Money will buy a man anything but his own destiny.”
–Luke Short (The Branded Man)
“Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be… You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”
–Matthew 6:21, 24 (NLT)
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“Preoccupation with self is the greatest barrier to seeing, and the hardest one to break.”
–Freeman Patterson
This has been some kind of year. All kinds of storms from the hurricanes, to fires, to shootings, and add to that riots. Going through them is tough, but what comes afterward can be just as hard. Rebuilding, relocating, restoring is not necessarily easy. In other words, life can get rough at times. Life, without the pressures from the devil, can grind down a man’s spirit. One thing important to remember is some men have achieved their greatest successes under life’s most unpleasant pressures.
There was a fisherman, several centuries ago in England, who stood on a bluff overlooking his flooded homestead. What would he do? Where would he rebuild? But that same storm that destroyed his property was the same one which sank the Spanish Armada. Even Philip II of Spain said that it was the “winds and waves of God” that destroyed his fleet. What would have happened if England has been conquered by Spain in 1588? More than likely Protestantism would have been wiped out through the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition. England surely would have face torture and death.
Sometimes it takes sickness or a flying brick to bring us to the place where God can use us. Colonel S.L. Brengle of the Salvation Army was hit by a flying brick while in a London slum. While he was in the hospital recuperating, he wrote “Helps to Holiness.” Or take Catherine Marshall, lying in her sick bed from a disease from which she might not recover. She used the phone to minister and began to write. Have you read “Christy”?
John Bunyan wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” in jail. Glenn Cunningham was so badly burned at the age of eight that doctors said he would never walk, but recovered to become a great track star. Other stories could be told. Success because of the “storms of life.”
I like what Robert W. McIntyre said, “When life’s pressures are most intense, peace cannot be far away, for the eye of the storm is the most peaceful place for miles around.” Then following the storm peace returns, and within a matter of time things are back to normal.
“God is able to pour out on you richly every possible grace, so that you will always and under all circumstances have plenty for your own need, and to spare for every good enterprise.”
–2 Corinthians 9:8 (Berkeley)
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“What is largely missing in American life today is a sense of context, of saying or doing anything that is intended or even expected to live beyond the movement… We have become so obsessed with facts that we have lost all touch with truth… Consider this paradox: Almost everything that is publicly said these days is recorded. Almost nothing of what is said is worth remembering.”
–Ted Koppel