Month: October 2017

To please someone is to cause that person to feel happy and satisfied. To take only one’s own wishes into consideration in deciding how to act or proceed, is pleasing yourself. I believe all too often we jump to conclusions especially in this day of instant news feeds that are designed to grab our attention. Breaking news! This message is all about who are we trying to please.

1 Thessalonians 2:4 refers to the challenge we all have and that is who are we trying to please. “We aren’t trying to please people, but we are trying to please God, who continues to examine our hearts.”

I believe people are obsessed with being recognized. Halloween is a perfect example. It evolved from the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain and the fear of ghosts and ghouls to now about pleasing one another with fancy costumes and candy. It is a transition from a pagan ritual to party time. Why? Because it is more pleasing to dress up and pretend than deal with reality. Now, I do not want to sound like a party pooper but Halloween is actually “All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve” but where is the fun in that? I believe the danger in marketing Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas is that we tend to forget the real purpose of our existence. In my opinion, we should spend more time trying to please God and his desires for our lives rather than pleasing people.

Matthew 22 covers what appears to be 2 additional commandments to Love God and to Love your Neighbor as you love yourself. I submit that Love is the key to all of the commandments. How do we please God? Why don’t we start by being happy with who we are without the need to please somebody else. When we are happy in our existence, then we can be used by God to help others be happy and that  in my opinion pleases God more than anything we could do to gain recognition by others.

Enjoy God given sunsets in your life and be thankful He gives us this beauty to please us.

T

A written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something is an invitation. Do you get invitations to go to parties or some other events? I am sure like most of us we look at our calendar then consider the source or our options to accept or not. If it is a very important person or someone you respect, you may even clear your calendar to make sure you can accept the invitation. If the person or event is not considered to be of any substance or your time more valuable elsewhere you may simply decline the invitation. I do not believe any of us would be so vicious as to abuse the inviter or even kill them. Right? (Read Matthew 22:1-14 to understand the implications of such action.)

In Philippians 4:8-9, we are advised to focus our thoughts on doing good and practice the good things learned. Our society is full of conflicts or battles between good versus evil. The lines between the two are skewed according to one’s belief. You see it in politics especially. Who should we believe when the news media slants to one side over another. Unfortunately, social media tends to propagate the conflicts to understand who is right or who is wrong. No one really can be sure. Now, if your opinion over someone is so distorted that you would violently reject an invitation from that person, what a shame. Especially, if the one doing the invitation is a King, it would be even more scandalous. That is the essence of the scripture in Matthew. The knowledgeable of the time, could not see accepting an invitation from someone they refused to recognize. It is a shame that so many people are invited but because they have a distorted view of right and wrong they are left out of the party to suffer in this cold dark world alone.

T

By definition, baggage is what you bring with you. A deeper meaning reveals that baggage are “things that encumber one’s freedom, progress, development, or adaptability; impediments: intellectual baggage that keeps one from thinking clearly; neurotic conflicts that arise from struggling with too much emotional baggage.” Sound familiar? An asset is a “useful valuable thing, person, or quality.” When I got married over 38 years ago, I was asked if I had any impediments preventing me from entering into marriage. I was confused by that question but quickly recovered by saying no. Over the years of our blessed marriage, I have considered that question more deeply once I understood the question.

I believe we all carry around with us baggage and assets. We can own property or we can be owned by our property. This weekend my wife and I were blessed to get to know again somewhat forgotten cousins. We re-united for a day to remember days gone by as children and hopefully, rekindle new relations, new memories. Gathering around a piece of property you own to share common memories adds value and considered an asset. Making that piece of property a detriment to adaptability is baggage. We should feel free to fly using assets to our advantage.

In Philippians 3:4, Paul says “if anyone else has reason to put their confidence in physical advantage, I have….” Verse 7 says “these things were my assets, but I wrote them off as a loss for the sake of Christ.” Now, I am not recommending to sell all your property but I am suggesting we should change our attitudes to follow Christ. Norman Vincent Peale, published a booklet called “Thought Conditioners” where he referred to Philippians 3:13,14 and commented that if we are to have mental health and live successfully, we must move away from past failures and mistakes and go forward. He suggests we should learn the art of forgetting by dropping the day into the past when we sleep and look confidently to the future with God when we awake.

In Matthew 21:33-46, Jesus told a parable about a property owner who rented out his vineyard only to find the tenants decided to claim the property for themselves. They defended the  property from the owner’s representatives even by death. The result was destruction for those who believed they had a right to the property. God’s resources are his not ours. We are merely workers in his field so let us use these assets to add value to one another and not make baggage in our lives preventing our purpose according to Him.

T

Achieved without great effort, presenting few difficulties is a definition of the word easy. I believe we live in a world where many of us expect all things to be easy but life is not easy then we die. In this day of “if it feels good do it” we can live with that easy attitude but eventually the challenges of life will catch up with our efforts to avoid challenges. As the song says, “I never promised you a rose garden”. Yet, I believe many attempt to bypass the harder things in life by adopting a false belief. Some of the influences I believe is media driven. We hear, we see then we emulate what we perceive as reality. Whether what we believe is founded on sound principles or not, it becomes our truth that we easily accept as fact. Take taxes for example. I hate paying taxes but understand we should all pay our fair share. But my assumption is flawed because I believed everyone pays taxes. It never occurred to me before my mid 30’s that there are people who live off the hard work of others and never pay taxes because they never earn a wage. Not all are capable of earning a wage if they are mentally or physically challenged but I suspect that is a relatively small number. Others take the easy way out of paying taxes by not working. Simple strategy right? Maybe, but I believe eventually that attitude will lead to failure in life.

In Philippians 2:5, we are encouraged to “Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus. Though he was in the form of God….he emptied himself by taking the form of a salve and by becoming like human beings.” He did not take the easy way out. We are encouraged to be more Christ like which in itself means that we work in the mission fields not expected to be easy. Many of us go to Church and that is it. We think we have done our part. In my opinion, we gather together to worship and charge up our batteries for the next mission outside the walls of a building we call Church. We see temples, chief priests and elders teaching us by some authority but in Matthew 21:23 Jesus challenged them by saying “Who gave you this authority?”

I encourage you to continue reading then pray for directions to the next mission field expecting the mission not to be easy but go anyway because that is the right thing to do.

T