Faith

You can trust God to bring it to pass--as long as you don't settle for less than his best.

Many of us are pregnant with a word that God has spoken to us either directly or through someone else. But if we have been carrying the word for a season with no indication that it is about to be birthed, we can become discouraged.

What promise has God proclaimed to you personally? Is it the restoration of your family? A ministry that mends the brokenhearted? Or a business that prospers and produces?

 The beginning of a new year is like a mile marker on the path of life--a checkpoint to show how far you've come. It's a good time to think about where you are on the road to destiny.

When you were younger, what did you expect to have accomplished by this point? When you first got a vision of what God had planned for you, where did you think you would be by now? Are you moving forward--or has the climate of fear in our country paralyzed you and prevented you from making progress?

Many of us have allowed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the subsequent declaration of war to immobilize us. We have allowed fear to supercede faith--and to rule our thoughts, feelings and actions.

Probably the best advice my mother ever gave me came when I was finishing my senior year of high school. We were in one of those mother-and-daughter heated discussions because I had made some decisions that were breaking her heart. Like a broken record, she had repeated her speech over and over. It went something like this: "You lie in the bed that you make."

Faced with my "Oh, no, here we go again" attitude, my mother was completely frustrated. She blurted out, "You can come in here and fool me, Paula. You can fool your family and your friends, but you'd better be honest with yourself!"

I knew she was right. She had hit a nerve, and eventually, it proved to be the advice that would change my life.

Real men don't use bad language.

If you watch enough television and movies, or listen to enough popular music, you'll eventually get the message that real men talk like old sailors. Words once considered taboo in public have now become part of our nation's lexicon.

In his book Cursing in America, Timothy Jay says 13 percent of the leisure conversation of American adults contains cursing. As Christian men, we're supposed to adhere to a higher standard than the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the talk doesn't always match the walk.

Why ongoing debates surrounding the claims of Christ shouldn't shake your faith.

Who is Jesus? This is the question people have been asking for 20 centuries. While He was alive the askers were religious leaders, political leaders, even His own disciples. Who are you, they wanted to know. Where do you get your authority and power?

In the last two centuries, scholars and skeptics have added new questions. How historically accurate is the portrayal of Jesus in the first four books of the New Testament?

How a pair of real-life Indiana Joneses used the Bible as a super-accurate treasure map in their search for the real Mount Sinai.

Cresting the final stair-step pitch of crumbling granite, Bob Cornuke and Larry Williams stomped their boots simultaneously on the snub-nosed summit of Jabal al Lawz. With a victorious "Whoop!" Williams turned to Cornuke, "Do you think we're the first Westerners to reach this summit since Moses?" he asked.

Cornuke shrugged. All he knew was that they'd reached the top of an 8,000-foot peak that had tantalized their imaginations halfway across the planet and sent them chasing like bloodhounds into the suffocating deserts of northwest Saudi Arabia. Local bedouins call the peak Jebel Musa--or Mountain of Moses. If the duo's theory was correct, they'd finally reached the real Mount Sinai.

Integrating your faith with your work.

Are you in full-time Christian service? If you say "No" because you work in the secular world, you may be wrong, Robert J. Tamasy says. He explained: "Recently a friend of mine, a financial planner, commented, 'I'd give anything to be able to go full time for the Lord.'

I thought about his statement for a moment and then replied, "What makes you think you haven't already done that?"

PROCURRING THE PROMISES OF GOD REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE. ARE YOU WILLING TO PRESS THROUGH ADVERSITY TO FULFILL YOUR DESTINY?

Joseph is the perfect example of a man who was pregnant with promise and yet had to walk through the processes, trials and hurts of life to attain his destiny. He was the son of Jacob and Rachel (see Gen. 30:22-24). Because Joseph "was the son of his old age," Jacob loved him more than he did his other children, and he gave him a coat of many colors (Gen. 37:3, NKJV).