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Mr. Intenseone:
Greg Laurie is awesome. He used to be one of the Pastors at Calvary Chaple Costa Mesa. I'm enrolling my son next fall for school, I think it's going to be a great experiance for him!

Colossus_500:

--- Quote from: Mr. Intenseone on April 21, 2006, 09:07:02 PM ---Greg Laurie is awesome. He used to be one of the Pastors at Calvary Chaple Costa Mesa. I'm enrolling my son next fall for school, I think it's going to be a great experiance for him!

--- End quote ---
I listen to Greg Laurie every chance I get.  He is an incredible speaker.  Alot of those guys from Calvary Chapel are on a web portal where you can listen to them online.  Here's the link:  www.oneplace.com

Some of my other favorite pastors to listen to are.

Ravi Zacharias
Chuck Swindoll
Chuck Smith
Alastaire Begg
J. Vernon McGee (though he is deceased, his messages are still played on the radio and online)
Adrian Rogers (though he is deceased, his messages are still played on the radio and online)
Leo Giovanetti
Bob Coy
Joe Fosche

there's a host of others that i like to listen to, but these guys have helped me tremendously in my growth. 

Intense, your son is a very lucky young man to have a dad who invest in his future like you have.  It'll take him a long way and will make his walk a little bit easier (it's never easy is it?).  Kudos to you, bro. 

24KT:
On Gratitude

"Strive to be conscious of all the riches God has given you, and your heart will be full of love. You will think only of helping others, of lighting the way for them. Someone who feels rich cannot keep everything he has for himself; he feels compelled to share it. Whereas someone who is not aware of his wealth and spends his time making lists of everything he lacks will naturally resent those he believes are richer than himself. As far as he is concerned, they have too much. He has no alternative but to attack them and either take or destroy what should be his. It is always poverty, poverty in all its forms – material, moral and spiritual – that is at the root of every crime. So, if you want to be a benefactor of humanity, be conscious of all the riches God has given you, and know that no one can take them from you."

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Colossus_500:
This one is pretty long, but it's a great read.  Here's an excerpt from Ravi Zacharias' book "Cries of The Heart". 

Cries of the Heart
Ravi Zacharias
 
Some time ago my wife, Margie, returned from an errand visibly shaken by a heartrending conversation she had experienced. She was about the very simple task of selecting a picture and a frame when a dialogue began with the owner of the shop. When Margie said that she would like a scene with children in it the woman quite casually asked if the people for whom the picture was being purchased had any children of their own. "No," replied my wife, "but that is not by their choice." There was a momentary pause. Suddenly, like a hydrant uncorked, a question burst with unveiled hostility from the other woman’s lips: "Have you ever lost a child?" Margie was somewhat taken aback and immediately sensed that a terrible tragedy probably lurked behind the abrupt question.

The conversation had obviously taken an unsettling turn. But even at that she was not prepared for the flood of emotion and anger that was yet to follow, from this one who was still a stranger. The sorry tale quickly unfolded. The woman proceeded to speak of the two children she had lost, each loss carrying a heartache all its own. "Now," she added, "I am standing by watching my sister as she is about to lose her child." There was no masking of her bitterness and no hesitancy about where to ascribe the blame for these tragedies. Unable to utter anything that would alleviate the pain of this gaping wound in the woman’s heart, my wife began to say, "I am sorry," when she was interrupted with a stern rebuke, "Don’t say anything!" She finally managed to be heard just long enough to say in parting, "I’ll be praying for you through this difficult time." But even that brought a crisp rejoinder—"Don’t bother."

After leaving her, Margie returned to her car and just wept out of shock and out of a longing to reach out to this broken life. Even more, ever since that conversation she has carried with her an unshakable mental picture of a woman’s face whose every muscle contorted with anger and anguish—at once seeking a touch yet holding back, yearning for consolation but silencing anyone who sought to help, shoving at people along the way to get to God. Strangely, this episode spawned a friendship and we have had the wonderful privilege of getting close to her and of praying with her in our home. We have even felt her embrace of gratitude and have reflected much as she has tried in numerous ways to say, "Thank you."

But through this all she has represented to us a symbol of smothered cries, genuine and well thought through, and of a search for answers that need time before that anger is overcome by trust, and anguish gives way to contentment.

