How Do I Make This Relationship Work Joyce Meyer ❃Joyce Meyer❃
Originally posted 2016-03-08 15:47:09.
Originally posted 2016-03-08 15:47:09.
by Joyce Meyer – posted March 08, 2016 Jesus said, Go; it shall be done for you as you have believed.… —Matthew 8:13 Sometimes when I stand behind the pulpit, and before I speak, I pause and my gaze sweeps across the audience. I look at the faces of the people. I love to see the bright smiles and expressions of anticipation, but there are always a few who look downtrodden and discouraged. I don’t know anything about them and I don’t want to judge them, but their faces look sad. They look as if they have lost hope and expect nothing positive to happen—and too often, they get exactly what they expect. I understand those discouraged people; I was once one of them. Here’s a simple fact I’ve learned: Positive minds produce positive lives, but negative minds produce negative lives. The New Testament tells the story of a Roman soldier whose servant was sick, and the soldier wanted Jesus to heal him. That wasn’t uncommon—many wanted Jesus to heal them or their loved ones in those days. But this soldier, instead of asking Jesus to come to his servant, expressed his belief that if Jesus would just speak the word, his servant would be healed (see Matthew 8:8). Jesus marveled at his faith and sent out His word to heal the servant. The soldier’s positive mindset—his faith—brought positive results. He expected healing, and that’s exactly what happened. Too often, we cry to Jesus to heal us, to take care of our finances, or to deliver us from problems, but we don’t fully expect the good things to happen. We allow our minds to focus on the negative aspects. Doubt and unbelief war against our minds and steal our faith if we allow it. As I wrote in my book Battlefield of the Mind, many years ago I was extremely negative. I used to say that if I had two positive thoughts in a row, my mind would get in a cramp. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but that’s how I saw myself. I lived with the same philosophy that other people have: If we don’t expect anything good to happen, we won’t be disappointed when it doesn’t. I could have excused my negative attitude by telling everyone about my disappointments in life and I had many. It wasn’t just my lack of expectation. It was more than that. Because I thought negatively, I spoke negatively. When people told me of their spiritual victories, I’d think, That won’t last. When people spoke of their faith, I’d smile, but inwardly I would think that they were gullible. I could always figure out ways that plans would go wrong or people would disappoint me. Was I happy? Of course not. Negative thinkers are never happy. It’s too long of a story to explain how I came to face that reality, but once I realized what a negative person I was, I cried out to the Lord to help me. I learned that if I kept studying the Word of God, I could push away negative thoughts. God’s Word is positive and uplifting. My responsibility was to become the kind of believer who honors God with her thoughts, as well as with her actions and her deeds. I understood the remorse David must have felt when he wrote Psalm 51: Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your steadfast love… is the way he starts. I especially meditated on verse 9: Hide Your face from my sins and blot out all my guilt and iniquities. I hadn’t sinned the same way David did, of course, but my negative thinking and bad attitude was sin. It wasn’t just weakness or a bad habit. When I focused on negative thinking, I was rebelling against God. The Lord had mercy on me. As I continued in His Word and in prayer, He freed me from Satan’s stronghold. Freedom is available for all of us. Gracious God, thank You for every deliverance in my life. Thank You for setting me free from negative and wrong thinking. Thank You for defeating Satan in this area of my life. Amen. Originally posted 2016-03-08 15:43:53.
Sthembiso Shandu has said Tshwane University of Technology’s management wrong for halting classes and vacating students from residences. On Monday, 7 March university management issued a notice to students that classes on the Shoshanguve campus were off until 6 April 2016. The document also recommended students leave their residences by 14:00 on Tuesday, 8 March 2016 for their own safety. Shandu who is the Deputy Head on the Student Representative Council (SRC), told News24’s Karabo Ngoepe the university was “stupid” to shut down the campus. He said, “So this decision is wrong. It must be reviewed today or tomorrow. It must be reviewed.” He also remarked the tertiary institution was not the Vice Chancellor’s “tuckshop” but a national asset. News24 reporter Ngoepe noticed students leaving the South Campus, wheeling bags of luggage and even a small bar fridge from the morning of Tuesday, 8 March 2016. Taxis standing outside the gate were headed for Tshwane central, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Easter Cape. “We want lectures to be here,” he said. “We are not going to agree to a sense of saying that classes shall close simply because a white man is failing to meet us, is failing to sit in a table with us.” Ngoepe also reported fences on campus were broken on the South Campus in Shoshanguve. Watch the clip above. Originally posted 2016-03-08 15:28:14.
