A Needless Death

Many years there have been small plane crashes in the Rocky Mountains. Some times the planes and their victims are never found because the crash occurs in a remote area. I remember one in particular. The pilot survived for several weeks in the crumpled fuselage of his single engine plane. He recorded his struggles in a diary until he finally died of exposure. The next spring some hikers found the plane, his body and his diary. The irony of the whole thing was that the wreckage was only a few hundred yards from a major thoroughfare. It had been traveled all winter long by thousands of motorists. Help was so near, yet so far.
We ask, “How could that have happened?” We can only guess. It had to have been ignorance. The pilot obviously didn’t know how close he was to help. It could have been because of disbelief. He may have heard the hum of tires and thought he was hallucinating. Or it might have been delusion. Maybe his mind told him something contrary to the facts of reality. Whatever it was, the pilot had needlessly died.
What about you? Is your life being eked out in the crumpled fuselage of unfulfilled dreams? Is your diary full of shattered hopes and of bitter resentments?Then listen carefully. Do you know that you can find happiness and fullness of life by believing in Jesus? Don’t miss out on God’s rescue because of ignorance, disbelief or delusion. Fullness of life is yours through Jesus.

Be Joyful Always

In a letter to the first century church, St. Paul told them to “Be joyful always.” The fact that it’s written in the form of a command is very significant. What we have here is not a suggestion, an encouragement or a piece of wise advice. It’s not implying that the greatest griefs of life can by easily replaced by some superficial happiness. This is the Word of God ordering us to be joyful! So, you say, “How do I do that? I can’t control how I feel.” And that’s the point exactly.
This quote is talking about actions, not feelings. Feelings can’t be commanded. Feelings are emotional responses to both what’s inside of us and to what’s happening to us on the outside. Feelings are extraordinarily difficult to control. Not even God commands us how or what to feel. But he does command us what to do. And one of those commands is to “be joyful.” Let’s compare it to going to the doctor because you feel run down and tired all the time. Your physician would not tell you to “stop feeling tired” or order you to “feel energetic.” But she might say, “Exercise 30 minutes every day.”
She knows that if you take her advice and go home and exercise, the action of exercising will have the byproduct of altering your feeling of tiredness.
Joy is an action, not an emotion. And the action of joy has the power to change our emotions.
Listen.

Under the Surface

I grew up near the Atlantic Ocean and it was an important part of my childhood. To this day I have a deep love and respect for the sea. I can spend hours just watching the waves. There's a beauty and a restless excitement about it all. But when I studied the ocean in college I came to understand it very differently than the way I experienced it as a boy at the beach. As a child I saw the ocean only in terms of the waves on the surface. I delighted in plunging in and trying to swim around. Some days it was too rough to risk and other days it was as calm as a pitcher of milk.
It was in a college classroom that I began to understand that you can't make a surface judgment of the ocean. I learned that the life of the sea is far more determined by the deep currents than the surface waves. Miles below the surface there’s a stability that no hurricane can stir. So, do not try to understand the Atlantic or the Pacific by what you see on the surface, but by studying what flows beneath.
And so it is with this thing we call Christian joy. It is not directly tied to whatever storm is stirring up the surface of our lives. Joy is who we are and what we believe. To be joyful is to choose God’s reality for the deep currents of our lives, rather than having life controlled by the turmoil of circumstances on the surface.
Listen.