Spiritual Wimps
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”
Matthew 23:13
Where are men the biggest wimps?
It often amazes me that men who are good athletes, or who pride themselves on hard work and self-reliance, are absolute wimps when it comes to fulfilling God’s calling of being the spiritual leader in the home. Many macho men are classic spiritual wimps in this area. They look at religion and church as mostly women’s stuff and often rely on the wife and mother to fulfill the void of spiritual leadership in the family. The guys simply wimp out.
But, Scripture is clear. The father is to have this major responsibility. There is no doubt that a primary reason for the disintegration of the family is that so many men are spiritual wimps rather than spiritual leaders.
If you’re a husband or a father, stop wimping out on what it means to be a man in God’s eyes. Ask the Lord for guidance for what it means to be a spiritual leader. Come on men, rise to the challenge! The future of our land is depending on you.
Trusting God
“And those who know Your name will put their trust in You, for You, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek You.”
Psalm 9:10
Isn’t it amazing all the people we entrust our life to every week? We trust pharmacists to give us the right pills from a prescription that we can’t read. We trust pilots we don’t know to fly us to the right destination believing that they know how to fly that baby exactly where we need to go. As we sit in traffic on the interstate, we entrust our lives to engineers and road construction crews, believing the bridges will hold.
Yet people have trouble trusting God.
They often say, “I can’t see Him.” Do we see the engineers that designed the bridge? Do we know the pilots who fly the planes? Not usually. Yet God, our creator who loves us more than anyone, who even sacrificed His son for us to have forgiveness of sin and eternal life, is difficult to trust?
It’s amazing. It doesn’t make sense to trust imperfect men and not to trust a perfect God.
Plane Crash
“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
Philippians 1:21
We were dropping out of the sky—five people in a twin-engine Cessna. The right engine had gone out, and then the left followed. We knew within a minute or two that we would crash. I thought of my wife and our three-month-old son. Would he grow up without a father?
I prayed that God would guide the pilot in bringing us down. Amazingly, in a way I can’t explain, a peace came over me—a sureness that we would be okay—whether we lived or died—because we knew Christ.
We crashed in a rice field. Part of the left wing broke off and we belly-flopped and spun to a stop; yet we all walked away unharmed—a miracle for sure. But the greater miracle was to be face-to-face with death and unafraid. That meant everything.
If you were in my seat, how would you have felt? The good news is, with Jesus Christ, we can face death knowing if we live or die—we live.
The First Temptation
“And [the serpent] said to the woman, ‘Indeed has God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?’”
Genesis 3:1
Let’s talk about temptation. Go back to the big one, the first one—the devil tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. Why don’t you read Genesis 3:1-7?
Note what he does.
1.He raises questions about the trustworthiness of God’s word.
2.Then the seeds of doubt are planted in Eve’s mind.
3.When Eve says she’s not to eat of the fruit or she’ll die, the devil replies cunningly, “You surely shall not die.”
The ultimate liar accuses God of lying. He makes his word seem true and God’s word seem unbelievable.
Think about temptation in your own life. It usually means a choice between believing your way is better than God’s way. For Eve and for all of us, when we begin to doubt the Bible as reliable for living life the best way, we begin to give into temptation—we buy into the lies and half-truths of the world.
For Eve and for all of us, it leads to spiritual death. So…decide to believe God’s Word—it is the best way. Ask God to give you strength to live it and resist temptation.
