The Bible Speaks

While doing a little walking through the Bible today, I came across some passages that I felt the need to share.

• On Marriage: So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It's your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it. Colossians 3:12-14 [MSG]
• On Worries: Don't fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life. Philippians 4:6-7 [MSG]
• On Delegation (and Trying To Do Too Much): Moses' father-in-law said, "This is no way to go about it. You'll burn out, and the people right along with you. This is way too much for you—you can't do this alone. Now listen to me. Let me tell you how to do this so that God will be in this with you. Be there for the people before God, but let the matters of concern be presented to God. Your job is to teach them the rules and instructions, to show them how to live, what to do. And then you need to keep a sharp eye out for competent men—men who fear God, men of integrity, men who are incorruptible—and appoint them as leaders over groups organized by the thousand, by the hundred, by fifty, and by ten. They'll be responsible for the everyday work of judging among the people. They'll bring the hard cases to you, but in the routine cases they'll be the judges. They will share your load and that will make it easier for you. If you handle the work this way, you'll have the strength to carry out whatever God commands you, and the people in their settings will flourish also." Exodus 18:17-23 [MSG]
• On Over-indulgence and Self Control: When you're given a box of candy, don't gulp it all down; eat too much chocolate and you'll make yourself sick; And when you find a friend, don't outwear your welcome; show up at all hours and he'll soon get fed up. Proverbs 25:16 [MSG]
• On Temper and Forgiveness: Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4:31 [MSG]
• On Greed: But if it's only money these leaders are after, they'll self-destruct in no time. Lust for money brings trouble and nothing but trouble. Going down that path, some lose their footing in the faith completely and live to regret it bitterly ever after. 1 Timothy 6:9-10 [MSG]

Some passage from the Bible just require no elaboration at all. Your comments? Joe

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Be Yourself

Today's Daily Soap {Scripture | Observation | Application | Prayer} FOR TODAY'S FULL READING, CLICK THE TITLE LINK ABOVE.

• S: He went on to tell a story to the guests around the table. Noticing how each had tried to elbow into the place of honor, he said, "When someone invites you to dinner, don't take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he'll come and call out in front of everybody, 'You're in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.' Red-faced, you'll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left. "When you're invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, 'Friend, come up to the front.' That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I'm saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face. But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself." Luke 14:7-11 [MSG]
• O: We reap greater rewards from just being ourselves than from trying to please everyone else.
• A: The world today is full of pretense. So many people are so busy trying to be someone else -- to please everyone and be something they really aren't -- that we often know people (or know of people) long before we actually really know them. Often this can actually be true in the closest of relationships, like marriage. Imagine not knowing some of your spouse's deepest secrets because he/she has always tried to please you and make you happy, even to the extent of never letting you really get to know them. Wouldn't it be so much better to really get to know someone -- the good and the bad -- than to be misled by their pretense? Whether it be family, friends, casual work acquaintances, or the politicians we elect to serve and represent us -- give me the real thing. We are so much more likely to pleased with ourselves and with others if we can all just be ourselves.
• P: Father, help me to be the me that You want me to be -- to rise above pretense and let the real me shine through.

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Your comments? Joe

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Communication

Today's Daily Soap {Scripture | Observation | Application | Prayer}

Today's SOAP inspired by the Men's Devotional Bible

• S: Song of Solomon 2:3-13; Psalm 85:10-13; Proverbs 3:1-6
• O: Love, faithfulness, and communication are interdependent characteristics of a lasting relationship.
• A: My wife and I sometimes run into a communication barrier. When she's busy, I want to talk. When she wants to talk, I'm busy. This morning as I sat down to read through this daily devotional, she started talking to me. I got frustrated. I was trying to spend some time with God, and my wife was interrupting us. When I complained, she was frustrated that I was sitting in the breakfast nook, where everyone could see me and be tempted to interrupt me. I explained that the kids weren't interrupting me, it was just her. I tried to remind her of my commitment to conduct my own personal devotional time every morning, and how easy it is to fall back on a commitment when you don't force yourself to build a habit of it (I have, after all, missed the past two days here and felt that getting through the process today was critical). In frustration, I closed up my laptop and stormed out of the room, pretty much resigned to giving up on it for the day. Then, without the barrier of the computer between us, we talked a little bit. When I told her the only other table convenient was in the dining room -- where I thought she wouldn't want me to set up at -- she suggested I do just that. So here I am, in the dining room, reading through a devotional that is all too fitting for the situation this morning. Relationships take work. Marriages, being the toughest and (hopefully) most enduring of all relationships, take an even greater effort. More work. They do not last without love. They do not last without faithfulness. They do not last without communication. Just as I mentioned on Average Joe American recently, communication is the cornerstone of any civilized society -- which includes any loving marriage. It can become too easy to spend all of our communication time talking about money, and bills, and the kids, and what needs done around the house, and all too easy to not spend it telling each other how we feel and what we need from each other. We must communicate. Both ways. All the time. About more than the mundane.
• P: Lord, help me to keep this realization of how important communication is to the success of my marriage. Help me to open my ears when my wife speaks and to remember that she is more important than whatever else is vying for my attention at the time. Help us both to open up the lines of communication and to share with each other what we think, how we feel, and what we need from each other. And help us to just put the mundane issues out of the way for a while.

READ TODAY'S DEVOTIONAL:

FIDELITY means a stubborn dedication to growth in personal relationship. A marriage partnership must have room for individual growth; but at the beating heart of any marriage is the delicate, fragile -- often painful -- but potentially joyful relationship of two persons face to face in personal encounter. The vital core of marriage is the special kind of sexual communion that vibrates on every level -- physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. All the institutional dimensions are only the framework for the dynamic center. And if partners are faithful in the complex ways mentioned above, their fidelity will mean a steady dedication to the growth of an honest and open relationship in every dimension. Fidelity is best practiced with an implicit understanding that the relationship happens within a permanent, lifelong structure. But within the structure of permanence, relationships are constantly shifting: they are never stagnagt, but grow deeper or become shallower. To be faithful means that we can never lazily accept the present as our fated destiny. For relationships never have to be what they are; they can change. The future has possibilities wherever two willing human beings affirm its possibilities for them. No one can make a claim to faithfulness in marriage if he does not keep the door open to the possibilities that his relationship can be better tomorrow than it is today. Personal relationships are nourished only through communication, and communication between two people enmeshed in daily preoccupations with jobs, budgets, diapers and new math can be very difficult to maintain. For one thing, it takes time . . . And, above all, it takes desire. Personal communication is difficult because it is painful for us to talk about what we are feeling; it is much easier to discuss the unbalanced checking account than to discuss how we feel toward wach other. But more, it is difficult because when we talk we are not sure what becomes of our message after it is filtered through the receptive apparatus of the person who receives it . . . Fidelity will give us the job of finding out what the other person is actually hearing from us and of patiently probing what the other person is acutally trying to say. --From the Men's Devotional Bible by Zondervan (link above)

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