Guidelines For Living

Anyone who has ever undertaken a building project knows that what looks great on paper never takes the same shape in the real world. I don't know if Nehemiah had ever heard of "Murphy's law --whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." There must have been a Persian equivalent, because a man who lived 2600 years ago experienced the full force of that reality.

Have you ever wanted to do something, yet you were faced with all kinds of obstacles? If you answer, "Yes!" then you can relate to one of the greatest of all Old Testament characters, a man by the name of Nehemiah.

In her book, Having It All, psychologist Deborah Lee quotes an investment consultant as saying, "Having both work and family is a plus." She points out that a balanced portfolio is much safer than having all your stock in one company. Question: "Can you really have it all?" Can you have a rewarding job and a happy family—a high- powered, high-stress job with a lot of demands and a salary to match, at the same time you are a mother or a dad who is there for his or her children? Can you succeed in business and still be there when your child takes his first step, or throws his first ball at Little League? Can you sit on the corporate board and be there for Parent's Day when your daughter's first grade teacher shows moms and dads how well little Teresa can read?

No individual can really be educated apart from a knowledge of the Bible, and the book of Psalms in this grand book contains some of the most beautiful and thought-provoking passages and prose of all the world's great literature. I, for one, marvel at the profound emotional insights which you find described here—the same emotions and feelings we grapple with today. In Psalm 42 and 43, which were probably written as one, the writer voices a recurring theme. Three times he asks, "Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?" Three times, he speaks of the solution: "Put your hope in God," he says, adding, "for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God."

"If you want to make God laugh," says a post it sticker, "make plans!"   And what is the real message—that you should never try to plan anything? No, but rather, when God is left out of your plan, your game plan may never happen. There is a proverb which says, "We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall" (Proverbs 16:33 NLT).

Dr. Vernon Grounds was a friend and mentor to thousands of young men and young women preparing for Christian work. In one of his letters he told of a woman who was captured during the Spanish Civil War, and when she was ordered to reveal where she stood politically, she knew that saying the wrong thing could result in her being shot as a traitor. To say that she was a conservative meant she was on the right of the political spectrum, and to say that she was a liberal would identify her as a leftist. Uncertain as to what she should say and knowing how important her answer could be, she thought for a moment and then replied, "I stand at extreme center."

Of the four Gospels, none is more to the point and straightforward than the account of Jesus' life as rendered by Mark. Because of his close relationship with Peter who, himself, was a pretty blunt, leave-nothing-unsaid sort of a person, many scholars believe that Mark simply reflected Peter's thoughts. With that in mind, may I remind you that some of the most uplifting, positive words of Jesus are also recorded by Mark? For example, Mark tells about the time Jesus was talking with the disciples and said, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours" (Mark 11:24). Then Jesus said, "And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins" (v. 25).

A man walked into a bank, handed the teller a threatening note and walked out with a bag of money containing more than $3,000. The man was never caught, but the whole thing has authorities baffled. It began a few months later when the bank received an envelope which had been mailed from a distant city containing a cashier's check in the name of a Mister R.E. Morse as in the word "remorse." Along with one of the checks was the following note: "My faith in Christ as my Savior has impelled me to undertake this reimbursement and I hope to be able to pay it off within six months."

One of the strange things about trials is that when they knock at our door or sneak through the back door of our lives, we never quite expect them. Yes, we know that other people face them, but not us. When we do go into combat with them, we also feel that nobody else has ever faced the same intensity of testing nor do they understand.

There is a common perception in the world today that faith in Jesus Christ will exempt us from the trials and hardships of life, especially those associated with our health, our happiness, and our prosperity. Then when people buy into this concept and discover all together too soon that their prayers will not always turn back the hostility of a world who thinks Christians are bigoted and strange, they become disappointed and feel disillusioned.