CS Lewis once described “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” as the most unpopular of the Christian virtues because in Christian terms “neighbour” encompasses enemies and because of this the command requires that we forgive our enemies. If you’ve ever had to forgive someone for doing something that really hurt you then you’ll most likely be able to understand where CS Lewis was coming from. Forgiveness isn’t easy among the best of friends, let alone the worst of enemies. The act of forgiveness defines so much of the Christian faith and the thought of what Jesus did so that our sins could be forgiven is overwhelming and inspirational. But process isn’t always viewed as this positive when we have to forgive someone for how they’ve wronged us. The parable of the unmerciful servant holds a mirror up to how we can act when we have to forgive someone. The servant whose debt is cancelled by the King has had an amazing gift bestowed upon him. He has been set free from an enormous and incomprehensible debt. But this same same servant showed no mercy to another who owed him a debt which was insignificant in comparison to the one that he had previously owed the King. The sins that others commit against us can feel anything but insignificant at the time but what the story reminds us that we too have sinned and been forgiven at a cost. God’s grace provides us with the perfect guide on which to model how we forgive others. What we learn from what Jesus teaches us about forgiveness is that true forgiveness knows no bounds, it doesn’t run out and we receive it even though we don’t deserve it. Jesus ended the parable with, “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart,” (Matthew 18:35). Here we’re reminded that love is at the centre of this act. To truly forgive someone we have to abandon all hopes and wants of exacting revenge and do away with our tally of their wrongdoings. Forgiving someone can be an extremely difficult thing to do and it can take a long time before we work up the spiritual strength to do so. Meditating on God’s grace and praying for the power to forgive can help us reach a point where we are able to wipe the slate clean. Thinking about how we’ve been forgiven is instrumental in understanding and working towards forgiving others. The impact that forgiving someone can have on our frame of mind, spirituality, physical health and our relationships is phenomenal. We don’t always realise but holding bitter thoughts or resentment towards another person can have devastating affects on our wellbeing. Not only does the act of forgiveness help set us free, but as forgiven people we have a duty to forgive others. Originally posted 2016-03-08 14:44:40.
Last month my esteemed Christian Today colleague Martin Saunders wrote a piece about the “three words that could save the internet (and make you happier)” – an irresistible headline that turned out to refer to “Be Kind Online”. “It feels good to help each other, to encourage, build up; shine a light into someone’s day,” he wrote. I’ve tried, I honestly have. And in writing about a National Geographic author interview with someone who’s written a book about the 12 apostles, I will make a titanic effort not to say exactly what I think about the editorial policy that lets such books into print. The work itself, Apostle, isn’t out till next month, so I haven’t read it. Normally, therefore, I wouldn’t comment on it. However, by giving an interview to the Nat Geog, author Tom Bissell has made himself fair game. Bissell, a lapsed Catholic, set off “to discover whether the Twelve Apostles were actual historical figures or merely characters in a fictional story”. His idea of historical research is to walk the 500-mile Camino de Santiago pilgrim route in Spain, visit the place where Judas reportedly hanged himself, and hunt (in vain) for a mysterious monastery in Kyrgyzstan where Matthew is supposed to be buried. He admits one of the greatest inspirations for the book is Monty Python’s Life of Brian. He tells the interviewer: “A couple of the names recorded in the New Testament are probably actual people. There was probably a Peter and a John, definitely a James (the brother of Jesus), and probably a Thomas. Beyond that, there’s nothing historical that verifies their existence other than the gospels themselves. So I think they’re a mixture of fact and fiction.” The trouble is that this might equally well be said of Bissell’s book. He tells us, for instance, that James, the brother of Jesus, “definitely existed”, but uses contested evidence from the Jewish historian Josephus to back up his claim. He asserts, on no evidence whatsoever, that James was Jesus’ older brother and that this “confounds everything orthodox Christians accept about the virgin birth”. Of the infamous “James Ossuary” which supposedly contained his bones, he says: “I’ve not seen the ossuary and I’m not a trained archaeologist, but I’m perfectly willing to believe that James could have had a secreted away tomb, with an ossuary.” But it’s in his comment about what would “verify the existence” of the apostles that he shows his hand, and a pretty poor one it is. For something to be “true”, he says, it has to be confirmed by a secular – and therefore rigorously factual, unbiased and trustworthy – account. If it’s only in the Bible, you can safely assume it’s fiction. All we have to go on is the interview, and the book might be full of far more detailed analysis, but I doubt it. So here are my gripes about this kind of writing, which has more in common with Dan Brown than with any serious historical research. 