MY PRAYER FOR YOU
May you have enough—
— character to make you honorable
— trials to make you helpful
— sorrow to make you humble
— grace to make you healthy
— wisdom to make you holy
— faith to make you hopeful
— hope to make you happy
— love to make you hospitable
Then my friend, you will never be lacking in the things that matter most.
With these you will be blessed and a blessing.
Think about it! —HDS

This is the last day of the year, and my last article of the year. That serves to remind me that someday will be my last day. That would be a sad day were it not for the fact that then comes the best day! If you are a Christian you have every reason to be excited about the future.

We often hear it said, “No man knows the future”–but that’s not altogether true. Indeed we do not know what tomorrow holds, nor do we know the details of future days or the day of our death. But we do know what is to come as revealed in the Bible. I often say, “For the Christian, the future always looks bright if we look far enough ahead”, and ” For the Christian the best is always yet to come”. If you are going to conquer the difficulties of today and cope with the uncertainties of tomorrow you need to keep that in mind.

When life is at it worst, remember what Paul said in 2 Cor. 5:1,”For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens”. And that is just one of many helpful scriptures. Regardless of what bad and sad situation you can envision, God has a promise to encourage you. By keeping your attention on those “exceeding great and precious promises”(2 Pet. 1:4) and yielding yourself to the Spirit’s control you can defeat every foe you ever face.

Between today and the last day, before the best day, everyday will present you with challenges of some sort. But you need not despair–Christ, the “Rock of Ages” and “Ancient of Days” will be with you every moment of every day until the best day comes when you will be with Him—forever! Until then, be not discouraged by the roughness of the way, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory”( 2Cor. 4:17). I told you–” the future looks bright– the best is yet to come!” Think about it!
Happy New Year, Bro. Stone

If I—-
— oppose Obama, I’m a racist.
— support Israel, I’m a Zionist.
— declare what the Bible says about the husband/wife relationship, I’m a male- chauvinist pig.
— condemn abortion, I’m a woman hater.
— say able bodied people ought to work for a living rather than depend on welfare, I’m inconsiderate.
— support the Tea Party, I’m a right-wing extremist.
— don’t have a drink with you at Happy Hour, I’m “holier than thou”.
— insist on my constitutional rights to keep and bear arms, I’m a threat to society.
— quote what the Bible says about homosexuality, I’m a bigot.
— call for stricter border control, I’m prejudice.
— state documented facts to prove a point, I’m a conspiracy theorist.
— don’t agree with you, I’m misinformed.
— challenge what you say, do or think, I’m intolerant.
So, where do you draw the line? Or perhaps you think there shouldn’t be any lines– unless, of course, they are the ones you impose on others.

What do you want me to do– curl up in a fetal position, sucking my thumb, watching people like you dictate what happens? Sorry to burst your bubble, but that ain’t gonna happen! As long as I have ounce of strength in my body, or breath in my lungs, I’m going to declare God’s Word as it is to men as they are.

As “Bud” Robinson prayed, “O Lord, give me a backbone as big as a saw log, and ribs like the sleepers under the floor; put iron shoes on me, and galvanized breeches, and hang a wagon load of determination up the gable end of my soul, and help me to sign the contract to fight the devil as long as I have a fist, and bite him as long as I’ve got a tooth, and then gum him till I die!”

If you are on the other side of the issues that’s a choice you made. I’ve also made my choice. If it puts you and I at odds so be it. If standing for what is right means standing against you then that’s the way it must be. Pleasing you is not the primary goal in my life. My only purpose is to glorify God through obedience to His word. Hearing Him say, “Well done” is all that matters. Regardless of what you might think about us as Christians, we love you. And, because we love you, your protest against us, for hating the sin that is destroying soul, will not silence us. Think about it.

Well, with Christmas just ahead, many children are making out their “wish list”. Kids, however, aren’t the only ones who do this. We all tend to wish for things we want. I remember as a boy I had a desire to be six feet tall. I don’t know why that was so important to me, but since my dad was only 5′-8″ it didn’t look too promising. But I kept wishing and the closer I got to that magic mark the more I checked my height. Finally one day it happened! Guess what– although my dream had come true it didn’t make me any happier. I started another list. This time I wanted to look like Charles Atlas– you gotta be my age to know who he was. A modern day equivalent might be Duane Johnson–aka “The Rock”. Yeah you probably already guessed–that dream didn’t come true.

To this very day I can think of things I wish were different. I wish I was smarter. I wish I had a photographic memory. I wish I could still do a 100 push-ups and bench press 350 pounds. I wish I could sleep all night without waking up. I wish all the aches and pains would go away. I wish my wife was in perfect health, and that all my loved ones never had any problems, etc. I’ll spare you the rest. And, I bet you have a wish list also. For the most part these are harmless desires and we’ll get along just fine without them, but sometimes even these can get out of hand. We can become so obsessed, driven by our dreams, that we make ourselves miserable because they aren’t realized. We feel we just can’t be happy unless it happens. We fail to enjoy what we have (and don’t deserve) because we don’t have what we want. Therefore we are never happy for any length of time because our wish list keeps changing.