These smothered cries and the wordless reality that infuses every life may well be endemic to the human condition—men, women, young people and even children. Numerous professional voices are now awakening us from the illusion under which men particularly have lived in many cultures, that strength lies in not feeling. What a price has been paid for living with such amputation. Not every cry is ridden by anguish, but every life has its own cry or has heard the cry of another who is struggling with emotions or passions in need of explanation. Not every struggle is vented with such force, but many a life is governed by much inner conflict. And just as some are able to cope more readily with failure, so also are some better able to handle the vicissitudes of life.

The purpose of this book, therefore, is not simply to apply some healing balm to the bitter pain of an unheard cry, rather, to face squarely the reality that all of us in our private moments deal with suppressed cries. Years ago Reader’s Digest printed an article entitled, "When We Are Alone We Dance." The main idea was that when we are alone and nobody is watching, we all have some rhythmic expression. We may not succeed in clicking our heels in midair but that does not keep us from trying. Within that private world, each one of us also wrestles with some heart-consuming battle. For one it may be the inner ache of loneliness; for another it may be the daunting and haunting specter of guilt. For yet another it may be the question, "Why do I not feel God to be near when I have done all that I know to be right?" And for still another it may be the question of all questions—"Who are you, God?"

The reader will immediately recognize the range of our existential struggles. If anything unites our cultures today it is the unanswered questions we face that have a felt reality. The loneliness of an unloved life is the same in Bombay as it is in Barcelona. The life tormented by guilt is the same for a movie icon in Hollywood as it is for a schoolteacher in Havana. How do I choose a life that has pleasure without living a life that is immoral?

These gnawing questions were underscored by a grim and dreadful incident that took place in New York City some years ago, the culmination of a series of almost indescribable events that had befallen a young woman. The story is too heartrending to repeat. Feeling the silent pain of a whole city, a state senator agonized,"How can so much go wrong in one life and nobody be aware of it?"

After days of pondering that obvious question, a city councilman gave the only plausible answer. He said, "Life is too busy and complicated for me to hear the cry of every person in my community. As a matter of fact, I struggle to find time to even hear the cries of my own family. If I had to listen to the cry of everyone in New York City, you may as well ask me to listen to the sound of every blade of grass growing and to the heartbeat of every squirrel. The noise would be deafening on the other side of silence." I doubt that he overstated his point. If the cries of the heart in any community were to be cumulatively sounded, the noise would indeed be deafening.

Where then, might one go? There is a place where there is an aggregate of human suffering and questioning. That place is the heart of God. The Bible repeatedly portrays for us the anguished, though sometimes silent, cries of those in need, pleading for one who might bring hope.

Of all the stories in the Scriptures, none so reflects those varied needs as the story of the Woman at the Well in her conversation with Jesus. In the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel we read of the encounter Jesus had with the Samaritan woman. The disciples had left Him to get a little rest while they went into town to buy some food. When they returned they were astounded to see Him talking to this Samaritan woman, but they were afraid to ask why He would talk to her or to question what prompted this curious familiarity.

Jesus’s response to her is profound. The woman represented all that was oppressed or rejected in that society. She was a woman, not a man. She was a Samaritan burdened with ethnic rejection. She was discarded and broken from five failed marriages. She identified God with a particular location, not having the faintest clue how to reach Him. Was it possible to have any less self-esteem than in her fragmented world?Jesus began His tender yet determined task to dislodge her from the well-doctored and cosmetically dressed-up theological jargon she threw at Him, so that she could voice the real cry of her heart. Almost like peeling off the layers of an onion, He steadily moved her away from her own fears and prejudices, from her own schemes for self-preservation, from her own ploys for hiding her hurts, to the radiant and thrilling source of her greatest fulfillment, Christ Himself. But He did not stop there, He went further. That "further" will draw some of our attention in this book.

In short, He moved her from the abstract to the concrete; from the concrete to the proximate; from the proximate to the personal. She had come to find water for the thirst of her body. He fulfilled a greater thirst, that of her soul.

When the disciples finally managed to break into the conversation, they asked Jesus if He was not hungry enough to want to eat. But Jesus said, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about." By now completely bewildered, they wondered if someone had already fed Him. They were on a completely different level of hungers and thirsts, while He was about His Father’s business of giving the bread of life and of opening the spring of living water so that one need never thirst again.

