Is money really life’s report card?

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

There’s a saying that goes: ‘money is life’s report card,’ meaning success in life is in proportion to how much we earn, accrue and spend. Yet the universal experience is what John D Rockerfeller said when asked how much you need to be happy; ‘Just a little bit more,’ he said.
But over against this stand the words of the Bible: ‘Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said: Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.’
Making money life’s report card eventually becomes an obsession that leads to the very opposite of what we are want. It doesn’t lead to contentment; it just guarantees we’ll never find it. It’s like drinking saltwater; it doesn’t satisfy our thirst; just increases it.

Posted in Abundant life, Life, Life's journey, Life's lessons, Living Life, Materialism, Money, Success, wealth | 3 Comments

Happiness is like a butterfly.

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

Happiness is all about keeping things in balance. The Bible says: ‘Give me neither poverty nor riches, just give me as much as I need.’ It’s realizing when enough is enough. Anything more is great if you receive it, but your happiness doesn’t depend on it.
One of the great conundrums of life is that we don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. Rather, we become happy by living a life that means something. Some wise person put it this way: ‘Happiness is like a butterfly. Chase it and it will elude you. But turn to other things and you’ll find it gently sitting on your shoulder.’
The happiest people you know are probably not the richest nor the most successful, but rather those who have invested their lives in something bigger than themselves.

Posted in Abundant life, Happiness, Materialism, Meaning in life, Meaninglessness, Money, wealth | Leave a comment

‘Remember in the darkness what you knew in the light.’

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

Many of us have had the experience of waking up in the early hours of the morning and finding ourselves overwhelmed with fear and negative thoughts. Those early hours are when our natural rhythms are at their lowest point in the daily cycle, and we, consequently, are at our most vulnerable emotionally. It’s also the time when we find our faith most sorely tested. You have to work hard at believing when you are at your lowest emotionally; but in actual fact, that’s what true faith is. It’s hanging on, even when it’s only by your finger nails.
That’s what the psalmist in the Bible was doing when he kept saying to himself, ‘Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him…’ He was reminding himself that it won’t always be like this; as some wise person once said: ‘Remember in the darkness what you knew in the light.’

Posted in Faith, Fear, Feelings, God, God with us, God's faithfulness, God's love, Hope, Storms of life, Trials and testings | Leave a comment

The magical mustard seed

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

There’s an old Chinese story about a woman whose only son had died. She went to a holy man and asked him for something that would bring her son back. But instead, the wise old man told her to bring him a mustard seed from a home that had never known sorrow, and he would use it to drive away her grief. So she set off in search of the magical seed. But wherever she turned, in hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness. And in each place she thought to herself: “Who is better able to help these unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?” Eventually, she became so engrossed in ministering to other people’s grief that she forgot about her own quest for the magical mustard seed, never realising that it had, in fact, driven the sorrow out of her life.

Posted in Compassion, Grief, Healing, Selflessness, Sorrow | Tagged | Leave a comment

Even though we can’t see God

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

I think many people dismiss the idea of God because of the Sunday school type language that believers often use, which, though appropriate for six year olds, is totally unconvincing to people who’ve grown up in a scientific age, presenting God as the Big Man who lives in the sky and sends blessings if we’re good, and disasters if we’re not. We’d do far better if we just concentrated on that great concept at the beginning of John’s Gospel: the concept of the logos – the divine intelligence that is behind all things, and the eternal love that is the great energising force that underlies all life. Then, like the blind boy out flying a kite that he couldn’t see, who said: ‘I may not be able to see it, but I sure can feel it tugging;’ even though we can’t see God, we’ll know assuredly that God is there.

Posted in Divine intelligence, Faith, God, God's presence | Leave a comment

Disappointed? Often! Discouraged? Sometimes! Defeated? Never!

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

Scott Peck’s famous book, The Road Less Traveled, opens with the words:’Life is difficult.’ He says we’ll never get on top of life until we accept this fundamental truth, but when we do accept it, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters, because when we actually confront that fact we grow mentally and spiritually. ‘That,’ he says, ‘has always been a major theme in the great religions, especially Christianity.’
Nobody summed it up better than the Apostle Paul who said: ‘We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair. We are hunted down, but God never abandons us. We are knocked down, but we get up again and keep going.’ In other words he was saying: Disappointed? Often! Discouraged? Sometimes! Defeated? Never!

Posted in Spiritual growth, Spiritual Insight, Strength, Trials and testings, tribulation and trouble, Tried, Troubles, Victory, Winners | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

2000 years of failure

Posted on April 26, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

My former father-in-law was not a religious man. The only time I saw him go to church was when I married his daughter. But for the last twenty years of his life he was adamant that he had literally seen Jesus. It happened when he was in a coma and not expected to live through the night. But next day, when we visited him, he was sitting up looking like he’d never been sick. He told us he’d seen Jesus standing at the bottom of his bed. We wondered if he’d been hallucinating, but for the next twenty years until he did finally pass away, he swore that it had been Jesus who had stood at the bottom of his bed and given him back his physical life.
For two thousand years human arrogance and unbelief have conspired time and again to convince us that Jesus is no more. And for two thousand years they have failed.

Posted in Jesus, Resurrection | Tagged | Leave a comment

It’s never too late to get back on track

Posted on April 26, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

Pilgrimage is one of the great themes of the Bible. Our present life is not a destination, it’s a journey to a greater life. Many of us who are well into the second half of life look back on opportunities we missed and regret that it’s now too late to pick them up again. However, there is a growing movement that is asserting the very opposite. It’s never too late. I know of grandmothers who left school at 14 and are now graduating from university with honours degrees. I know of retired men, whose working lives deprived them of beauty and creativity, who are now artists and wood carvers. I know of pensioners who had forgotten what it was like to fall in love, and now stroll arm in arm with the soul mate they always wished they’d had.
The point is this: in the journey of life it’s never too late to get back on track.

Posted in Life, Life's journey, Life's lessons, Moving on, New Life | Leave a comment

Physics and metaphysics

Posted on April 26, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

The essential difference between beliefs based on scientific proof and those based on faith is revelation. So, for example, we believe that the earth travels around the sun because mathematical and astronomical evidence shows that it’s so. But belief in a Supreme Being or divine intelligence behind the universe is clearly beyond the range of physics, and comes into the realm of metaphysics.
For people of faith, the evidence comes by way of revelation. Jesus taught that the deep inner conviction within a person that God is real, doesn’t come primarily through the intellect, but through something far deeper within us – something we call the spirit. That doesn’t mean that it’s intellectually untenable. It just means that we experience it at a deeper level, and then begin to understand it intellectually.

Posted in Believing, Faith, Revelation | Tagged | Leave a comment

God’s blank cheque

Posted on April 26, 2016 by vincentsmithauthor

The Gospels records how Jesus’ ministry was characterised by crowds of people, who came to him to be healed. Amongst them were two blind men. He asked them if they believed he could do this, and they said yes. Then he said to them: ‘According to your faith will it be done to you,’ and they received their sight.
Those words remind us that there are only two things that limit what we receive from God: the first is God’s will itself, which knows what is ultimately best for us; and the second is the level of our faith to believe it.
It’s like a blank cheque made out to us and signed by God, ready for us to write in the correct amount. When we dare ask for something that is in accordance with his good and perfect will for us, his reply is still: ‘According to your faith will it be done to you.’

Posted in Faith, God, God's faithfulness | Tagged | Leave a comment