After watching this video I believe that Jason Gray genuinely loves life!
When you know Jesus as your personal Lord, Savior, Redeemer, and Friend it is truly GOOD TO BE ALIVE!
Good To Be Alive
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Tag Archives: Life
Living the Dream
This morning on my way to the church I heard this song. It put a smile on my face as I considered the song’s message. Life is quite different from what I dreamed it would be thirty years ago in highschool; nevertheless, I am living the dream!
I hope this uplifting song puts a spring in your step, a smile on your face, and moves you to go out today and live the dream.
Lessons From Kindergarten
It has been quite a while since I last read Robert Fulghum’s book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” So, today I decided to take it out, read the first chapter, and remind myself just how simple life can be.
In the first story of the book Mr. Fulghum talks about his life’s Credo:
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.
These are the things I learned:
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Don’t hit people.
- Put things back where you found them.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
- Wash your hands before you eat.
- Flush.
- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
- Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
- Take a nap every afternoon.
- When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
- Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
- Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
- And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.
Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all – the whole world – had cookies and milk at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
Source: “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN” by Robert Fulghum.
Signs of Life
“Signs of Life” is a forty day devotional by Dr. David Jeremiah. In the book we are given daily examples of the signs of life that should be found in an authentic Christian. It is a powerful study which reminds us that Christianity is not just about attending church. Christians are a new creation, a new life, a bright light, and an example of Jesus to the rest of the world. “Signs of Life” gives us explicit reminders of what this new Christian life is supposed to look like. After all, most people can tell when someone is physically alive or dead; so doesn’t it stand to reason that they can tell when a person is showing signs of the Christian life or not?
Each day the book starts out with a short thought. Day seven begins with these words, “We don’t stay on earth forever; but after we’re gone, our imprint remains.” Then, on day thirteen we read, “If you were a walking advertisement for the Lord, what would people learn about Him?” These two thoughts together can be very convicting depending on what it is you are advertising every day. Are we a commercial for Jesus Christ which demonstrates the reality of this new life? Is our new life influencing others toward Christ? How large of an imprint are we leaving? Will those who come behind us find us faithful?
Sunday morning we will be looking at the life of a man who left a giant-sized imprint on the landscape of his time. In fact, his advertisement for Christ was so large that we are still following his example today.
Saul of Tarsus was a man who hated the blasphemous, demon-possessed, false teacher Jesus of Nazareth. His hatred was so great, he set out to find, arrest, try, convict, and then kill anyone who would not recant their faith in the man who had died by hanging on the cross.
I would like to invite you to Living Oaks Baptist Church as we look at this man’s life. We will see why he had such a passionate determination to destroy the followers of the Way. Then we will witness the miracle of his life being turned completely around. What could possibly make so drastic a change in someone’s life? Be sure to attend LOBC at 10:45 tomorrow morning to find the answer.
The Rescue!
Throughout Easter weekend I read several posts that greatly blessed my heart. “How the Resurrection Undoes Our Need to Be Proven Right” by Russell Moore was one of my favorites.
Dr. Moore writes:
As Jesus drowned in his own blood, the spectators yelled words quite similar to those of Satan in the wilderness: “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mk. 15:32).
But Jesus didn’t jump down. He didn’t ascend to the skies. He just writhed there.
The bloated corpse of Jesus hit the ground as he was pulled off that stake, spattering warm blood and water on the faces of the crowd.
That night, the religious leaders probably read Deuteronomy 21 to their families, warning them about the curse of God on those who are “hanged on a tree.” Fathers probably told their sons, “Watch out that you don’t ever wind up like him.”
Those Roman soldiers probably went home and washed the blood of Jesus from under their fingernails and played with their children in front of the fire before dozing off. This was just one more insurrectionist they had pulled off a cross, one in a line of them dotting the roadside. And this one (what was his name? Joshua?) was just decaying meat now, no threat to the Empire at all.
The corpse of Jesus just lay there in the silence of that cave. By all appearances it had been tested and tried, and found wanting.
If you had been there to pull open his bruised eyelids, matted there together with mottled blood, you would have looked into blank holes. If you had lifted his arm, you would have felt no resistance. You would have heard only the thud as it hit the table when you let it go. You might have walked away from that morbid scene muttering to yourself, “The wages of sin is death.”
But sometime before dawn on Sunday morning, a spike-torn hand twitched. A blood-crusted eyelid opened. The breath of God came blowing down into that cave, and a new creation flashed into reality.
God was not simply delivering Jesus (and with him all of us) from death. He was also vindicating him (and with him all of us). By resurrecting Jesus from the dead, God was affirming what he had said over the Jordan waters. He was declaring Jesus “to be the Son of God in power” (Rom. 1:4).
This was done, the Bible says, by “the Spirit of holiness.” This is the same Spirit who rested on Jesus at his baptism “like a dove” (Matt. 3:16). I wonder if, as the dovish Spirit alighted on him in the water and in the tomb, Jesus might have thought of the words of the Psalm the Devil would quote in the wilderness: “He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge” (Ps. 91:4).
With that kind of rescue, who needs to be proven right in any other way?
Note: The following post is an excerpt from Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011).
Bob Pittenger 