Don't Ever Give Up

Abraham Lincoln first attempted a career in business in 1831 and failed miserably. A year later he ran for state legislature unsuccessfully. That same year he lost his job and applied to law school but was laughed out of consideration because of his miserable qualifications. Not long after that humiliating ordeal, he started another business using money he borrowed from a close friend. Before the year ended, however, that business faded and failed. Lincoln claimed bankruptcy and spent the next seventeen years paying off debt. In 1835 he fell deeply in love with Ann Rutledge, only to have his heart broken when she died soon after their engagement. The following year he had a complete nervous breakdown and spent the six months in bed recovering. In 1838 he sought to become speaker of the state legislature and was defeated. In 1840, two years later, he sought to become the elector of the state, and was defeated. Three years later he ran for Congress and lost. In 1849 he sought the job of land officer in his home state but was rejected. In 1854 he ran for the Senate of the United States. Again, he lost. In 1856 he sought the vice-presidential nomination at his party's national convention. He got less than one hundred votes, suffering yet another embarrassing defeat. In 1858 he ran for the U.S. Senate and lost again.

Finally in 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency of the United States. And after winning the most devastating war our country has ever experienced he was reelected for a second term.

Don't ever give up! You never know what prize awaits you on the other side of your pain. 

Fathers Matter

A while back I was listening to a teaching series by Perry Noble called Adam & Eve and he shared some statistics in one of his messages that I now want to share with you as we approach Father's Day. 

• 90% of the inmates in prison did not ever have a relationship with their father 

• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes 

• 90% of all runaways are from fatherless homes 

• 85% of all children with behavior disorders are from fatherless homes 

• 80% of all rapists are from fatherless homes 

• 71% of all high school drop outs are from fatherless homes 

• 71% of teenage pregnancies are taking place in fatherless homes 

And Dave Ramsey recently tweeted "Children without a father in the home are 2x more likely to be poor." 

What am I trying to say? Despite what you may have heard from culture, fathers matter. You see...

In our culture a man is often portrayed as an idiot, which is partly why so many women think they and their children will do just fine without one...

Our culture encourages women who haven't found a husband yet, but who want to have a baby, to just go ahead and get pregnant via artificial insemination, as if the baby will do just as fine without a dad as with a dad...

It's considered "cool" in our culture for a lesbian couple to adopt children, as if the children will do just as well with two moms as they will with a mom and a dad...

In other words, culture says dads don't matter. But this is a lie of Satanic origin that Christians should be careful not to buy into. Focus on the Family says "There is no mistaking the majority of more than 30 years of social science research that indicates children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father. These studies show this is the best possible environment for children to grow and thrive." 

Fathers...YOU MATTER. And we can best learn to be a good earthly father as we follow the loving example of our Heavenly Father. I hope you'll make the decision to do that if you haven't already this Father's Day. If you need help with that I'd encourage you to listen to a message I once preached entitled: Today You'll Be With Me In Paradise. 

Dream Big

God help me to dream bigger! I thought I was really demonstrating faith by believing God for 500 people by the end of the year. Well today one of my staff told me they were praying for 1,000 people by June!!! God help ME to believe like THAT! While our goals should be out of reach but not out of reality, I still believe we dream too small for serving such a big God. Sometimes we just need to add a zero to whatever we're believing God for. Adding a zero will remind us that we serve a big God, that we must depend on God to see our goals come to pass and that God is the God of the impossible. I'm challenged today to dream BIG!

Interview with Rick Warren

This is an absolutely incredible short interview with Rick Warren, 'Purpose Driven Life ' author and pastor of Saddleback Church in California .In the interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were not made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven. One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body-- but not the end of me. I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity. We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense. Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one. The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort; God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy. We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness. This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer. I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore. Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life. No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on. And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for. You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems. If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, which is my problem, my issues, my pain.' But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others. We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her- It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people. You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life. Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy. It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72. First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit.. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church. Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free. We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity? Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)? When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better. God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.

Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.

Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.

Painful moments, TRUST GOD.

Every moment, THANK GOD..