We used to sing a stupid little song in Sunday School. The song went like this…   Count your blessings, Count them one by one. Count your many blessings, See what God has done.   There is actually a lot of wisdom in that stupid little song. We keep far better score of our problems than our blessings. Today I am counting my blessings with thanksgiving.   Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. Philippians 4 NIV I pray you will have a blessed Thanksgiving.
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I am taking a break from the daily blog until after Thanksgiving. But come back daily for an excerpt from my book “Bring’em Back Alive”. This section is from a chapter called Feud for Thought.   In December 1979, a tragedy occurred in my home state of Ohio. The Who rock group came to Cincinnati to perform at Riverfront Coliseum. The tickets were sold in a then-popular format called festival seating.   Ticket prices were fixed, and the best seats went to the concertgoers who could get inside most quickly. Needless to say, festival seating caused some chaos in the best of circumstances. But in Cincinnati that night, the self-centered desires for good seats led to disaster. When the doors finally opened, the impatient crowd surged forward, resulting in a crush of humanity. Eleven people were killed that night and scores injured.   I would venture that not a single person went to Riverfront Coliseum that night with idea of
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I am taking a break from the daily blog until after Thanksgiving. But come back daily for an excerpt from my book “Bring’em Back Alive”. This section is from a chapter called Feud for Thought. We covered numbers 3 & 4 yesterday. 5. Don’t leave your sense of humor at the altar.   One of the reviews of Bad Christians described me as “flippant.” To be honest I would have preferred “witty” or “erudite.” Flippant! But the fact is that I believe a sense of humor is one of God’s gifts to help get us to the finish line of life. “Humor is a rubber sword,” observed Mary Hirsch. “It allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”   An examination of the life of Jesus would indicate that He possessed a sense of humor. God’s writers did not set out to author a joke book, so you won’t find the phrase “a Sadducee, a Pharisee and a Roman
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I am taking a break from the daily blog until after Thanksgiving. But come back daily for an excerpt from my book “Bring’em Back Alive”. This section is from a chapter called Feud for Thought. We covered numbers 1 & 2 yesterday.   3. Use your mouth for blessing.   There is a book that details a multitude of uses for duct tape. I might suggest one more: If you have a critical spirit, tape your mouth shut. (I confess, that would reduce a fair amount of my own communication.) A bit of more scriptural but less colorful advice is contained in the book of James. It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke and go up in smoke
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I am taking a break from the daily blog until after Thanksgiving. But come back daily for an excerpt from my book “Bring’em Back Alive”. This section is from a chapter called Feud for Thought.   I am not naive enough to think that we can solve everything with a New Year’s resolution. We are flawed and we are sinners, and we bring to the party everything that implies. But I do believe in the power of the Holy Spirit and the always-present possibility of revival in the body of Christ. So I will remain a prayerful optimist until the Lord takes me home. Here is my modest step-by-step plan to begin to shift the momentum in the battle for unity. 1. Remember that Christ died for everyone. The reality of that truth can make a person uncomfortable. That guy who hits his wife: Christ died for him. The homeless guy in the refrigerator box under the bridge, the rebellious
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I am going to be taking a break from the daily blog until after Thanksgiving. But come back daily for an excerpt from my book “Bring’em Back Alive”.   In the book of Jude, we read words that could have been written in last month’s Christianity Today: In the last days there will be people who don’t take these things seriously anymore. They’ll treat them like a joke, and make a religion of their own whims and lusts. These are the ones who split churches, thinking only of themselves. There’s nothing to them, no sign of the Spirit! (Jude 1:18-19) As I noted in Bad Christians, we believers love to talk about multiplication (church growth) but we really only seem to understand division. The Bible offers no excuses for being part of any division within the church. Paul makes a succinct point (he tended to do that) about division in the church at Crete: But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies
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Earl Wilson once said that “one way to get high blood pressure is to go mountain climbing over molehills”. If the following story were Jeopardy categories it would go something like this… “Let’s go with ridiculous church and state objections for $50, Alex.”  And then you would follow up with this category. “I’ll take spectacular over reactions for $100, Alex.” Ding – ding – ding. It’s the DAILY DOUBLE! In preparation for a guest appearance at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta this year, a marching band at C.D. Hylton High School in Prince William County decided to prepare a Georgia themed show.  One of the fun songs they chose was ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ by the Charlie Daniels Band. Alert readers are probably already rolling their eyes in anticipation of where this is going. You got it. A local newspaper published a letter by a Woodbridge resident who wondered how a song about the devil could be played at school events because of the separation of church and state.
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