1. It fails to take the Bible seriously as history. Bissell – and plenty of others like him – have decided the apostles probably didn’t exist on grounds that would also rule out the existence of Jesus and Paul. If you’re going to pick and choose what you believe, at least be honest and say that’s what you’re doing. 2. It’s bad history. Anyone who blithely asserts that James was the elder brother of Jesus and so this disproves the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is not a serious historian. 3. It privileges the secular over the sacred. It assumes ‘real’ history comes from outside the Bible; anything in it is automatically suspect. But granting – as Bissell himself does – that these stories were shaped toward an end rather than being bald narrations of fact, the idea that the authors would simply have invented whole chunks of narrative just doesn’t hold water. They were concerned for the truth. We might, depending on our theory of biblical inspiration, accept they made mistakes; accepting they told lies is a different thing altogether. 4. It appears to argue from the insecurity of later traditions about the apostles to their non-existence at all. But if Bissell goes to Santiago de Compostella and finds no evidence James was there (it’s not clear from the interview), this says nothing about the existence of James. Ditto if he goes to Kyrgyzstan and finds no evidence for Matthew. There’s no earthly reason why he should, and the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Most Christians are perfectly at ease with biblical criticism and with the idea that the Bible can be analysed in terms of how and when it was written. Things aren’t always as they seem, we know that. The last 200 years has seen the Bible comprehensively taken apart. But it’s also seen it put back together, as well, and the onus is still on those who doubt the fundamental reliability of the New Testament stories to prove their case. In fact, nothing’s more likely than that the minor characters in the Gospel story should have disappeared. The story is not about them, it’s about Jesus. A far more interesting question than why most of the apostles faded out of history is, why Jesus has not. Originally posted 2016-03-08 14:17:14.
The Bible is decorated with stories of ordinary people who exemplified extraordinary courage, character and faith through the lives that they lived. The examples that many Bible characters gave included living out a life of faith and excellence as leaders, parents, children, and even as wives. God likens a relationship between a husband and wife to the relationship between Christ and the church. He gives solid guidelines and clear principles on how a woman is to respond to God’s grace and, as a result, she will live out a life honoring God through being a blessing to her husband and other people around her. God is not just calling women to be exemplary women in the workplace, as parents or as church leaders. He is also calling women to be great examples of faith by being a blessing to their husbands. The key to being exemplary wives is by relying on God’s love and grace and being filled with His joy and love so that she will be a channel of it to others. Here are four biblical examples of exemplary wives. Ruth Although single for a majority of the storyline, Ruth would become a bride that Boaz would be proud of. She exemplified extreme trust and loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi, and extreme hard work and perseverance. Esther The Queen Esther embodied true courage that comes only through the power of God. In boldness, she stood before the king to plead with him to lift a sentence that would eradicate all of her people even if it meant danger to her own life. She also showed great respect for her husband, the King Ahasuerus, by not judging him for making the wrong decisions. Sarah Imagine one day your husband telling you to pack all of your things and resign from all your endeavours because he was going to take you and all you own to a place that he has never even heard of. This is what Sarah had to go through, and with great faith she submitted herself to her husband, Abraham. Though she wasn’t always perfect, she remained faithful to her husband and to her God. Priscilla The wife of Aquila, Priscilla is one of the key reasons why the early church flourished and grew. A businesswoman by profession, Priscilla responded to the call of God to participate in the work of spreading the gospel by participating in various missions trips. Priscilla and Aquila were referred to by Paul as “fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life,” showing great loyalty to the church and to the work of Jesus Christ. Originally posted 2016-03-08 13:14:20.