Battles

  Lead by the Lord Isaiah 58:11 The Lord will always lead you. He will satisfy your needs in dry lands and give strength to your bones. You will be like a garden that has much water, like a spring that never runs dry. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge story has always fascinated me. To reduce the initial construction price from an estimated $11 million down to a cheaper budget, engineers replaced the original deep, rigid open-truss stiffening design with shallow, solid steel plate girders. On November 7, 1940, moderate 42-mph winds caught the rigid, unyielding deck design, creating a violent twisting aerodynamic resonance and the structural forces then quickly snapped the cables and tore the entire bridge apart. That bridge did not break apart because it was built wrong but it broke apart because a choice was made that ignored what was true and instead chose to follow what was easier. I think about that often when I think about God. We have a God who tells us what is true and what ...

  What Does God Want Isaiah 58:5 This kind of special day is not what I want. This is not the way I want people to be sorry for what they have done. I don’t want people just to bow their heads like a plant and wear rough cloth and lie in ashes to show their sadness. This is what you do on your special days when you fast, but do you think this is what the Lord wants? In the book of Genesis during the creation we find the making of mankind and the thing that always stands out to me is how God handles what He does with humans. All the other things that God makes God just speaks and they exist but God takes special time and attention when creating humans. We humans are created by the hands of God and that is something that we need to think about because it has profound effects on who we are in this world. But that is not even the best part of what God does. Not only are we created by God’s hands but then God breath’s his breath into us. There are thousands of books written on...

  Special Isaiah 58:3 They say, ‘To honor you we had special days when we fasted, but you didn’t see. We humbled ourselves to honor you, but you didn’t notice.’” But the Lord says, “You do what pleases yourselves on these special days, and you are unfair to your workers. I once knew a guy that made his living from buying and selling car repair manuals. It surprised me that those old dusty books had any value and the guy told me they worth a lot of money. He explained to me that the people buying the books needed the information in those pages to fix the cars they were working on and without those books the work they were doing was a lot harder. The value was not in the book itself but the information that it held explaining how to fix a car. That conversation has stuck with me over the years because it really has application to our faith. The Bible is a lot like those old car manuals. Our Bible is not valuable in and of itself, it is valuable because in it we find the God ...

  FRIENDLY TABLE GAME CLUB! Regular 2nd Tuesday night of the month meeting Tonight, a session playing a set of house rules, CROSSROADS! Crossroads is a tabletop system Lowell Lufkin has been working on for several years. It is essentially a resource management game. Each player has a capital which generates resources. The city is connected to roads which lead to crossroads containing villages, towns, and religious centers. Each crossroad grants resource points to be used by the capturing player. Each road costs resources to send a military unit over it. The better quality road the lower cost. Poor roads, more cost. The players can spend resources to improve roads, raise troops, upgrade troops, and for other purposes to win the game. The player controlling the greatest value of crossroads at the end of the game - usually an agreed time - is the winner. We had three players; Jeffrey A Russ , Jerre Morris , and Lowell Lufkin . Jeff had a good starting position near a religious site. ...

  Shout Isaiah 58:1 The Lord says, “Shout out loud. Don’t hold back. Shout out loud like a trumpet. Tell my people what they have done against their God; tell the family of Jacob about their sins. Over the last forty years as a minister I have spent a lot of time in scripture. Most of it has been preparing sermons and Bible studies but there is also my personal devotional time which is central to the development of my faith in God. I want to say that having spent all that time getting to know the God who inspired those who wrote all of that material in the Bible I like God and I really appreciate how God thinks. This might sound weird but let me explain. When I first came to scripture, I saw God’s word as commands to be obeyed because if we disobeyed we went to hell. When I really started studying the Bible, it came as a fairly large surprise that I did not actually understand what the Bible was all about or what God was trying to do with all the stuff God was telling us. ...

People Isaiah 57:21 “There is no peace for evil people,” says my God. There are some things in my walk of faith that have troubled me over the years. One of the most crushing problems I had was dealing with God’s anger. As a young man I feared God and worried about His anger a lot. When you read through scripture you find that though God is slow to anger when He does get angry it is a terrible thing. This was a frightening thing to me and it colored much of my faith as a youth. It is interesting that certain times of life help explain who God is and what He is doing. That is what happened to me when I had children. Very quickly I understood God’s anger with such clarity that it moved my faith in a very radical way. God calls us His children and there is a reason for that. It explains how God acts and what God does and when I had children I began to understand some things about God that I had no grounding to do so until then. Parents often get angry with their children when th...