In this simple narrative converge our own hungers and God’s great longing to fulfill those inner hungers and satisfy those deep longings. I recall on one occasion speaking to a man who had come from a country where much blood had been spilled in internal strife, a land where someone’s heart was broken every day by some stray bullet or a hate-filled ideological conflict. He told me that even though for years he had found comfort in the knowledge that Christ had borne his sins, it was a new realization years later when he took note that Christ had borne our sorrows, too.

That intimacy with God is a knowledge that has bridged what one knows with what one feels. Such knowledge takes what we know and what we feel seriously. This is not a fatalistic posture that says, "So be it," resigned to accept what flies in the face of reason. When we learn God’s profound answers to every sentiment we feel, we find contentment and courage and live a life of hope and confidence. We then make every day count with significance, while treasuring His thoughts and harnessing our feelings.

For too long we have forced a dichotomy between fact and feeling and have unwittingly bought into systems of thought that held on to the one while doing disservice to the other. Voltaire once remarked that all of man’s miseries are a reflection of his grandeur. In other words, our senses and sensations can and ought to be joint indicators of the eternal and the true. That which God has joined together, let no man put asunder.

We well remember the words of the song, "How can it be wrong when it feels so right?" and we might legitimately take issue with that plundering of the objective realm of right and wrong at the mercy of momentary passion.

But there is another side to it: How can things be right when they feel so wrong? That is a much more difficult issue. Does God expect one who is plagued by a lonely existence to dismiss that feeling as unreal? Does the search for a personal God in an impersonal world not raise legitimate questions? Do the questions of a person in agony not count? Must we not have wisdom amidst the myriad pleasures that surround us? That is where this book hopes to lead us. We will not be content to merely deal with the problems as they surface by an intellectual stroke of the pen. We will not stop at the point where the answers are merely stated as glib responses. Our hope will be to bring the whole of our being to engage with the questions and the cries of the heart. Cries are born out of real feelings. So also must joy betoken a real confidence and repose.

In the Psalms David described himself as one wounded and crying in his bed at night. This same David spoke of the happiness that came when he took his cry to the Lord. With that same confidence, let us begin our journey to respond to the cries of the heart. We might be surprised to know how much bottled-up sentiment will be uncovered. When God speaks we will not respond by saying, "Don’t say a thing;" rather, we will be soothed by His touch and will rest in His comfort, knowing that He has bothered to hear our cries and to come near in our need.

Colossus_500:
Spiritual Laws
From the Active Word with Pastor Bob Coy

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. (Galatians 6:7 NKJV)

God has decreed certain laws to govern the physical world, such as gravity, inertia, and relativity. These laws will not bend, break, or buckle. The same holds true in the spiritual world. Certain spiritual laws will always remain constant and consistent, such as the law of sowing and reaping. Absolutely no one is exempt from this law, including David.

The Bible tells us that as David was looking over the city from his palace one evening, he noticed a woman taking a bath. A quick inquiry confirmed that the woman was Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, a soldier serving in the king's army. Inflamed with lust, David had her brought to the palace and committed adultery with her. Then David went on with his life . . . until Bathsheba shared that she was pregnant (2 Samuel 11:1-5).

In an attempt to cover his tracks, David arranged for Uriah to return from battle so that he would sleep with his wife. When Uriah wouldn't, David sent him back to the battlefront with a set of orders for Joab, the captain of the army. They instructed Joab to engage the enemy and then pull back from Uriah so that the enemy could easily pick him off. Everything went according to plan. Uriah was killed in battle, and David married Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:6-27).

Everything seemed fine at first, but by sowing these sins, David would soon reap God's rebuke. The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to confront and call David to repentance. Moreover, David would later reap the consequences from the same sin he had sown:

'Thus says the LORD: ‘Behold, I will raise up adversity against you from your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your neighbor, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun.'' (2 Samuel 12:11 NKJV)
 
David wasn't exempt and neither are we. We need to put down whatever sins we're entertaining in our private lives. If we don't, we're sure to suffer the consequences according to the spiritual law of sowing and reaping.

DIG - What is the law of sowing and reaping?

DISCOVER - When have you reaped what you've sown?

DISPLAY - How will you use David's mistake to your advantage?

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