A Beautiful Life

"There's something so beautiful about a man's life
Something so remarkable about his inward strife.
There's something that fills us as we read about the saints of old
Something that makes us inspired, encouraged, bold.
We read and hear of their failures and falls
We see how yet again they rise up, giving it their all.
By their faithful endurance we are greatly inspired
In their great spiritual battles we see them fight against how they were wired.
There's something so beautiful about their past, stained with blood
And yet something so crumbling about how along with Christ they've been dragged through the mud.
Oh how we see such worth in a life spent out for Christ
Oh how that Holy Name has cost them such a price.

But to see joy in a man's life marked with excruciating pain,
To know that all his loss has turned into gain.
What incredible paradoxes we are able to see in a single life
What courage God can produce against the gun and knife.
What a legacy God has made them leave behind
Their passion for God was the fire that made it shine
The dark clouds lingering above them could but threaten to tear them apart
The dreary storm not reflecting their glad heart.
So let us remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants,
Who never backed down from the wicked tyrants
Let us know the motivation for the lives they had,
Let us not look at their lives to be sober and sad.
But be encouraged to know that in darkest times their brightest light was produced,
Be inspired to see how they were from this world cut loose.
Be motivated to have your whole spent for God,
And in ages to come, up to the Scriptures, not be found a fraud.
At the end of our days, let us see a spent and beautiful life just as the saints of old
Oh let our life of passion have an impact to make a new generation bold."

My Life Is His

"For these are the years that I should not live,
These are the breaths I would never give.
So full of weariness and woe
I am living the life I would have ended years ago.
Depression once pulling me down like sinking sand,
My Jesus giving me much more than a helping Hand.
These long days do not belong to me,
Since He was the One who opened my eyes to see.
For these days are less mine than they are His
A miracle to breathe it is
For He has the right to make this life wild,
For He has the right to make me into His suffering child.
No right have I to complain
For from this life I have nothing to gain
If my Saviour chooses to put me in fire
Or to make me walk across a high wire
Then have my soul let it be,
For this very script I love out does not belong to me
My Saviour has brought me and given years I'd never have had
What more can I do but through my suffering try and make Him Glad?"

Does The Battle Stop on Break Time?

Does the battle stop in summer?
I've noticed that in churches a lot of times everything stops when summer hits. The book studies stop, the small groups stop, the youth group stops, pretty much everything besides the main church service seems to stop.
Do you ever notice that church activities tend to come to a halt in summer?
Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking. Does the spiritual battle come to a pause in the summer?
No. The spiritual battle never ends in your life.
Just because some people have time off of work or school, doesn't mean that they need to have a break off of church activities too.
The need for Christian fellowship in places such as small groups is just as great through the rest of the year as it is in summer.

In fact, summer is one of the best times for church activites.
For one, people tend to have more time.
It seems that in summer, most people have too much time on their hands. And tend to let down their walls spiritually. And in result of letting down one's walls, sin dominates.
Letting down your walls leads to a wasted life. The moment you as a Christian feels relaxed is when the devil will capture you.
You'll start compromising your morals in order to have a "good time" with your friends, you'll start watching TV and playing games that will take up your whole day; you'll waste your life when your shields drop.
It's easy to waste your life when no one is keeping you accountable. So you see, it's important to not let your fellowship with Christians stop when summer hits.

At least to my thinking, it's important that church activities don't stop. We need to have fellowship with the body, even though it's so much harder when everything seems to stop at church.
The plain and simple fact is is that the spiritual batte will never stop in this life, not until Christ comes, of He takes you home.
But until then, never think it is alright to let your walls down, no matter what kind of time you have and no matter if it is summer or spring, or winter or fall.
The Christian life is not over during the summer.

God Bless,
  A.W.

"Now many fail at this point. I have already found it depressing to listen to the kind of people who, whenever you meet them, will always for sure tell you the story of their conversion many years ago. They tell you that story every time. I have known people who do exactly the same thing with revival. Now there is a sense in which I can understand this. There is always something about an initial experience that is remarkable and outstanding. And a time of revival is amazing and wonderful that it is not surprising that people go on talking about it. But, if they give the impression that they have had nothing since that wonderful experience, that ever after they have been walking through a wilderness, and traveling through a desert, then it is absolutely wrong. But there are many Christian people like that. Their idea of the Christian life is of a dramatic experience, perhaps at the outset, after which they just trudge along, living on the strength of that and partly keeping their eye turned backwards as they go forward.
But this is quite wrong. It is almost a denial of this essential principle that I am outlining--and thank God that it is! What a tragedy it would be if it were only the beginning of the Christian life which could be described in this way!"
--D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

God Bless,
  A.W.