Category Archives: Spiritual Development

Practical teachings from the Bible for every day living.

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Why the Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace Matters

Podcast: Light on Life Season 9 Episode 16

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There is a lot of conversation in the world today about the subject of unity. In some cases, the discussion is about the lack of it. Many seem to value it for its benefits; however, some have manipulated its benefits for personal gain. During World War II, Hitler commanded all religious groups to unite so that he could control them. Among the Brethren assemblies, half complied, and half refused. Those who went along with the order had a much easier time—those who did not face harsh persecution. In almost every family of those who resisted, someone died in a concentration camp. When the war was over, feelings of bitterness ran deep between the groups, and there was much tension. Finally, they decided that the situation had to be healed. Leaders from each group met at a quiet retreat. For several days, each person spent time in prayer, examining their own heart in the light of Christ’s commands. Then they came together. Francis Schaeffer, who told of the incident, asked a friend there, “What did you do then?” “We were just one,” he replied. As they confessed their hostility and bitterness to God and yielded to His control, the Holy Spirit created a spirit of unity among them. Love filled their hearts and dissolved their hatred. When love prevails among believers, especially in times of strong disagreement, it presents to the world an indisputable mark of a true follower of Jesus Christ. 1 Why the Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace Matters that’s our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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Are You A Passionate Seeker of Jesus?

[Tweet “Gentleness, that giant fruit of the Spirit is at work, when there is real God-style unity.”]

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Do You Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus? [Encore Podcast]

Podcast: Light on Life Season 9 Episode 15

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Do You Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?

One of my favorite shows from yesteryear was Get Smart. It was a show about a goofy secret agent. One of the popular catchphrases for the show was ‘would you believe.’ Maxwell Smart would say when he got caught by the bad guys, ‘would you believe.’ Here’s some of the dialogue. “I happen to know that at this very’ moment, eight Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe seven? Six? How about two cops in a rowboat?” Or, At this very minute, 25 Control agents are converging on this building. Would you believe two squad cars and a motorcycle cop? How about a vicious street cleaner and a toothless police dog? Or, I once trained a girl to swim across the English Channel five times. Would you believe four times? Would you believe three times across the Mississippi? How about twice around the bathtub? Once around the bathtub? Or, in a short while, General Crawford and a hundred of his crack paratroopers will come crashing into this landing. Would you believe J. Edgar Hoover and I0 of his G-men? How about Tarzan and a couple of apes? Bomba, the Jungle Boy? Or, at this very moment, 100 highway patrolmen with Doberman pinschers are surrounding this entire area. Would you believe four deputies and a bloodhound? How about a Boy Scout with rabies? The question arises, ‘do you believe in the Resurrection of Jesus? Do you believe it just like the Bible says it, or do you believe a watered-down ‘Maxwell Smart’ version of the events surrounding Jesus’ death?

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Three Things Jesus Did that You Can Do

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Why Applying the Word to Your Everyday Life Is Vital, Right, and True

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Fourteen

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Why Applying the Word to Your Everyday Life Is Vital, Right, and True

In today’s podcast, we are focusing our sights on the vital nature of applying the Word of God to your everyday life. I ran across this superb illustration that references translating the Bible into real life. The illustration talked about how many Christian wives led their husbands to the Lord. The key is a woman willing to live what she believes in each case. A small group of men concluded their weekly Bible study on one occasion. At the time, they were sharing their thoughts about all the different translations.

The first man said, “I’ll stick with the good old King James Version. It has always been my favorite.” The next man said, “I can’t understand that old English. The New American Standard is my choice for translation.” The third man was a recent believer. “My favorite translation is my wife. Her life translated the gospel into a language I could understand.”

What a great testimony! Living out the Word in a way that bears the fruit of salvation! Leadership Ministries Worldwide, Practical Illustrations: 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude (Chattanooga, TN: Leadership Ministries Worldwide, 2003), 87–88. Your goal, your aim, the target you need to shoot at is this: is your life the best translation of the Bible? We are over in Ephesians chapter four, and we are going to look at this thought as we focus on Why Applying the Word to Your Everyday Life Is Vital, Right, and True, all in this week’s Light on Life.

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#S2-001: Secrets to Hearing God: Are You Listening? [Podcast]

[Tweet “Because you have been blessed with every spiritual blessing, you should, therefore, walk a certain way.”]

