THE GOD OF THE SCRIPTURES

What comes into your mind when you think about God? The great preacher A.W. Tozer wrote that "we tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of God." So it's crucial that our idea of God correspond as nearly as is possible to the true being of God.

Certainly, in our limited human condition, we cannot think of God as He really is. But if we are drawing our image of God from the wrong sources, then He'll be too small.

Today, since "spirituality" is so big in our culture, celebrities and people of influence often talk about their relationship with God... but for many, God seems to be a vague deity they've made up, a personalized edition of a spiritual force who exists to make people feel good about themselves.

We need to take care not be squeezed into the mind-set of the culture around us. In every situation of each day, we have a choice. We can fix our attention on ourselves, and recast God in our own image. Or we can fix our attention on God, as the Scriptures really reveal Him to be.

-- Ellen Vaughn in Daily Seeds from Women Who Walk in Faith


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THE HUMBLE GOD

[God] delights, it seems, in using trees, flowers, rivers, automobiles, friends, enemies, church buildings, paintings in order to announce His presence or to work out His purposes… There is something crude in the depiction of God intervening directly in the play, the clumsy deus ex machina interrupting the speeches of the other actors and upsetting the stage. How much more tantalizing the God who hints and lurks and cajoles hiddenly through and around the actors, even unbeknownst to them. It is the humble God who chooses so to act.

-- Robert Barron in And Now I See


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MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIPS

William Menninger once suggested that relationships in marriage depend on how effectively we can change from preferring to get to preferring to give.

-- U. M. Bishop George W. Bashore


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SIMPLE OBEDIENCE

We grow spiritually by obeying God through the words of Jesus being made spirit and life to us, and by paying attention to where we are, not to whether we are growing or not. We grow spiritually as our Lord grew physically, by a life of simple, unobtrusive obedience.

-- Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest


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THE WISE COUPLE

There is no question that husbands and wives are different. The challenge is to put these differences together and become a team. When working out differences, the goal is for neither spouse to win; the goal is to have the marriage win. Differences in the backgrounds of husband and wife come out of life style, birth order, and how they were parented. The wise couple is aware of these differences and makes allowances for them.

-- Dr. Kevin Leman in Keeping Your Family Together


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