Posted on

Life On God’s Team

by

image

I remember being in elementary school and playing games on the playground at recess. The worst feeling was when two “captains” had been selected for dodgeball, kickball, or some other fun game and there you stood in a group of young, eager, insecure kids – all hoping to be chosen first and perhaps praying just not to be chosen last.

I was always a “decent” player – not awesome or horrible, so I usually got chosen somewhere in the middle, and I was fine with that. But I always felt sorry for the little, uncoordinated kid who got chosen last and felt the sting of it every time (“We really don’t want you, but SOMEONE has to take you…”).

Being a kid can be rough for sure. Being an adult can be just as hard.

People often assess our worth by what we have to contribute: talents, beauty, connections, skills, gifts, money, or time. It can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that God is the same way.

Embracing Our Identity as God’s Children

My last post touched on this – we want to believe what the Bible says is true: that He loves us unconditionally, that He has made us in His image and that we are His unique work of art (Ephesians 2:10).

We want to embrace our identity in Christ but may battle with fears, doubts and insecurities. We can be easily tripped up by besetting sins and the guilt that accompanies them (“Why can’t I just change already?! Why do I still struggle with this? God must not be pleased with me…”)

God has some great news for us! We don’t have to be perfect for God to choose us to be His children. In fact, it’s actually the opposite.image

You have to know that you don’t deserve to be chosen by Him, that you don’t have anything great to offer the Creator of the Universe that He didn’t give you in the first place. All you have to offer is your broken self, trembling in weakness, and ready to be molded by His steady hand.

You don’t have to show your badge, your awards or honors or credentials or SAT scores. You don’t have to show a perfect record: “Look God! I didn’t lose my temper all day long!”

What It’s Like to Be On God’s Team

God chooses some crazy players for His team, that’s for sure. We’ve all got our scars and our limps – but He loves each of us passionately and urges us on to grow every day to be more like Him.

He doesn’t praise us for making A’s or running the bases fastest, or getting on the NY Times Bestseller list or winning the big deal. But He does get all giddy inside when our hearts are turned towards Him, motivated by His love and grace to serve and love others and to do the best with what we’ve been given.

He is pleased when, in the secret place (where only He sees), we say “no” to sin and “yes” to Him, when we lay down our idols and pick up our cross, when we receive His warm embrace and let it warm us from from the inside out instead of giving Him the cold shoulder.

I’ve got great news for you today, friend. You have been chosen as a child of the Great High God – the King of the Universe. The One before whom every creature will one day bow in reverence and worship – that same God has looked on you with love and said, “I want her on my team. I want him in my family.”

Nothing can separate us from His love (Romans 8) but we can choose to resist it. Resist no more.

Bask in the joy of being chosen by God.

You’re on His Team. And guess what? His team wins.

Posted on

Believing What God Says About You

by

image

In the children’s book “You are Special” by Max Lucado, a little wooden boy named Punchinello can’t seem to get other people to like him. He’s not smart, athletic, handsome, or gifted. So the other wooden people called Wemmicks stick gray dots on him instead of golden stars. In fact, all of the Wemmicks are covered with either gray dots or golden stars.

One day, Punchinello meets a Wemmick who doesn’t have any stars or dots on her. When he asks her why, she simply tells him that he needs to come to the woodcarvers shop and meet Eli, the maker of the Wemmicks. Upon meeting him, Eli tells Punchinello, “You are special because I made you – and I don’t make mistakes.” As he hears this, Punchinello thinks to himself, “I think he really means it,” and as he thinks this thought, a gray dot falls off of him.

I love this story because it is a great illustration of how we live our lives. We run around giving ourselves and each other marks – good or bad. We praise some and put down others. We admire and applaud or we criticize and condemn. We are a fickle people.

Real Life Wemmicks

image

In Acts 14, we read that the Apostle Paul together with his partner in ministry, Barnabas, were preaching powerfully and God was doing miraculous signs and wonders through them. When they were in Lystra, they prayed for a man who had been crippled from his birth and he was healed.

As a result, the crowd that saw this miracle decided that Paul and Barnabas were the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes and could scarcely be restrained from sacrificing to them.

Shortly after this “Worship Paul” fest, some Jews from Antioch arrived and won the crowd over to their side. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of town, thinking he was dead.

Why You Shouldn’t Live for the Praise of Man

This story from Paul’s life is a great example of how quickly people can change their opinion of someone. Moments before they stoned Paul, the same people were literally worshipping him. Go figure.

Crowds are fickle. People’s opinions can change rapidly. But I love how this story ends. The people who really loved Paul gathered around him and helped raise him up.

Then what did Paul do? Whine to his friends that people were mean to him? Lick his wounds and mope for awhile that he wasn’t popular with the crowd anymore?

Not Paul. He literally “got up and went back into the town. The next day he left with Barnabas for Derbe” (verse 20).

