The Plumbline

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. (Thomas A. Edison) We must not get tired of doing good. We will receive our harvest of eternal life at the right time. We must not give up. (Galatians 6:9) It is easy to grow weary, much harder to regain momentum when we have been stagnant way too long! We will face trials - challenges beyond our 'natural' reasoning, ability, or strength. What we do when we stand face-to-face with those challenges makes all the difference! Will we turn and run? Will we stand up and fight in our own strength? Or will we turn to Christ for wisdom, renewal, and increased capacity? Sometimes we think the only thing we need when facing a hard challenge is to have more strength. More 'ability' to handle it. More 'intel' about the situation. The truth is that we might just need more capacity! Old wine skins were never meant to hold new wine. Why? As time passed, the new wine wou

Capacity is determined by what is attempting to enter the vessel and the vessel's "space" to hold what is entering. For example, if we have a used jar of peanut butter that has not been scraped clean and washed out, there are remnants of peanut butter in there. For all intents and purposes, we'd say the peanut butter jar was empty - we can easily cast it away as no longer of use to us. No matter how much we attempt to fill that "empty" jar with something else (like jam), that jar would never be totally full of the jam because it still was partially filled with the peanut butter. It may not be much peanut butter, but it still affects the taste of the jam and it takes up space that the jam would like to have enjoyed. Christ is kind of like the jam in our lives - wanting to fill the empty spaces of our lives, but he is competing with the peanut butter - remnants of our old ways of doing things, responding to things, and things we have held onto that we just don

Rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full. (Ecclesiastes 1:7 NLT) If you have ever stopped to just "ponder" something like where all the waters of the streams and rivers flow from or to, you might just observe what King Solomon so poetically described above. Rivers run - toward the sea they make their flow - yet the sea never seems to be "too full" to contain anymore. A pond or river may overflow their banks, becoming filled beyond capacity, but the sea - it never seems to reveal any resistance to be filled time and time again. Is it quite possible that we might just be like the seas? Filled time and time again, yet never truly full. What a joy it is to come to the realization of being filled - yet being filled is never the end for us. Filling leads to refilling and I think that leads to the expansion of capacity beyond measure. This is how God's economy works - it is expansive! It goes beyond what we have immediate need of today to be sure we hav

The moments come into our days when we might just doubt God's presence with us - those moments of stress so great we think our heart is about to explode within.  Stress is an actual "physical force" exerted on one thing by another.  I'd like us to consider it also as a "spiritual force", "emotional force", and "mental force" which exerts some type of pressure or "forceful action" which brings about this impression of being "strained" to almost the point of breaking.  As these conditions exist, we are often faced with the tremendous challenge of keeping our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and what he is doing in that moment within our "exertion".  A rubber band is a good thing to have in our junk drawers.  When we need to bind one thing to another, we want one of those around.  Yet, we have all experienced the truth of a rubber band stretched beyond the point of "no return" - that moment in time when it

Enthusiasm and Energy - two character traits which often define the progress we make in life.  Lack enthusiasm or energy and any task you take on will seem like a drudgery, weighing you down with its burden.  Sometimes we possess energy, but lack enthusiasm.  When we do, we have all the "burn" we need for the long-haul, but we just don't have the "umph" behind it to make the "haul" enjoyable.  We can also have all the enthusiasm in the world, but lack the energy because it has been sucked out of us by all the other stuff we also have "enthusiasm" for in life!  These two work hand-in-hand, as do many of our other "character traits" we have explored over the past several days.  Today's list is our "E" List - Enthusiasm and Energy. I readily admit that the Jews are impressively energetic regarding God—but they are doing everything exactly backward. They don’t seem to realize that this comprehensive setting-things-right

14-16 The unspiritual self, just as it is by nature, can't receive the gifts of God's Spirit. There's no capacity for them. They seem like so much silliness. Spirit can be known only by spirit—God's Spirit and our spirits in open communion. Spiritually alive, we have access to everything God's Spirit is doing, and can't be judged by unspiritual critics. Isaiah's question, "Is there anyone around who knows God's Spirit, anyone who knows what he is doing?" has been answered: Christ knows, and we have Christ's Spirit. (I Corinthians 2:14-16) Capacity is determined by what is attempting to enter the vessel and the vessel's "space" to hold what is entering.  For example, if we have a used jar of peanut butter that has not been scraped clean and washed out, there are remnants of peanut butter in there.  For all intends and purposes, we'd say the peanut butter jar was empty.  No matter how much we attempt to fill that "empt