The same way we have to care for our physical muscles, that is how we must care for our spiritual muscles.  Once used, they require rest and rejuvenation.  Sometimes God has to get in there to get out some knots or release tightness, and that can be uncomfortable and painful, but it is necessary.  Let us ask God to perform this relieving and necessary work in us today.

As one year ends and another begins, I recall a message from last year that reminds us who has taken the lead in our lives.  Today might not look the way you expected, and this past year might have been far from what you envisioned, but Jesus is still leading us.  Not only that, we can trust him to lead us ALL the way.

Looking at how this holiday season is celebrated in so many different ways in this world, why don't we take a moment to reevaluate how we spend this time?  Let us make sure that Christ is the center of all we do in and out of the Christmas season. 

We have challenges before us right now that can seem huge, but they are really nothing.  Whatever we face today is only a preparation for what will come tomorrow.  There is only more work, more suffering, and more warfare.  We have to learn to get through today's smaller challenges so that we can make it through the greater ones ahead.

Before we speak, let us check our motives and words.  We can speak life, or we can speak death.  The choice is ours.

There is joy, meaning, and purpose to so much of life, but the wrong perspective will send us looking for those things in places where we will never find them.  Let us seek God for direction on our fulfillment in life.

Well over a year ago, we were in this same place.  It has been a long season for the world, the Church, and the individual.  Let us continue to seek God for our role and her role in all of this.

Esther, Mordecai and the Jews of their time certainly had their flaws.  Yet, God used them in a mighty way, and we are still talking about it today.  For them, the question was simple.  Would they be willing to face death individually and corporately in order to try and save themselves from annihilation?  They would be.  Would we be willing to do the same?

The great masters of the arts put their work behind their passion.  They could not be sure that their work would create a legacy, immortalize them in our culture, or be tossed aside when the next great works appeared.  Beethoven and Rembrandt could not have known that we would be admiring and studying them today.  Let us focus not on our legacy but on our work, and let us trust that God will use that work to impact others long after we are gone.

We have been freed.  The chains are gone, the doors are open, and we have been shown the way.  Those who are wise would appreciate that freedom and do whatever it takes to keep it.  Yet, so many of us willfully walk back into bondage.  Let us ask God to show us how we have imprisoned ourselves again so that we can break out of the pattern.