Row, row, row your boat into your mission field.
Jesus calls us to live out our faith in all of life. So, row your boat across the street to your neighbor's house. Row it to your work. Row it home. Row it anywhere and everywhere the rhythms of your life take you. Then, get out of the boat and live "in" Christ and minister to your sphere of life.

Go Fish! (Pray, Care and Share)

Now or Later

Do you remember eating a now or later as a kid?

The person who gave us the candy would say, you can eat it now or later. Of course we would eat it now and it would last a long time.

Well, the gift that we receive from God is not for now or later. It is for now and later. This gift is eternal life. When we repent and trust Christ by faith for our salvation, he gives us this gift of eternal life. Some people feel this is just something far off, but it is not. We were all made to live eternally. We will live forever in one of two places. Some who don't repent and trust Christ will spend eternity separated from God in a nasty place called hell. Those who have repented will spend eternity in heaven and the new earth with God.

NOW, you have an opportunity to choose where you will spend eternity. The second book of Corinthians chapter six and verse two states: In a favorable time I listened to you and in a day of salvation I have helped you. Behold now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

LATER, there might not be a later. Choose this day whom you will serve. Will it be yourself, wife, kids, carrier? These will not last. Without a relationship with Jesus there is no life.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Trust in him and he will not fail you.

Moments At the Fishing Hole 5

Interesting things happen when you consistently share your faith. Before eating breakfast at a hotel, I asked the hostess if she needed prayer for anything. She quickly said yes. She was having marriage problems and asked for prayer. I immediately prayed for her and encouraged her. It turns out she was a believer in need. Within a few minutes she came back to my table and asked if I would pray for a co-worker. I finished my breakfast and started looking for them. Her co-worker was also in need of prayer for her marriage. It was like revival broke out in the hotel. We gathered for prayer and God used us to minister to those two ladies. They were very thankful and moved that God would send a stranger to care for them. Before I left, I connected them to a Pastor friend of mine in that town.

Expect God to connect you to those in need of Him. Pray and be ready.

Go Fish!

Beautiful Foolishness

“I don’t believe in God,” begins Julian Barnes in his latest book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “but I miss him.” Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity. He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture. “I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Such are the thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir. He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, “[I]t was a beautiful lie.”(1)

There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel. Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation. At the heart of the Christian religion is one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7). On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.

But unlike Julian, Paul saw the foolishness of the gospel as a reason--not to disbelieve--but to believe. “For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27-28). It is indeed difficult to explain why at the heart of the Christian narrative there is a child, why God would answer the dark silence of 400 years with the cry of a displaced and homeless infant, why God would take on the weakness of humanity in an attempt to reach humanity with power. Most of us would know better than to create, or to perpetuate, a story so foolish. However beautiful, the story of Christ is difficult to explain; that is, unless it was not crafted with human wisdom at all.

The story of a Savior coming as an infant in Bethlehem is indeed astonishing, as astonishing an idea as the resurrection. That God chose to come into the world with flesh, flesh that would suffer, is strange and paradoxical, beautiful and foolish. Perhaps it is also wise beyond our comprehension. “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Though the word incarn is now used infrequently, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound. Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh.(2) The Incarnation, the astonishing event we remember in Advent, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, is God’s way of doing exactly that: Christ comes in flesh to cover our mortal wound. God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies. This may seem a foolish mission, but to the blind who their receive sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness ever known.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Abraham Lincoln offers Thanksgiving to God
October 3, 1863: President Abraham Lincoln Establishes the annual day of ThanksIn response to the persistent requests of Mrs. Sarah Joseph Hale, President Abraham Lincoln was the first president to establish an annual day of thanksgiving. This was to occur on the last Thursday in November as a day of repentance and humility before God almighty. Here are Lincoln's exact words issued in his proclamation that day:The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people.I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863.Thank you, President Lincoln, for a reminder as timely now as it was then. Happy Thanksgiving to every reader, American and people of all nations. And thank you, dear Lord, for your grace and kindness to all, which is far greater than anything we deserve.
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