the benefits of the fruit.  When we got to verse 25, one of the members of my group made an excellent point that I wanted to share.   It was about how we deal with the challenges our flesh often throws at us.  The example was patience--some in my group were really challenged in this area.  The point that was made by one of the members of the group was that too often we try to master these weaknesses by suppressing them.  We bite our tongue when we're impatient.  We try and suppress our frustration when we feel it rising.  What this verse is saying to us, is when we walk with or stay in step with the...