If you ever thought that you lack skills, knowledge, or experience to do something worthwhile, think again.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ( 1 Corinthians 12:7 ESV)

The Apostle Paul makes it abundantly clear that all believers are given the Holy Spirit to dwell within them to do something incredibly good for all people. You may not find the next cure of polio or work out the crisis in the Middle East, but you can do good when you allow the Spirit of God within you to use you for doing good. Those things really add up. This good is not a selfish “good” but a “common” good, which embodies the well-being of people you like and dislike. Just think about this today: in what ways can I manifest a “common” good to the people around me? (e.g. buying a hungry person a meal; smiling at a stranger and wishing them a good day; holding the door open for the person behind you; etc.)  

What if whenever we spoke, we would impart the Spirit of God? This is the call of the everyday Christian.

…and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power… 1 Corinthians 2:4 ESV

The Apostle Paul says that the church in Corinth should only believe the Word of God that comes from God’s Spirit and His power. There was nothing special about Paul, the man, that the people of Corinth should be swayed by anything short of the power of God. Likewise, we should not be swayed by anything except for the Spirit and power of God. I think that statement is pretty obvious. However, this statement opens two questions in our minds. First: how could speech be a demonstration of Spirit and power? And secondly, how could I (you) speak in such a way so that, through you, God will be revealed to those who listen to what you say? I’ve thought of this from the viewpoint of being a public speaker and have concluded the following things which, I believe, will serve as a guide to your future speaking activities and duties. Speech can be a demonstration of power when spoken with authority. Simply put, believe that what you say will be backed up indefinitely by God. That goes with the caveat of saying that your speak about winning the most, whether earnestly believed or not, will probably make you a laughing stock as opposed to one speaking with authority. The story of the Roman Centurion comes to mind. He tells Jesus to “say the word” and the authority behind those words will make it happen. We need to believe it and speak it. We have authority in our speech and our speech can be a demonstration of power when we speak words we believe. The power and spirit of God come to life in our speech when we speak honestly without empty words hindering how we feel, think, and believe. Just think about the last time you some about something you believed in, did that not mean more or have more impact than the empty words you wrote on your holiday greeting cards? I want us to speak with the power and Spirit of God everytime and all the time.

How exactly does one’s soul become revived? If you’re tired, if you’re bored, if you’re feeling lackluster, then you know very well that you need revival.

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple… ( Psalm 19:7)

King David writes, “the Law of God is perfect.” It is this “perfection” which revives a person’s soul. He further says that when God speaks this law into being, everything else fades away and becomes irrelevant. If God’s law is perfect and the law revives the soul, we should then try to understand what this law is exactly and find out why it revives souls. The law of God is simple. Jesus states it this way: “love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind, and soul; and love your neighbor as yourself.” What people miss is this simple fact: that when we love God and other people with everything we have and are, there is nothing left to be burdened by within us. People are in need of revival because they are so dead to themselves because they have consumed more than they can handle within themselves. When we love God and others, ourselves become irrelevant. The burden that is lifted when we become irrelevant is incredible. It provides us with new life– less worries to drag on us. Our souls can be revived when we practice the law of the Lord because in doing so, we have emptied the death within our souls so that we can be revived by the life given by God. Whatever wisdom there is in self sustenence is now defunct and foolish by Good law of love. How amazing.

If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? (Luke 16:11) This story is about a dishonest manager who impresses his former employer by manipulating a bad situation to his benefit. There is several things we can learn from this story; however, today we will only focus on his resourcefulness. The manager was fired, although it is not clear why he was fired (except that he was being wasteful). But here’s the interesting thing: at the end of the story, he is commended for being shrewd, or resourceful. If he was shrewd, why was he fired in the first place? No matter. He was either bad at his job or didn’t care to do well at his job and the bottom line is that his boss fired him. I encourage you to read the entirety of the story for yourself in Luke 16:1-13, because doing so will help you understand where I’m taking this. Some of us would have been fired (for whatever reason, valid or not) and be sulking quietly in the corner. Okay, maybe some of us wouldn’t be so quiet and we would be complaining about it to anybody who cares to listen, but my point is that some of us would not have been as so resourceful with our firing. Isn’t it true? We would not have thought on this level. This guy bartered his way into a better situation because he was resourceful. He was willing to be faithful with what he did have, knowing quite well what he didn’t have anymore. He made the most of his situation, and landed him softly. Now, I’m not advocating that we beg and barter our way through life just to coast along on a menial existence. What I am saying is that when we have opportunity, we should be leveraging that for something good. Jesus asks at the end of the story, how have you been doing with what you have? Are you being faithfully rich with what you have? Or are you waiting for a savior? Maybe you’re one of those people who just want to get by and do nothing great. The question today is, are you being resourceful? It’s something to think about. A better life will not happen if you are not as resourceful as a manager who got fired for being wasteful. Think about it.

