The Plumbline

You can trust what your friend says, even when it hurts. But your enemies want to hurt you, even when they act nice. (Proverbs 27:6) What does your closest friend say about you? It may not always be what you want to hear, but if they know Jesus, we can trust him to use their words on occasion. Those words may build us up at one time, but they can bring necessary conviction at others! Do all the words we hear always bring us joy and great peace? Not hardly, as sometimes we need to hear the ones that sting just a bit. Why? We may not have been seeing things in the right light and need to have a bit more light shed on the matter. We may have been refusing to hear and just need someone to prod us to listen closer. Our enemies, on the other hand, may sugar coat every word they say, happy to mislead us wherever they can. Whenever we choose to listen to their lies, we almost feel a little undone by those words. They eat at us and give us concerns we didn't know otherwise. We must be caref...

Have you ever just chased your tail round and round? The harder you seem to work at solving something, the more difficult it seems to become to solve it. You never seem to "catch up", never seem to fully "grasp" the goal - the solution seems to evade you and you try repeatedly to solve whatever it is that stands before you. In the end, you just sit there in total frustration, more in a muddle than you were when you first began, wondering if there are any 'untried solutions' to the issue. Just as quickly as we started, we find ourselves out of energy to continue to journey! We stop short of the goal - never really crossing the finish line. What a waste to have started and then to not finish it. We are reminded of the importance of staying focused. We are also reminded of the senselessness of relying on anything other than Jesus to give us prominence or importance in the Kingdom of God. "I'm not saying that I have this all together, that I have...