Illustrations

In Rebuilding Your Broken World, Gordon MacDonald suggests twenty-six questions to help develop accountability and invite feedback. If we desire to grow, we should submit our selves to a spiritual mentor and answer these questions honestly.

1. How is your relationship with God right now?

2. What have you read in the Bible in the past week?

3. What has God said to you in this reading?

4. Where do you find yourself resisting Him these days?

5. What specific things are you praying for in regard to yourself?

A recent survey of Discipleship Journal readers ranked areas of greatest spiritual challenge to them:

1. Materialism
2. Pride
3. Self-centeredness
4. Laziness
5. (Tie) Anger/Bitterness
5. (Tie) Sexual lust
6. Envy
7. Gluttony
8. Lying

Source: Discipleship Journal

Worship has a positive impact on teenagers, according to a study that tries to determine religion's role in adolescents' lives.

A survey of thousands of 12th-graders nationwide has found that teens who attend worship and rate religion as important have positive self-images, are optimistic, and enjoy school.

Strawberries are my favorite fruit. I even love strawberry plants, for once they preached a powerful sermon to me which I've never forgotten. I was on my hands and knees in my garden pulling weeds, when suddenly I noticed something I had seen hundreds of times before but never caught the lesson. It was the "runners" on the berry plants. From the main vine a number of slender shoots extend like arms in all directions. They are thin, green stems creeping along the ground, being pushed out by that mysterious power in the mother plant.

We ought to know better than to despair over the visible result of spiritual endeavor. During a recent visit to Johannesburg I spent a day at one of the gold-mines. There was immense activity, gangs of workers, clouds of dust, hissing steam, deafening stamps, heaps of quartz, torrents of water and cauldrons of slime; but I came away without having seen a single speck of gold. The engineer touched the bottom of a turbid stream, and exclaimed, “There is a particle!” It was however, as invisible to me as the same metal usually is on the collection-plate.

Reflect on compounding interest, the repoductive cycles of nature, and the world's biological population explosion. Soon it will be clear why the multiplication is God's primary method for replenishing the earth. One unspayed female dog and her descendants can produce 4,372 puppies in just seven generations, and one unspayed cat and her offspring can produce 80 million kittens in ten years. This same fundamental concept of multiplication applies directly to the great commission.

There is a story told about the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox Courthouse as the Civil War concluded. General Grant was an unusual man. Knowing the war was over and the victory was his, he showed great, and unusual, kindness and respect toward the chief general of the Confederates. He allowed General Robert E. Lee to ride freely in and out of the area. He also allowed the Confederate men to keep their possessions and horses. Grant gave them food because they were hungry and let them all go home undisturbed.

John Harper was a Scottish preacher aboard the Titanic. When the ship hit an iceberg and sank, Harper was clinging to a piece of drift wood. As he was out in the darkness a man drifted close to him crying, and Harper shouted to him, "Are you saved?" the man replied, "No." Harper said, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." The man drifted away, but shortly came back into sight.

One day a teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name.

Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down. It took the remainder of the class period to finish their assignment, and as the students left the room, each one handed in the papers.

That Saturday, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and listed what everyone else had said about that individual.

Researchers have found that teenagers who listen to raunchy, sex-filled lyrics are more likely to indulge in early sexual activity than their counterparts who don't.