If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.

(Where both spouses are in church)
1. Prayer
Each spouse should seek daily time before God in prayer, reading the Scriptures and asking Him for the ability to grow in Christ-like attitudes and actions.
2. No Contact
The unfaithful spouse must have no contact whatsoever with the third party. Like an addiction, the only way out is to go cold turkey.
3. Commitment
The unfaithful spouse must be willing to make a radical commitment to regain the trust that has been broken.
4. New Lifestyle
The unfaithful spouse should commit to a lifestyle of transparency and honesty. Remind …

The softminded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea… The softminded man always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.

The Book, “Essential Church? Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts” by authors, Thom S. Rainer and Sam Rainer III, identifies seven sins of dying churches that serve as the driving factors behind losing the generational battle – the battle for every generation to see the significance of the church.
Sin 1: Doctrine Dilution
“Teaching anything less than the absolute truths in Scripture will make the younger generation feel betrayed when they learn that a large gap exists between what the Bible really says and what they were taught in church” (16).
Sin 2: Loss of Evangelistic Passion
“Dying …

TEHRAN, IRAN (Worthy News)– A well-known Iranian pastor faces execution after two judges agreed to make him “liable to capital punishment,” as part of a crackdown on the growing Protestant church movement in the Islamic nation, Worthy News and its parner agency BosNewsLife learned Tuesday, July 13.
Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani was detained in June along with wife Fatemeh Pasandideh in the city of Rasht in northwestern Iran because of their Christian activities, Iranian Christians said.
A senior pastor of the Church of Iran movement, which includes house churches across the country, told Worthy …

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

Ignorant sins? Deep, forgotten wounds?
Tue, Aug 24 2010
BERLIN (Reuters) – A Polish man living in Germany went about his business for about five years without noticing he had been shot in the head because he was drunk when it happened. Police in the western city of Bochum said on Tuesday doctors found a .22 caliber bullet in the back of his head after the 35-year-old went to have what he thought was a cyst removed.
Presented with the 5.6mm projectile, the man recalled he had received a blow to the …

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

Written by Myron Powell
1 John 5:14-15 (NKJV) Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. 15 And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him.
Confidence
Boldness = “Come boldly before the throne!”
Confidence in Him, not in ourselves!
Speak the language of faith, not fear! Because God doesn’t respond to fear!
Hebrews 11:6 (NKJV) But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he …

This article can be used for numerous cases as a sermon illustration:

not realizing a brother/sister has fallen away until it’s already too late.
the reality of calamity and trial in our lives… How grief adds to grief. Job?
any other ideas?

Fri, Aug 20 2010
PARIS (Reuters) – A French woman discovered her 42-year-old son had been buried in the same cemetery where she was attending her brother’s funeral, after she had tried to invite him to the ceremony, a newspaper said Friday.
The family were leaving the cemetery near Lille, Wednesday when one of …