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How to Get to Be the Strong Man God Wants You to Be

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Thirteen

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How to Get to Be the Strong Man God Wants You to Be

When we think about what a strong man is, people have all kinds of images that pop into their heads. To them, a strong man may conjure up pictures of some bodybuilder with gargantuan steroid injected muscularity. Some have a picture of legendary tough guy-type actors. Others have a concept like this guy in the following story.

An old fellow had been in the north woods for weeks by himself, camping out. Each night at dusk, he built a campfire, boiled water for coffee, and took out his skillet to fry up some bacon for dinner. As he was sitting by the fire one night, the water boiling and the bacon sizzling, he heard a tremendous racket in the brush. The sound was like a roaring freight train, and as trees fell over and branches snapped, the biggest bear he’d ever seen lumbered into the clearing. A tough-looking hombre holding a seven-foot live rattlesnake in his hands was on the bear’s back. The man shouted and screamed as he brought the bear to a skidding halt, bit the head off of the rattlesnake, and flung it into the brush. Then he slid off the bear’s back, turned, and hit him between the eyes, knocking him unconscious.; The camper was speechless as this wild-eyed renegade walked over to the fire, tossed the boiling coffee down his throat, drank the hot grease from the skillet, and ate all of the bacon in one bite. As he wiped his hands with poison ivy and slapped the bear back to consciousness, he turned to the camper and said, “Partner, I’m sorry I can’t stay around and visit with you a while, but I’ve got to keep moving ‘cause a real bad dude is chasing me!” Galaxie Software, 10,000 Sermon Illustrations (Biblical Studies Press, 2002). This is a comical example of a strong man. But all that aside, how do you get to be a strong man of God, not physically, but spiritually? Answering that question is our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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Reasons to Study Spiritual Manifestations

 

[Tweet “Do you think that a strong man or woman of God needs others praying for them? Absolutely yes!!”]

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Three Ways You Can Know That You Are Believing God

Encore Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Twelve

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Three Ways You Can Know That You Are Believing God

How can you know that you are believing God? What does it mean to have faith or to believe? How do you know if you really are believing God for healing or any other Bible promise? Jesus ministered healing to twenty-three individual cases. In the vast majority of these individual cases, you can see evidence of the person’s faith in connection with their healing.  You may have had those times where you thought you believed God, and nothing happened. You were believing God for some healing in your body, and you got no better fast. How do you know if you’ve connected? Everything is by faith. You know and expect by faith. If you want to connect with God, you have to speak in His domain. You have to speak His language. Otherwise, you won’t be heard. Heaven is a faith place. The domain of unbelief is not understood there. You will not connect with heaven’s power if you’re speaking in the wrong realm. So, how do you know if you really are trusting God? One way you can find out? Take the test. There are seven tests which you can apply, which we are going to go over. These are not all the tests there are. These are seven that I know about. In this podcast, we will talk about three of them. How do you know that you are trusting God? That’s our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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Why It’s Important to Flow in Faith’s Domain

[Tweet “You know you believe when no one can talk you out of it, even under pressure.”]

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The Real Scoop on Teaching Angels and Heavenly Host University

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Ten

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The Real Scoop on Teaching Angels and Heavenly Host University

We are talking about angels today, specifically teaching angels. Here’s a story on angels from the turn of the 20th century. Charles Herbert Lightoller was tall, sun-bronzed, and handsome, possessing a deep, pleasant speaking voice. His mother died during his infancy, his father abandoned him, and he ran off to sea at thirteen. By 1912, he was a respected seaman for the White Star Line and was assigned to the maiden voyage of the grandest ocean liner ever built, the Titanic. He was just drifting off to sleep on April 14th when he felt a bump in the ship’s forward motion. Hopping from his bunk, he soon learned that the Titanic had struck an iceberg.