Have you ever wondered why God was so patient? I know you probably don’t think this when you’re hurting or discouraged or have been wronged, but what about when you have hurt, wronged and discouraged others and thought to yourself, “why does God still forgive me?” I wonder often why God is so patient with me.

I know deep down inside that I couldn’t and wouldn’t be patient with somebody like me– so why would God, the creator of all the known and unknown universe be so patient?

But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:16 ESV)

The Apostle Paul writes to a young pastor in the first century why he thinks God is so patient– it is so that others can have hope in God for their salvation.

Let’s think about it for a moment, however bad or horrible you think you are, which you probably are, I’m not going to deny it, Paul was probably worse. Paul, being a Pharisee, should know better, especially since he describes himself as a “Hebrew of Hebrews,” but he still goes out intentionally does wrong. He is an accomplice to murder, formed mob riots, persecuted the innocent and most like, dealt with people in a bad way. Yet God picks him off to do work and is patient through all of his apparent shortcomings.

The reason for this– to show people that if Paul can be saved, so can anybody else. Let’s face it, God is not patient because he’s dead.

God is patient because he believes people can be saved when they look at your shortcomings and mistakes. Next time you wonder why God is so patient, you should give thanks because people will have an opportunity to have hope and you can be reassured of your salvation– God is patient so that we would have hope to believe in eternal life with him.

This Christmas season, let us remember that it was because of patience that God sent his Son Jesus to walk amongst impatient and unruly people like us. It is from this patience that we have any hope of salvation.

Have you ever wondered why every single sermon and every single word that Jesus spoke boils down to love? Perhaps you knew this, but wondered where that notion came from. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. (1 Timothy 1:5) When you have a pure heart, good conscience, and sincerity in your faith, you will move toward a disposition of loving. In life God gives us one great objective: to love the best you can and then love like God loves as much as you can in faith. You can love in every phase of life and in every walk of life. There are no preconditions and or requirements that need to be fulfilled by you to love. When we look at Jesus, we see a good heart, pure conscience and sincere faith in action. It was out of love that Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, fed the hungry, and died for the unloving. From that example we find our queue to move as he did–charged with love. Jesus, in his ministry, wandered homeless, requiring miracles to sustain his sustinence and wellbeing. His disciples testify to that in the gospel and in the epistles. Just read the New Testament accounts of how their charges of love affected the greater world around them. Here is the challenge for today, since love is our charge, what have we been doing in love? Or has our inability to have a pure heart, good conscience, and sincerety of faith stopped us from loving in m moments we could have and should have loved? I know I missed a lot of opportunities as of late, have you?

There is hope that comes from our struggles. It’s just hard to see it sometimes… Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. ( 2 Corinthians 1:9) I think when I experience my lowest of lows, it’s at moments in my life when I feel like I’m so high and invincible. Then I come crashing to the ground at 100 miles per hour. The sad part is that the crash doesn’t kill me. It just makes me wish I were dead. It’s in that feeling of wishing to be dead that we realize that we felt invincible for the wrong reasons. We should feel invincible because God raises us from the dead, but instead, what usually happens is that we feel invincible because nothing has attacked us and we were left untethered to anything that would ground us. Think about when you struggle. I know some of us reading this don’t understand struggle because we’ve never struggled. I know others of you have struggled so much that in reading this you get pissed off that I only compared the struggle to crashing from the sky at only 100 mph. Regardless, just think about your struggle or when you do struggle, what the purpose of that struggle is. I’m sure that from that struggle, or when things don’t go the way you want because you really don’t have control despite your best efforts to maintain that control, there is a purpose and lesson that can be learned from it all. For Paul when he literally received death sentences and hung on to dear life by the plank of a ship, he consistently and constantly came to the same conclusion: his life was not his to live, but God’s instrument to use the way He wishes. The Apostle says, “that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God…” Our struggles stem from being used by God to change a world that doesn’t want to change and we’re at the forefront of it because we are God’s tool for that change. At the same time, we struggle internally because we’re tools being implemented by God and it bothers us that things are going against us. At the same time, that is the hope we find our strength in when we struggle. God is everything we need to be relying on because we will undoubtedly struggle in doing what God created us to do. We can struggle on and have no hope from it, or we can rely on the fact that you were born to do this in the name of God. Are you feeling hopeful in your struggle?