He didn’t care what people thought about him because he didn’t live for their approval. In fact, he wrote to the church of Galatia that when you choose to follow Christ, you are choosing to make His opinion of you the only one that matters:

“For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Galatians 1:10).

Believing What God Says About You

image
Punchinello and Paul have something in common. Both of them learned how to keep the opinions of people from “sticking” to them and keeping them down. They learned to listen to the only opinion that mattered: their Maker’s.

Have you listened too long to voices who say that you won’t amount to anything? That you’re too much of this or not enough of that? Maybe the most critical voice you hear is your own.

The only way to silence those voices is to drown them out with the Voice of Heavenly Love – the One who created You and says, “You are special because I made you – and I don’t make mistakes.”

Choose to believe what HE says about you today. Stand up, shake off the opinions of others and live your life for God alone.

His is the only approval that you need.

Posted on

10 Great Reasons to Turn Off the T.V.

by

image
According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.

The most disturbing stat to me in this report is that children ages 2-11 spend an average of 24 hours a week in front of the tube. That’s 1/7 of their whole week!

We are some of the weirdos out there who don’t have cable. Our exposure to T.V. is pretty much limited to an occasional family movie night over the weekend. So I would say our family averages 2 hours a week or less of time in front of the screen.

There are multiple reasons we have decided to limit our time in front of the tube. I think I could probably come up with 100, but 10 will have to suffice for the length of a blog post 🙂

10 Great Reasons to Turn Off the T.V.:

1. More Time with God – Most of us are busy people. We may find it difficult to see when we can make time for a personal and reflective devotional life. Here may be a simple solution: Give up T.V., movies, and/or social media and choose instead to invest that time in prayer, bible study, and personal worship.

2. More Time with People – I have been in homes where the television stayed on continually. Conversations would be interrupted, diverted, or non-existent due to the distraction of a T.V. screen.

When you turn off the set, you have time to really talk – to connect. To hear someone express their complete thoughts on a subject that is important to them. To play a game (yes, a board or card game or even just hide and seek) with your child.

People are more awesome than T.V. because they can love you back.

3. Less Wasted Time – I love this quote:

“Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos… two hours later your fingers are yellow and you’re no longer hungry, but you haven’t been nourished.” ~Clifford Stoll

It’s pretty much the same with T.V. I have often heard people lament “That is two hours of my life that I can never get back!”

4. Greater Contentment – Commercials are great at showing us everything we don’t have, making us hungry when we just finished a big dinner, and insisting that we “owe ourselves” some stupid item that is utterly forgettable.

In addition, sitcoms and movies can present unreal lives and views of romantic love (among other things) that can leave us discontent with the reality of our own lives. As Sally’s friend says to her in “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You don’t want to be in love! You want to be in love IN A MOVIE!”

5. Better Personal Health – I don’t have space to quote all the stats that prove how frequent T.V. watching promotes a sedentary lifestyle and contributes to health problems such as obesity, insomnia, and other major issues in our country. When you are “zoned out” in front of the screen, you can easily put away an entire bag of chips or a pint of ice cream without even noticing.

It’s also easy to get “lost” in a movie or show and stay up way too late, thus depriving you of much needed sleep that will leave you stumbling into your morning with less focus and energy.

6. More Time to Read – My whole family loves to read. I adore reading a wide variety of books – from classics to spiritual growth books to biographies or educational ones – they all leave my soul richer, wiser, and more thoughtful.

For many of you, there may be a whole list of books you have wanted to read but just “haven’t had the time.” Cut out T.V. and media and see how many of those books you can knock off your list!

7. Less Stress – How, might you say, will cutting out T.V. time also help eliminate some stress from your life? Well, the time you spend watching T.V. can divert you from things you really actually need to do – like fixing a broken faucet, cleaning the kitchen, or packing your kids lunches for the next day.

8. More Quiet Space and Solitude

“We all need empty hours in our lives or we will have no time to create or dream.” ~Robert Coles

Quiet time to just reflect, create, work on a hobby or project or goal you want to achieve is priceless. Embrace it and thrive.

9. To Be An Example to the Next Generation –

image

I’m going to go off on a little tangent here about kids watching T.V. because I have a bunch of them. Kids are amazingly creative individuals who have the capacity to create their own fun, use their minds, imagine, work with others, and accomplish great things…if we don’t dumb them down with excessive screen time.

When we expect our kids to need to be entertained by a t.v., tablet, ipod, or other electronic gadget, we are in essence saying to them that we don’t think they have the capacity to create their own fun.

When your kids observe your face buried in a book or working in your garden when you have free time, they are going to follow your example and do the same. However, if they see you turn on the T.V. or sit in front of the computer in every spare moment, they will do the same. It really is that simple.

10. To Live Your Life Instead of Watching Someone Else’s (Real or Fake One). Enough said.

What are some reasons you can come up with to give up T.V. or drastically reduce your screen time? I would love to hear from you! Let’s make the choice today to plug in to real life and turn off the television!

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...