DO YOU BELIEVE IN YOU?

Steve Goodier writes about some people who did not listen to their critics.  They rose above criticism.

Did you know that Albert Einstein could not speak until he was four years old and did not read until he was seven?  His parents and teachers worried about his mental ability.
Or that Beethoven’s music teacher said about him, “As a composer he is hopeless”?  What if young Ludwig believe it?    When Thomas Edison was a young boy, his teachers said he was so stupid he could never learn anything. He once said, “I remember I used to never be able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class…my father thought I was stupid, and I almost decided that I was a dunce.”  What if young Thomas Edison believed what they said about him?   When F. W. Woolworth was 21, he got a job in a store, but was not allowed to wait on customers because, according to his boss, he “didn’t have enough sense.”  I wonder if the boss was around when Woolworth became one of the most successful retailers of his day.   When the sculptor Auguste Rodin was young he had difficulty learning to read and write.  Today, we may say he had a learning disabiltiy, but his father said of him, “I have an idiot for a son.”  His uncle agreed.  “He’s uneducable, ” he said. What if the boy had doubted his ability to excel?    A newspaper editor once fired Walt Disney because he was thought to have no “good ideas.”
The great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was told by one music teacher,  “You can’t sing.  You have no voice at all.”
And an editor told Louisa May Alcott just a few years before she wrote the classic novel “Little Women,” that she was incapable of writing anything that would have popular appeal.

I don’t know about you, but I am utterly amazed when I read of this list of people who could have well been defeated by what people said of them.  However, they were very successful inspite of doubters.  They would not allow the discouraging voices of others to put them down or hold them back.   They made something of themselves and have made the world better because of it.

We all have potential and it is your desire to make something good of yourself, to be the best that you can be.
Someone said, “Success is doing the best you can, with what you have, where you are, to the glory of God.”

Seek God’s help to grow, to become all that you can be.

NO TURNING BACK

The story of this song, “No Turning Back” is covered in the book by Dr. P.P. Job.  It comes out of  an incident with a tribe in India known as head-hunters.  The more heads a man collected, the more successful he was considered.

One Welsh missionary succeeded in coverting a man, his wife, and two children in this village.  This man’s faith proved contagious and many villagers began to accept Christianity.  Angry, the village chief summoned all the villagers.  He then called the family who had been converted and demanded that they renounced their faith in public or face execution.  The man instantly composed a song which bcame famous down the years.

He sang, “I have decided to follow Jesus.   No turning back, no turning back.”

Enraged at the refuasal of the man, the chief ordered his archers to arrow down the two children.  As both boys lay twitiching on the floor, the chief asked, “Will you deny your faith?  You have lost both your children.  You will lose your wife too.”  But the man sang these words in reply:

“Though no one joins me, still I will follow. No turning back, no turning back.”

The chief was beside himself with fury and ordered his wife to be arrowed down.  In a moment she joined her two children in death.  Now he asked for the last time, “I will give you one more opportunity to deny your faith and live.”  In the face of death the man sang the final memorable lines:

“The cross before me, the world behind me.  No turning back, no turning back.”

He was shot dead like the rest of  his family.  But with their deaths, a miracle took place.
The chief who had ordered the killings was moved by the faith of the man.  He wondered “Why should this man, his wife and two children die for a Man who lived in a far-away land on another continent some 2,000 years ago?
There must be some supernatural power behind the family, and I too want that supernaural power.”
In a spontaneous confesssion of faith, he declared, “I too belong to Jesus Christ.”  When the crowd heard this from the mouth of their chief, the whole village accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior.

This is the power of God through the demonstation of faith. Can we too sing in the strength of our trust in Jesus, “No Turning Back, No Turning Back.?”

LIKE A BLIND MULE

“A stranger passing through the mining district of Pennsylvania on Sunday some years ago, saw a large number of mules in a field at the entrance of one of the mines.  He asked a little boy why the field was so full of mules.  The small lad replied,  “These mules are worked in the darkness of the mines for six days of the week, and they are brought up into the light on Sunday to keep them from going blind.”

Isn’t it true that people are a little like mules?  We know some folks who are completely oblivious of the purpose of the Lord’s Day, the day of worship.  They are indifferent to the call of the church, they are neglectful of the teachings for which it stands, and they have become morally and spiritually blind.

Just as the mules of the mine need one day in seven to be brought from the darkness of their toils into God’s glorious sunlight, so we need one day in seven whereupon we might rest from the labors of life and be lifted from the trivialities of this world’s darkness into high places of companionship with God and Christ and Christian friends.  (Even God worked six days and rested on the seventh.)

It is for this purpose God gave us the day of worship.  Wise is the man who accepts God’s gift and foolish is the man who rejects it, for he is taking his stand with those who are spiritually blind.  That blindness is the curse of our needful world.  Every person ought to feel obligated to his God, his friends, his loved ones, and to himself to observe the Lord’s Day by being in the Lord’s House.”   ( I clipped this article from Cocoa Beach Christianaut (newsletter) 43 years ago and it is still very true.)

I know that going to a house of worship does not make you a Christian any more than parking your car in a garage makes you a garage.  However, wanting to associate with your family certainly makes you a part of that family.  What would the family think if you refused to meet with them, to associate with them, to share with them?  There is encouragement and strength received from each other in the gathering of the church.  The church is not the building, it is the people who worship together, love each other, in that place.

God’s Word declares, “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”   Hebrews 10:25

 

 

 

SHINE THAN SHOUT

This story that Stuart Briscoe tells is a neat one and so true.

“My dad used to tell the story of a man who went home one Saturday, and his wife had got a “honey-do day” for him.  His honey wanted him to fix up a doorbell.  So, he went down to the local store, and he got the wire, and he got the little battery and the bell, and he wired the whole thing.  He put the bell inside, and he rang the bell, and he thouught his wife would be absolutely thrilled, and she said, “Ugh, if only you had put a light up at the same time.”

So, he trudges off back to the store, and he buys a lamp, and he wires it up to the battery and he puts the lamp in there, and switches on the lamp, and nothing happens.  So, he calls an electrician friend of  his, and he says, “Hey, I rigged up this bell that my wife wanted, and I pressed it and it rings great. Then, she wanted a light, so I fixed the light on to the battery, and nothing happens.”  So the electrician says, “You don’t have enough power because it takes more power to shine than to shout.”

“It takes more power to shine, than to shout.”

What God wants us to do before we start shouting is to start shining.  If the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ in our lives is being bottled up inside us than all that the people can see is the outside clay pot.  There will be no shining, and the shouting will fall on deaf ears.

“For God who said, “Let your light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.  But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”   2 Corinthians 4:6-7

Jesus said, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.”   Matthew 5:16

Of course, the message of Jesus needs to be verbalized because we can tell it easier than we can live it.  But, the proof of the pudding is in the living.  Let you actions be your loud speaker.  SHINE FOR JESUS.