The Plumbline

Character traits of individuals are as varied as are the number of people in this world.  Some of us have tiny button noses, others are larger and have even made people famous, like Jimmy Durante who is most well known for his "schnozzola".  There are those who possess the evenest white teeth, never needing braces to correct overbite, under bite, or even teeth seemingly too tightly crammed into the space they occupy.  Yet, there are character traits we often don't focus on as much as the outward - those which make us up on the "inside".  I would like to call attention to those character traits which God sees - the "inside stuff".  This journey will begin today and may take us several days, but I hope it will unfold some things for us which we might just be overlooking when we are focusing intently on the "image" we portray.  You see, character traits are more than skin deep and those which matter the most are those which are often barely visi...

Have you ever hit your toe on the furniture by stumbling around in the darkness?  You knew full-well the piece of furniture was there - no one moved it after you went to bed!  Yet, in some moment of "altered alertness" you came into full contact with that inanimate object.  Have you ever noticed it is most commonly your little toe that gets all the stubbing???  What this tells me is that we "almost" avoided the contact which left us in so much pain!  Just a margin of error - not a huge deviation from course - just a tiny margin.  Imagine that!  This should give us a moment to pause about some of the other "errors" we experience in life which cause us more than a little pain - it was likely not a "huge" margin of error which brought us full-face with the pain! “I am the world’s Light. No one who follows me stumbles around in the darkness. I provide plenty of light to live in.”  (John 8:12 MSG) Why do we stumble upon the furnishings in the dark...

1-3   God  spoke to Moses: "Make two bugles of hammered silver. Use them to call the congregation together and give marching orders to the camps. When you blow them, the whole community will meet you at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting..." (Numbers 10:1-3) The instructions to Moses were to make two bugles (or horns) of hammered silver.  These were to be used to communicate with God's people that it was either a time for worship, warfare, or to move on to their next place of occupation.  Whenever the horns were sounded, Israel was to hear clearly the instruction God was giving.  Depending on the sounding of the horns, the people would be "clued into" God's will for their lives at that moment. Today, we don't have such a "clear" example of "hearing" God's will for our lives, but the three "calls" of the horns still apply to us.  The first "sounding" of the horn was a call to worship - a call to assemble toge...

32-36  "So, my dear friends, listen carefully;    those who embrace these my ways are most blessed. Mark a life of discipline and live wisely;    don't squander your precious life. Blessed the man, blessed the woman, who listens to me,    awake and ready for me each morning,    alert and responsive as I start my day's work. When you find me, you find life, real life,    to say nothing of God's good pleasure. But if you wrong me, you damage your very soul;    when you reject me, you're flirting with death." (Proverbs 8:32-36) Wisdom, in the book of Proverbs, represents not only a characteristic we develop, but a person - the person of Jesus Christ.  The very life of Christ was a display of wisdom by which we can pattern our daily walk.  Our writer spent the first eight chapters of this book reminding us of the importance of choosing wisdom over any other action.  If so...