As the horrors of that night unfolded, Lightoller finally found himself standing on the roof of the officer’s quarters, the water lapping at his feet, as he helped any around him into lifeboats. Finally, there was nothing left for Lightoller to do but jump from the roof into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. The shock of the 28-degree water against his sweating body stunned him. As he struggled to regain his bearing and swim away from the ship, he was suddenly sucked back and pinned against a ventilation grate at the base of a funnel that went all the way down to Boiler Room 6. He was stuck, drowning, and going down with the ship. Suddenly Psalm 91:11 came clearly to his mind: For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways. At that very moment, a blast of hot air exploded from the belly of the ship, shooting Lightoller like a missile to the surface of the ocean. At length, he managed to grab a piece of rope attached to the side of an overturned lifeboat and float along with it until he pulled himself on top of the upside-down boat. He turned and watched the last moments of the Titanic. Her stern swung up in the air until the ship was in “a perpendicular position.” Then she slowly sank into the water, with only a tiny gulp as her stern disappeared beneath the waves. There were about thirty men atop the lifeboat, and together they recited the Lord’s Prayer, then Lightoller took command of the boat and guided them to safety. Pieced together from several books and internet articles about the Titanic. His story also appeared in the Congressional Record of the investigation of the sinking of the Titanic.1 Angels – that’s what we are talking about in this podcast — the real deal on angels – The Real Scoop on Teaching Angels in Heavenly Host University, that’s our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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Choosing to Serve God with Joy

[Tweet “Don’t confuse the people with the politics. Leaders are what makes nations evil, not the people.”]

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Why Jesus Breaking Down the Walls Between Men and Races Matters

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Nine

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Why Jesus Breaking Down the Walls Between Men and Races Matters

You know we often hear the term ‘breaking down walls.’ But in reality, Jesus is the ultimate wall breaker. By his death, burial and resurrection, Jesus broke down the wall of hostility that existed between men and races. The wall has already been torn down. Men just need to know and understand that it’s so. When we come to Jesus when men give their hearts to God when they experience the new birth, the love of God comes on the inside of them and transforms and changes them into the image of Jesus. So, union between the races comes because of union with Him. On the idea of union, have you ever thought about coffee? Many people drink coffee with cream. When cream is added to coffee, a union occurs. The blackness of the coffee and the whiteness of the cream are now integrated and made one. The coffee becomes brown because of the union. The coffee is not considered black-and-white coffee; it’s just a cup of coffee! When you drink it, you now must drink the black coffee with the white cream because they have become one. If someone were to try to separate the cream from the coffee, there would be chaos in the cup. Once the union of cream with coffee has occurred, no separation is possible. The Bible says that when we came to Jesus Christ for salvation, we entered into an indissolvable union with Him so that what happened to Jesus happened to us. Jesus died. We died. Jesus arose. We arose with Him. Jesus ascended. We ascended with Him. Jesus brought us all into union – guess what? What God has joined together, you cannot separate.1 Why Jesus Breaking Down the Wall Between Men and Races Matter, that’s our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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The Flow of the Miraculous

[Tweet “Don’t confuse the people with the politics. Leaders are what makes nations evil, not the people.”]

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Connectedness: How We Are Powerfully Joined to Jesus and to One Another

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Eight

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Connectedness: How We Are Powerfully Joined to Jesus and to One Another

On being joined to Jesus, Paul mentions in his Epistle to the Ephesians that Jesus Christ is the Cornerstone. The Jews had a legend based on a statement of the psalmist. According to that legend, when the Temple of Solomon was being built, the masons sent up from the quarry below a stone different in size and shape from all the rest they had sent up. Looking at it, the builders said: “There is no place for this stone. There must be some mistake.” So, they rolled it down the cliff’s edge into the valley of Kidron below the Temple area. As time went on (for the Temple was seven years in building), they were ready for the chief cornerstone. When they asked for it, they were told, “We sent it up to you long ago.” One of the workmen said: “I recall it now. There was a stone altogether different from the rest, and we thought there was no place for it and rolled it down to the valley below.” Men were sent down to the valley to find the stone. They succeeded in doing so; when the stone was brought up, it fitted perfectly into its place—the headstone of the corner.1 We are powerfully joined to Jesus and one another. Jesus is the cornerstone, but what does that mean? That’s what we are going to focus on this week’s podcast: Connectedness: How We Are Powerfully Joined to Jesus and One Another.

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#S4-049: What the Bible Says about the End of the World [Podcast]

[Tweet “The church is a closely-knit group of people joined with Jesus and to one another.”]

