Choose your battles

Many times I feel frustrated not knowing how to counter an argument and not having the right words to say to the ‘attacker’.

‘Choose your battles’ was the advice given by my friend when I was relating to him an incident as such. The advice made a lot of sense to me as I pondered on it. And today God affirmed me when I read this bible verse from a daily verse software installed on my phone:

The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent - Exodus 14:14

Sometimes, with certain people, it doesn’t matter how much you explain to them why things are done in such manner. If they’re not opened or they’re just plain stubborn, your explanation will not weigh anything regardless how fantastic your reasoning is.

I guess what He is teaching me is that, sometimes it's okay to just keep silent and let Him who is able to change or break that stubborn heart do the fighting for us.

Thank you, Abba Father, for this lesson.

Taxed for going to church?

Are you kidding? In a suburb of Kansas City, people who go to church are getting taxed. Read it here.

Giving thanks lead to praise and worship

Again, why were we taught to give thanks first when we begin to pray? This blogger couldn't have explained it better. In this post, I also liked how the structure of the temple (which was designed in different degree of holiness) was used to describe the flow of praise and worship:

Do you know what happen when you give thanks? You start to look in your life, and in your world, where God is, where his blessings are, where you have received grace upon grace. And for all that God has given to us, we give him Thanks! And as we give thanks, we "enter through the gate" into what God is doing, into the kindness and the love of God. And only with this awareness, can we start to Praise God for who he is. We praise God because he deserves our praise.

Ps. 147
[1] Praise the LORD!
For it is good to sing praises to our God;
for he is gracious,
and a song of praise is seemly.
The psalmist says we enter His gate with thanksgiving, and so we start from our worries, our world, our self-centredness, and we turn to what God does for us in our lives. We learn to see what we have received: Love, kindness, grace, and blessings. And for these we give thanks to God. And as we give thanks to God, we start to see who this God is. We started to see the Love that he has for us. And we move on from "the gift" to the "Giver". If in thanksgiving we look into "our lives", then in Praise, we fix our eyes on THE "God".

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Praise and Worship

This post reminds me of why we have praise and worship session, and that what we do is actually scriptured.

Ps.95
[1] O come, let us sing to the LORD;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
[2] Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
[3] For the LORD is a great God,and a great King above all gods.
... 

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First make peace with your brother

“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift."

 Matthew 18:15

Always thought the scripture was about us apologizing if we sin against another person. I never knew God asked us to apologize even when we're right (most of the time we think we're right even when we're not eh?).

It's easier to apologize when we know we've done wrong. But to apologize to the other person who have done you wrong is against the norm, or rather against our shame-driven culture. 

But in the God-driven culture of love, he wants us to reconcile with our enemies regardless whose fault it was. 

Doing what God wants us to do can sometimes be so hard, but the fruits of following His Word is indeed worth it all.

Frog hitches ride on back of snake

 When all is not well, even enemies will turn against each other no more.

Of all the startling images to have come out from the Queensland floods, this has to be the most unusual - a green frog hitching a ride on the back of a brown snake.

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