One of the many great things about God is that he is so willing to give people a second chance.  And it really doesn’t matter what kind of life you lead in the past.  God is an equal opportunity saver.  All we have to do, is be willing to turn our lives around and live for him, and God offers his own Spirit to guide and empower us to follow through on our commitment to him.

Are you ready to live a different life?  God can make it happen!

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Your checkbook should balance.  You ought to balance things out like your family budget or how much healthy food you eat vs. how much junk food you consume or how much you work and study and play and rest.  A lot of things in life that are enjoyable can become become very unhealthy  and even deadly if you overdo it.  On the one hand a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.  But on the other hand, if you eat too much sugar, you can get fat, develop diabetes, go blind, lose toes and limbs, and eventually die.

Some things shouldn’t have any place in your life, because they do nothing but harm.  You wouldn’t add rat poison to your menu because it would kill you.  Another thing that doesn’t do anybody any good is sin.  Sin hurts others, it hurts God, and it will spiritually kill you.  So when you’re trying to find a good balance in your daily life, it’s best to leave sin completely out.  It will not only throw off your balance, it will get you a one way ticket to Hell.  And that will totally mess up your day.

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Einstein said that it was insanity to keep making the same mistake over and over expecting different results.  And that’s basically what a lot of people do with sin.  They keep doing the same immoral things over and over thinking it’s not going to hurt them.  The only problem is, you can’t plea insanity for evil on Judgment Day.  Part of what makes sin evil is that you do it with full knowledge that it’s wrong.  Your own conscience declares your guilt.

So the simple fix is to stop sinning.  Jesus offers a free pardon to anybody willing to make that choice and start living for him.  So the question is, will you stop, or will you keep doing the same wicked things expecting different results?

King Nebuchadnezzar was a great example of someone who learned that lesson a little slow, but he eventually got it.  Are you smarter than him?

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What do you put all your work into?  What is your ultimate goal in life?  Do you want to be rich and famous?  Maybe you just want to buy a car or a house?  Are you saving up for retirement?  Are you thinking any farther than that.  What would you do if you spent your whole life trying to make it in this world and found out after you died that you completely missed out on an eternal opportunity to invest in something beyond this world?

“What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?  Is anything worth more than your soul? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in the glory of his Father and will judge all people according to their deeds.”     –Jesus Christ

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This is one of the greatest lines in all of Scripture.  Heck, this is one of the greatest lines in anything:

“O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you.  If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us.  He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty.  But even if he doesn’t, we want to make it clear to you, Your Majesty, that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.”

That’s courage, that’s faith in action.  Lots of people talk about believing in something.  But like James said (and I paraphrase) when it comes to faith, you put up or shut up.

What do you claim to believe in?  And does it really make a difference in how you live?  That’s a challenge I think we should all think about and take on in our day to day life!

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They say if you’re not willing to stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.  Are you standing up for anything.  There’s a lot of universality in our culture, with people touting tolerance and acceptance of everything–except for God.  It’s like we’ll approve of all behavior, as long as it’s not the morality that God calls us to.

God wants us to stand with him.  and the cool thing is, if we are willing to take a stand for God, he’ll stand up for us.

Check out how that scenario worked out for three guys named Shadrach, Meshach, & Abednego.

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What’s your motivation in life?  What get’s you out of bed in the morning?  Are you driven by a desire for success, to make the world a better place, to find inner peace?  Would you like to know the real secret of life?  It’s to share a love relationship with your Creator.  And if that isn’t what lights your fire, then you are missing something.  There’s more to life than just being alive, and Jesus came to offer people life to the full.  If you’d like to know what that’s all about, a good place to start is on your knees.

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You might not think there’s a lot of idolatry going on in our world today.  But if you look around, it’s not hard to find.  The idols might not be quite the same as what you read about in the Bible, but that doesn’t make the sin any different.  There are still some people who bow down and pray to statues, but more often it’s things like sports and entertainment, cars, clothes, the almighty dollar, that steal people’s devotion from God.  They give their hearts to pastimes and diversions, and they don’t spend any real quality relationship time with God.

How about you?  Is your life so busy with the things of this world that you barely have time to go to church once a week–and even when you go, as soon as you get back home you’ve transitioned to “normal” life because worship is just a once in awhile thing for you and not a 24-7 part of your life?  Or maybe God is not part of your life at all.  That’s what modern-day idolatry is all about.  And like it or not that’s #2 on God’s Not-to-do list!

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Have you ever wondered about how to study prophesy?  Have you ever read the book of Revelation and wondered what it all means.  Well the book of Daniel is a great place to practice.  Not only does it start off with specific examples of prophecy explained and revealed to real people, it shows the partial fulfillment of that prophecy, so you can see it in action.  And on top of that, so much of other Biblical prophecy is either linked to Daniel or backed up by it.

So if you want to learn about how to understand prophecy, just turn to Daniel and see what God has to reveal to you today!

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As we’ve been going through the book of Daniel, it’s so amazing to think about how the things God revealed through Daniel were all about the future from his perspective.  And now that we look back on it thousands of years later, we can see how the things he told about unfolded just the way he had described.

Of course some of his prophesy has yet to be fulfilled, but I’ve heard people scoff at that, and say it’s all just coincidence, or somebody made up the book of Daniel after that fact.  And it seems that some people will do just about anything rather than acknowledge that God has something to tell them.  Of course they usually don’t want to hear it, because often his message is you need to change how you live, and a lot of people don’t like to be told to change their behavior or especially their way of thinking.

How about you, are you willing to hear God’s Word and obey, or do you resist his instruction?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:50 — 22.4MB)