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Why Unity Is Essential in All Things God

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Seven

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Why Unity Is Essential in All Things God

On the subject of unity, Tony Evans makes the following insightful comments about the purpose of the United States of America. He says, ‘One of the great experiments regarding nationality is the American Experiment. The American Experiment is unique because of its intentionality to bring people from all walks of life, from every nation, under the banner of a single flag and to intentionally seek to bring across to these shores people from all kinds of other nations who would make up a union called the United States of America. This experiment brought people together who would pledge allegiance to a single flag even though their backgrounds were different, unique, and dissimilar. We acknowledge our differences by annotating our original heritages to our current nationality with terms like Irish American, Swedish American, Polish American, African American, or Hispanic American. The introductory phrase cites the uniqueness. The last word cites the unity. I am under the American Banner because I am uniquely based on culture, history, background, or previous location. In this experiment, there was an attempt to have a United States even though the people seeking to be unified were totally different. What the American Experiment represents from a cultural, historical, and geographical perspective to this nation, the church of Jesus Christ was meant to be for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords—people from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, all pledging allegiance to the cross.’ 1 This idea of being one people in Christ, whether male or female, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, is what the Spirit of God via the Apostle Paul tried to get over to the church of Ephesus. And in this week’s Light on Life podcast, that’s precisely what we are focusing on as we discuss ‘Why Unity Is Essential in All Things God.’

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What Is Your Testimony of Jesus?

[Tweet “It’s vital to not only look forward but to look back at where you came from — and how God brought you out and delivered you.”]

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Do People Need Miracles to Believe Jesus Is Real

Encore Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Five

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Do People Nedd Miracles to Believe Jesus Is Real?

Here’s the question that we will look at in today’s Light on Life podcast. Do people need miracles to believe Jesus is real? The fact that people believe that Jesus does miracles is decidedly true. The percentage of adults who mostly agree or completely agree with the statement, “Even today, miracles are performed by the power of God,” sits at 82%, according to a Princeton Religion Research Center’s PRRC Emerging Trends survey.1

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Jesus Heals A Blind Man: Why You Can Have Hope

[Tweet “God is — He just plain is a miracle-working God.”]

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Why God Has Called You to Cultivate a Character that Counts

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Three

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Why God Has Called You to Cultivate a Character that Counts

Character that counts is a trait that everyone wants — when I say character, I mean the good variety. A Wall Street broker had fallen in love with a young lady and began dating her. He was very wealthy, and he had to be careful whom he related to. He didn’t want to relate to somebody who would damage him or only come after him for his money. So he had one of his associates hire a private detective to find out everything there was to find out about this lady. He didn’t want to make a mistake. He also didn’t want the private eye to know whom he was doing the investigation for, lest the girl finds out later and think that her love didn’t trust her. The broker got his associate to hire a private eye to check up on this lady without telling the detective who was making the assignment and paying the bill. After several weeks, the report came back on the young lady whom the broker was considering. The report said, “I have investigated this young lady, and she has a squeaky clean life. Perfect in every detail, no flaws, no known mistakes. She is on the up and up in every possible way. However, there is one little possible blip on the screen of her life. She is often seen around town in the company of a young broker whose dubious business practices and principles are well known.” You see, the problem may just be you.1 The Bible talks about character, so we will focus on why God Has Called You to Cultivate a Character that Counts — all in this week’s Light on Life.

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How to Make It Through a Bad Day

[Tweet “Good character is what the world wants. Surely, it should be what believers in Jesus want.”]

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Why It’s Vital to See Yourself as God’s High Powered Creative Workmanship

Podcast: Light on Life Season Nine Episode Two

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Why It's Vital to See Yourself as God's High Powered Creative Workmanship

What does the word ‘workmanship’ conjure up in your thinking? Ephesians 2:10 in the King James states that followers of Jesus are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus. That statement comes on the heels of the tremendous cost of man’s redemption displayed via the grace of God. Have you ever heard of the Sydney Opera House on this theme of extraordinary grace? What was once termed Australia’s most significant “mistakes” was later hailed as its greatest—although costly—masterpiece of workmanship. This is the Sydney Opera House. The original cost estimate announced in 1957 was $7.2 million. The final cost in 1973 reached $110 million. Concerning this unique structure, the state premier of New South Wales said: “The cost has become a secondary consideration to the perfection of the achievement.” 1 The point? The creation of a masterpiece is never a cheap affair. They are costly, precious, and treasured. Why It’s Vital to See Yourself as God’s High-Powered Creative Workmanship, that’s our focus on this week’s Light on Life.

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The Jesus Guide to Forgiveness

[Tweet “When the Lord redeemed you from your ginormous mess created by Adam’s transgression, He did so in an excellent fashion.”]