Well as we enter into this new year things are as they always were, busy. How do we stop the madness. I can remember an old saying that many use in a negative way. I am sure that all of you have heard it before, ” I wouldn’t give them the time of day”. This means that you are so put out with someone that you would not lend them a second of your time. Maybe we could take this saying and use it to slow down a little bit ourselves. Lets look at it for just a moment. What if we identified certain things in our lives that are time consuming, then we put them in a categories. We could look at each thing and just say to it, today I am not giving you the time of day. What would we do with this time though, maybe we could visit someone we have never visited, maybe we could spend that time meditating on the things of God more. We could spend that time making calls to some who may be discouraged, or just need a encouraging word. We could go out and buy some cards and send them. I guess we need to ask ourselves the question, what do we give the time of day. Question, what if it were possible to spend and entire day doing something for God, would we, or would we give other things this time. God help us to redeem the time, to stop looking at time as just passing. Really we only have a short period to accomplish the things that God has appointed for us to do. I can assure you we don’t have time to waste.

In times of war in ancient days, and even in some wars today when an enemy was defeated the victor plunder the camp of the fallen. They took what every was of value and destroyed everything else. Many times they would take the dead bodies of the leaders and show them in the towns. We have even seen that today in Iraq and Somalia. When Saul fell on a sword the Philistines cut his head off and then pinned his body to the wall of one of their gods. His armor was on display in the temple of the false gods of the Philistines. They were displaying their spoils of battle. I felt lead to preach on this last night and to share it in this blog. We too have won some battles, and we need to display our spoils before the enemy and the world. At times when God has revealed to us how the enemy laid a trap for us and God helped us to defeat him, and when we come to the end of a valley with victory, or the top of a mountain with glory, we must tell the world what our God can do. The enemy is so bold to rub it in the face of God’s people when someone backslides, or looses a battle, or when someone is praying for healing and God chooses to move in another direction. Be assured he will do all he can to make sure if he feels it is a defeat for God’s people to broadcast it. I like to remind him that at Calvary he lost completely, when we claim the cross he looks like what he is, A COMPLETE FOOL. God help us to rub it is face every time we get a chance. Bottom line, he was plunder, and pounded by my savior. JESUS

Well this word fully describes my ability to blog. I am not ashamed to admit this simply because it is truth. I know that we look at failure in many ways, but failure is failure. It is not such a bad thing unless we let it be. When we look at why we fail we can come up with many excuses, to busy, didn’t try hard enough, couldn’t understand, and so on and so forth. The reason we come up with excuses is that we just don’t want to admit we failed. I have to tell you that the first step to conquering failure is to admit you failed, don’t try to blame it some enormous problem, or someone that may have been close enough to your attempt to succeed to blame them, just except it. When you do you can then begin to work on why you failed. Let me give us some examples, for instance I could say my dog at my computer so I couldn’t blog, or my wife wouldn’t let me because she needed me to fix everything in the house, or I was counseling, or helping the saints, or whatever, the bottom line is I just failed. I realized that now that I have excepted that I am a FB (failed blogger) I can now start to do something about it, what’s that you say, I am doing it right now. One good thing about failure is this, failure comes from trying, if ya never try, ya never fail, course you don’t accomplish anything either, nothing, not even failure. I do thank God for one thing, though I have been a failure in things before, Jesus never has.

Well we are attempting to try and post again. We are in the middle of our VBS and thank the Lord we have had a pretty good turn out. God has richly blessed us with a lot of new children and youth. Wow, a lot of youth. We all prayed that God would send us some more young people and He did. I think now we are close to 20 youth. That may not seem like a lot to some but to us we feel we are richly blessed. I thank God for all my brother and sisters who have such a burden for the work of God. They have really put their heart into the VBS. Children are a gift from the Father. Oh God help us to direct them in the paths of righteousness. I have heard many quote the scripture “train up a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it”. Some see this as if we raise our children in church they will never leave God. Well we know this is not true, even in the era in which this scripture was written. What does it mean then? Well, with children we only have a short time to impress on them a way of life. They learn this very quickly so believe it or not time is of the essence. When they reach a point in life they have to face their own temptation and trials they have to make their own decisions. If they make the wrong ones and they have seen mercy in the home they will seek mercy. If they have seen wrath they will shun it, if they have seen compassion they will cling to it. If they have seen fearful rebuke for failure they will run. God help us to keep a balance in our homes. That balance is the spirit of Christ Jesus. If they choose the broad way, they will always remember that the narrow way was not just judgement, but also forgiveness. Pray for us as we work with the children in our local area.