Thoughts and Happenings
Edward
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Posts by Edward
Prayer and Exercise
Jan 4th
Strange title you say? Yes, I thought so too. A couple of months ago or so, I did a breakout study in our adult Sunday school class on the importance of personal devotions or having a daily “quiet time.” We take it for granted that healthy bodies require regular food, exercise and sleep but too often we neglect any kind of regular maintenance for our spiritual lives. I ended the series with an illustration using a jar with rocks and pebbles that showed very graphically that if we get the important things into our life jar first we actually get more in. Translation: you can’t beat having your quiet time in the early morning. No phones. No kids. No distractions. Your time with God then becomes the organizing principle around which the rest of your day revolves and you actually get more done and end up being happier and less stressed out in the long run. One of the best illustrations in Scripture is the manna in the wilderness. It always fell in the early morning, and if you didn’t get up and about and collect your manna, it disappeared with the rising sun. I’d like to write a book about it some time, but when will I get time for that?
Now to the exercise part. This evening I was doing some internet research (don’t you love Google!) on the question of whether it’s more beneficial to exercise in the morning or the evening. What I found was that it doesn’t really matter all that much as far as weight loss, etc., BUT studies do show that those who exercise early in the morning are more CONSISTENT. In other words, of those people who begin a new exercise program, those who chose the early morning for this activity were more likely to still be doing it a year later. Why? Because it’s easier to establish and maintain a consistent habit early in the day. Those who chose the afternoon or evening were more prone to allowing other activities to crowd out their exercise time. Which is exactly why the early morning is the best time of the day for establishing a regular, consistent devotional life. I was especially impressed with posters on a certain internet message board who reported regularly rising at 5:00 in the morning to exercise! Talk about commitment! I remember once reading one of the old time Puritans or early Methodists who said he was ashamed whenever he awoke to the sound of workers on their way to their daily labors in the early morning hours and he had not yet started his quiet time with God. The early morning exercisers ought to shame us into keeping an early morning appointment with God.
How to Make Spiritual Progress
Sep 7th
Speaking of Tozer, I’m currently reading another of his books called Man, the Dwelling Place of God and came across this helpful passage this morning:
Here are a few suggestions (on how to make spiritual progress):
- Strive to get beyond mere pensive longing. Set your face like a flint and begin to put your life in order. Every man is as holy as he really wants to be. But the want must be all-compelling. Tie up the loose ends of your life. Begin to tithe; institute family prayer; pay up your debts as far as possible and make some kind of frank arrangement with every creditor you cannot pay immediately; make restitution as far as you can; set aside time to pray and search the Scriptures; surrender wholly to the will of God. You will be surprised and delighted with the results.
- Put away every un-Christian habit from you. If other Christians practice it without compunction, God may be calling you to come nearer to Him than these other Christians care to come. Remember the words, “Others may, you cannot.” Do not condemn or criticize, but seek a better way. God will honor you.
- Get Christ Himself in the focus of your heart and keep Him there continually. Only in Christ will you find complete fulfillment. In Him you may be united to the Godhead in conscious, vital awareness. Remember that all of God is accessible to you through Christ. Cultivate His knowledge above everything else on earth.
- Throw your heart open to the Holy Spirit and invite Him to fill you. He will do it. Let no one interpret the Scriptures for you in such a way as to rule out the Father’s gift of the Spirit. Every man is as full of the Spirit as he wants to be. Make your heart a vacuum and the Spirit will rush into fill it. Nowhere in the Scriptures nor in Christian biography was anyone ever filled with the Spirit who did not know that he had been, and nowhere was anyone filled who did not know when. And no one was ever filled gradually.
- Be hard on yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back of another. Begin to practice the presence of God. Cultivate the fellowship of the Triune God by prayer, humility, obedience and self-abnegation.
Let any Christian do these things and he will make rapid spiritual progress. There is every reason why we should all go forward in our Christian lives and no reason why we should not. Let us go on.