What if we would start all of our conversations with the statement below? Would we begin to see people differently?

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. (Galatians 1:3-5)

Just think about the gravity of this greeting: “Grace and peace from God.” What’s the point in trying to continue the rest of the conversation? You have already been blessed by God! I’ve read these introductions so often and frequently in the Bible that I tend to ignore them in the Pauline letters. I know I shouldn’t be admitting that, but it’s true. You know you’ve ignored these greetings too. I mean, there is no theological meat in them. However, today I was struck by Paul’s greeting to the churches of Galatia. It’s like being prayed for when you don’t feel like God’s peace and grace is on your life because what you’re going through is so difficult and hard. To understand where I’m coming from, you have to understand the context of this letter and why Paul was writing this letter in the first place. People came to the churches in Galatia and started making the lives of the newly converted Christ followers a living hell with their distorted beliefs and twists on the faith Jesus wanted us to have. Just imagine being in a community that is already outcast by the rest of society because there is only one God, now has a bunch of agitators spreading rumors about the guys that shared Jesus with them, and then telling them to do things that they never signed up for. It’s like asking for one thing and getting a totally different thing after the sale is done and you’re just like, “What the….????!!!” Maybe that’s how your life currently feels. I know I definitely didn’t sign up to be doing what I’m doing right now. I know you never intended what you originally planned out to be your life to be where you are now, currently stuck in between a rock and a hard place. But there is grace and peace from God, the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ. We are being delivered according to the will of God from the present evil age. That is a conversation starter. That is encouragement. That is the question we need to be asking each other and the experience we need to be sharing with one another– what are we being delivered from? How are we feeling the grace and peace today? As we start our journey to Thanksgiving, I want you to know that there is a lot to be thankful for when our first lines are, “grace and peace to you from God.”

Do you get angry when people can’t or won’t heed your way of life? Do you clamor up when people live differently than you do in faith? Why?

Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? (Acts 15:10)

Before your decision to put faith in Jesus Christ, I’m thinking your lifestyle and/or thinking was pretty asinine.

Moreover, I am thinking that our reason for rebelling from our parents and even putting off the decision to follow Jesus for as long as we have was because our asinine lifestyle and thinking. Maybe you won’t go as far as calling it “asinine.”

But I’m pretty sure somebody would. That is always the case. Stop putting yoke on people that is unnecessary nor attainable. We, as human beings, constantly and consistently push people to live the way we can only strive to live in our wildest dreams.

What I’m saying is that our unrealistic expectations reflected on other people will go unfulfilled so long as we have them because we can’t even uphold them.

Here is why we stop judging people and start welcoming those whose lifestyles we disagree with: “But we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.” (Acts 15:11). Peter says essentially says that we were saved by grace, that is, because we couldn’t save ourselves from ourselves; so why would we unfairly expect somebody else to save themselves?

Hopefully it is not because of they have us as coaches. Failures hardly make good coaches.

When we catch ourselves from yoking others, we become good role models to people striving to find Jesus. Let’s work towards that.

I know it’s hard to be reverent to anything in our day and age and it’s sad to say so. But there is reaping to be done in our reverence to God. Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord , who walks in his ways! You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you. (Psalm 128:1-2) The Psalmist writes that if whoever “fears the Lord shall be blessed” and I want to say that conclusion is absolutely and undoubtedly true. However, to understand that truth or to apply it in our lives, we have to dig into what that means for us on a daily basis and interpret how we live it out on our daily lives. First off, you can interchange the word, “fear” and “revere” because “fear” means to “revere”. When we “revere” somebody or something, we give him/her/it respect and honor. That is to say that we obey and bend for the sake of that which we are revering. When we are revering God and doing like Jesus, because Jesus is God, then the “labor of our hands” is actually doing the things that Jesus did. Jesus proclaimed the good news, healed the sick, fed the hungry, loved the unloved. Our labor likewise, is doing what Jesus did as God on earth. The Psalmist is saying that the blessing we will receive in doing what God does because we respect, honor and cherish what God is doing will be a blessing for us. It shall be well for us who do those things. I don’t want to get into corporeally when doing what God does leads to pain, death, and destruction, because it can tangibly lead to those things, we’ve all witnessed the tragedy before. But I will tell you that even that end may be a blessing because it shall be well– that is our salvation is God and the reward we have is Him and in Him. Let’s go and reap reverence to God and labor like He labors today.