July 2015 Blog Posts (8)

“The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the might of the Spirit of God.” (Blaise Pascal)

God wants to make one thing perfectly clear—you and me! Our Creator commands us to live a radically holy life, morally superior to the unbelieving majority. Our Savior commissioned us to…

Our strength—or rather, our reliance upon it—is still pride. Therefore, it must be broken. Watchman Nee, in his book Changed into His Likeness, put it this way, “The characteristic of those who truly know God is that they have no faith in their own competence, no reliance upon themselves.” When we reach that point, we’re finally and truly useful to God.

Even much of the strength we think we have comes from our need to compare ourselves to others. We may be correct in…

God's Strange Process to Create Something Beautiful in You

Recently God gave me a stunning word picture while praying with a friend. Through no fault of his own, my friend had been going through a difficult and often bewildering trial.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a beautiful pearl being formed amid the darkness of an oyster shell.

Not knowing much about how pearls are formed, I later did some research at AmericanPearl.com and…

“True joy is the earnest which we have of heaven, it is the treasure of the soul, and therefore should be laid in a safe place, and nothing in this world is safe to place it in.” (John Donne, Sermons, 1624)

God has given us a recipe for living joyfully. If we ignore heaven’s instructions, we pay an awful price in heartbreak coin. God frowns on haphazard living and smiles on conscientiousness. When we submit to Holy Spirit directions, joy floods our inner…

If you’re anything like me, some days you feel like conquering the world—and other days the world seems to be conquering you. Although I usually respond pretty well when confronted with just one problem at a time, it’s overwhelming when the problems come at me from every side. Some days I feel like I’m playing a game of cosmic Whac-a-Mole, with troubles springing up everywhere.

Yet I’m comforted to know that many others have written about days when they were surrounded by…