It is a sad fact that most people are not satisfied with the way God made them, nor with what He gives them. It is not until we get to the point of being pleased with pleasing God that we are able to overcome this problem. The great thing about this is that while some dreams are out of our reach this can be true of every Christian. To please God all we have to do is to do the best we can with what we’ve got– simply be faithful. We are not in competition with anyone else. We will be judged and rewarded on the basis of our faithfulness to God, not out-doing others. Rather than wishing for things you don’t have just trust God to give you what you need– that will be better than getting what you wanted. If your “wish list” is one of legitimate desires turn it into a prayer list, then if you don’t get what you asked for you don’t need it. God will give you something better. Trust Him. Think about it!

Every once in awhile you start reading something and you just can’t stop. That’s the position I found myself in when I started reading this article by the late A. W. Tozer. It addresses a real need today and I believe it is worthy of your consideration.
Some Things Are Not Negotiable

WILL ROGERS ONCE OPINED that a sure way to prevent war would be to abolish peace conferences.

Of course Will, as usual, had his tongue in his cheek; he meant only to poke fun at the weak habit of substituting talk for action. Still there is more than a little uncomfortable truth in his remark.

This above all others is the age of much talk. Hardly a day passes that the newspapers do not carry one or another of the headlines “Talks to Begin” or “Talks to Continue” or “Talks to Resume.” The notion back of this endless official chatter is that all differences between men result from their failure to understand each other; if each can discover exactly what the other thinks they will find to their delight that they are really in full agreement after all. Then they have only to smile, shake hands, go home and live happily ever after.

At the bottom of all this is the glutenous, one-world, all-men-are-brothers philosophy that has taken such hold on the minds of many of our educators and politicians. (The hardheaded realists of the Communist camp know better; maybe that is why they are makingsuch alarming advances throughout the world while the all-men-are-brothers devotees are running around in confusion, trying to keep smiling if it kills them.)

Tolerance, charity, understanding, good will, patience and other such words and ideas are lifted from the Bible, misunderstood and applied indiscriminately to every situation. The kidnaper will not steal your baby if you only try to understand him; the burglar caught sneaking into your house with a gun is not really bad; he is just hungry for fellowship and togetherness; the gang killer taking his victim for a oneway ride can be dissuaded from committing murder if someone will only have faith in his basic goodness and have a talk with him. And this is supposed to be the teaching of Jesus, which it most certainly is not.

The big thing now is to “keep in touch.” Never let the dialogue die and never accept any decision as final; everything can be negotiated. Where there is life there is talk and where there is talk there is hope. “As long as they are talking they are not shooting at each other,” say the advocates of the long palaver, and in so saying they forget Pearl Harbor.

This yen to confer has hit the church also, which is not strange since almost everything the church is doing these days has been suggested to her by the world. I observe with pained amusement how many water boys of the pulpit in their effort to be prophets are standing up straight and tall and speaking out boldly in favor of ideas that have been previously fed into their minds by the psychiatrists, the sociologists, the novelists, the scientists and the secular educators. The ability to appraise correctly the direction public opinion is moving is a gift not to be despised; by means of it we preachers can talk loudly and still stay out of trouble.

A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads “Thou shalt not disagree”; and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins “Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything.” It is now the accepted thing to talk over religious differences in public with the understanding that no one will try to convert another or point out errors in his belief. The purpose of these talks is not to confront truth, but to discover how the followers of other religions think and thus benefit from their views as we hope they will from ours.

It is a truism that people agree to disagree only about matters they consider unimportant. No man is tolerant when it concerns his life or the life of his child, and no one will agree to negotiate over any religious matter he considers vital to his eternal welfare. Imagine Moses agreeing to take part in a panel discussion with Israel over the golden calf; or Elijah engaging in a gentlemanly dialogue with the prophets of Baal. Or try to picture our Lord Jesus Christ seeking a meeting of minds with the Pharisees to iron out differences; or Athanasius trying to rise above his differences with Arius in order to achieve union on a higher level; or Luther crawling into the presence of the pope in the name of a broader Christian fellowship.

The desire to be liked even if not respected is a great weakness in any man’s character, and in that of a minister of Jesus Christ it is a weakness wholly inexcusable. The popular image of the man of God as a smiling, congenial, asexual religious mascot whose handshake is always soft and whose head is always bobbing in the perpetual Yes of universal acquiescence is not the image found in the Scriptures of truth.

The blessing of God is promised to the peacemaker, but the religious negotiator had better watch his step. The ability to settle quarrels between members of God’s household is a heavenly gift and one that should be assiduously cultivated. The discerning soul who can reconcile separated friends by prayer and appeal to the Scriptures is worth his weight in diamonds.

That is one thing, but the effort to achieve unity at the expense of truth and righteousness is another. To seek to be friends with those who will not be the friends of Christ is to be a traitor to our Lord. Darkness and light can never be brought together by talk. Some things are not negotiable.( Think about it!)