The Root of the Righteous
Sep 7th
Anyone who knows me very well knows that A. W. Tozer is one of my all-time favorite authors. In fact, if I were to be stranded on a desert island with only two books, my choice would be the Bible and The Pursuit of God. But strange to say, I had never read his The Root of the Righteous until recently. And all I can say is Wow! This is almost as good as Pursuit. It seems like every sentence is loaded. The book has 46 short chapters. I read one or two per day during my morning quiet times and easily found one or two sentences that were well worth tweeting each morning. The chapters do not necessarily follow any order or any one subject, being a collection of editorials he wrote for The Alliance Witness. If you have never read this book before, I give it my highest recommendation. Take it for a spin in your daily quiet times. You will find yourself being stimulated to prayer and longing for more of God.
iBookstore Progress
Aug 28th
Well, it looks like things are improving for those who want to make submissions to the iBookstore. In my earlier posts I complained that the second book I tried to submit kept giving me an import error, and despite many contacts with iBookstore support, they could never really tell me how to fix the problem or really where to find the problem–just that somewhere in the ePub was an “unallowed character.” I finally decided to lay the whole thing to rest for a while, but then the other day my interest got sparked again and I decided to see if I could figure out where this unallowed character was. I began searching online for tools that would help me in the search. Before actually downloading or buying any of the tools I found, I decided to try submitting the book one more time to see if Apple’s reporting of errors had improved to the point where they would tell me where to find the problem. And lo and behold! After changing NOTHING in the submitted file, my book was accepted and is now showing up as “pending” in my iTunes Connect account! Hopefully within a few days it will be available for purchase in the iBookstore.
Divisive Leaders
Jul 24th
In our adult Sunday school class we’ve been doing a somewhat in-depth study of 1 Corinthians. We’ve progressed as far as chapter 3 and this coming Sunday (well, tomorrow actually!) we’ll be looking at verses 10 and onwards. It’s a very powerful passage. My main purpose for this blog post though is to quote something I found on Bible.org by Bob Deffinbaugh. Those who know me well will know immediately which “leader” came to mind when I read his comments. Here’s what he says:
I know of several men whose failures have caused great damage to the church and to the cause of the gospel. There seems to be one common element in these disasters—the men who fell were so powerful, and their control so great, that they seemed almost “unstoppable.” The reason for this: these leaders were so elevated and revered in the minds of their followers that they were considered beyond the temptations and sins of mankind. When men are elevated too highly in the minds of their followers, the people begin to think their leaders are infallible, that they are above the sins we see in ordinary people. And so they refuse to believe the evidences of sin, even when they are compelling. Even if they are guilty of known sin, no one seems to feel sufficiently qualified to attempt to rebuke or correct them.
The problem of esteeming leaders too highly starts very subtly and innocently. It begins with a deep respect and appreciation, often because this individual has led them to Christ, or that he (or she) has significantly contributed to their spiritual growth. This one person is given excessive credit for the work of God and elevated to a position of authority above what should be given to men. Allegiance to this leader becomes a status symbol in which followers take great pride. Out of this misguided allegiance, they feel obligated to ignore or even oppose other Christian leaders.
Elevating any human leader more than we should is a huge mistake, and can have devastating consequences in our spiritual lives, as Paul tried to show the Corinthians.
Abraham Lincoln
Jul 9th
Last night we visited the Lincoln Amphitheatre in Lincoln State Park, Lincoln City, Indiana. I had been to the amphitheatre a couple of times several years ago to watch a play about Abraham Lincoln’s early years, concentrating on the time he spent in Indiana, and also a rendition of Fiddler on the Roof. The theatre closed down in 2005, but was reopened last year. I have to say that I was a bit disappointed. The actual play was not as good as the one I remembered seeing there some years ago. The current one is too difficult to follow. It begins with Lincoln’s assassination, and then has flashbacks to his boyhood years in Indiana, combined with flashbacks of his presidency and the Civil War. The cast did an excellent job. I just think the script was not the greatest. Seems like maybe they tried to cram too much into a short space, or having two storylines running together was confusing or something. On the upside, they did throw in a lot of good quotes from Lincoln, which were interesting (but mostly already forgotten!), and the guy who played Lincoln as president did an excellent job. Also, it seems like the acoustics weren’t as good as what I remember from before. I had a really hard time telling what people were saying. You had to listen very carefully and watch their mouths move. And to make matters worse, a pretty good thunderstorm came through, which made it even harder to hear for a while. Oh well. My kids all said they enjoyed it so I suppose that’s worth something.
July 4th Party, 2010
Jul 5th
Below are a few photos snapped at the July 4th party, 2010, which as usual was held in the hay field on the Hilltop. Click on a photo to enlarge it. Click anywhere to close the enlargement.
