Successful prayer!

"Successfully praying should be the first lesson a preacher or teacher of the Word of God must learn to do in order to preach/teach effectively and fruitfully. However, prayer seems to be the hardest activity we are ever called upon to do. In our human depravity, praying is the one action we are constantly tempted to do less of more than any other.

Prayer is our best weapon against our enemies or the lack of will be our demise."

-Scott Bailey

Read more...

Forgiven & Forgotten!

"What a tremendous gift from God it is when we are able to forgive and let go of others ills against us - forigve & forget! This is the way our Lord deals with us, when we genuinely ask for forgiveness in repentance, God forgives & it is as if we never committed the sin which made us an enemy to Him in the first place.

I read a story the other day about a young seminary professor who would always introduce his New Testament class with a story from his past.

He and his dad were close and one day he told his dad a lie which hurt his father deeply. For years this young man grew older, but let the lie go unresolved. Guilt built up inside him about the lie and eventually a sense of tremendous remorse began to knaw inside of him. So, finally he sat down and wrote his dad a letter.

In the letter, he reminded his dad of the incident which he lied to him in case he did not remember. He explained in genuine tone his remorse over the lie and asked forgiveness without any explanation or excuse for the lie. The man went about his days when fairly quickly a reply letter came from his dad. It simply read, "Sure I remember the incident and YES your are forgiven!".

To the son this was a tremendious weight lifted from his shoulders as he had carried the weight of the unresolved lie for years. The further payoff came many years later when his mother and father both were much older, became ill, and died within a few months of each other.

He was the oldest child, so it was he duty to go to the parents home and start the process of sifting through their belongings. He ventured into the attic and found an old trunk with many momentos they had kept throughout their life together. Everything that was really precious to them monitarily was in that trunk.

As he was wiping tears away at the memories his parents had kept from he and his siblings childhood years, he came across that letter he had sent to his dad asking his forgiveness. He wiped the tears back, opened up the letter to re-read what he had written. As he turned the letter over on the backside was written in his father's own handwriting a word "FORGIVEN!" and it was underlined. His father had forgiven him and when his dad was done with something and beyond he would write it down and underline it meaning "finished".

By the letter being in that old trunk of mementos, with the word FORGIVEN written on it was his dads way of saying I have no unfinished business in this trunk. This was a tremendous gift his dad had given to him not only at the time of the reply letter, but years later when he found the letter as a treasure and the word FORGIVEN written on it. His dad had relinquished all traces of the hurt, the resentment, and the bitterness over the years.

In the same way, our heavenly Father will forgive us when we are genuinely remorseful and repentent before Him. I understand from my own experience, we sometimes need to ask for forgiveness from someone, and at other times we need to simply forgive someone and let go of the hurt and pain they might have caused. Either way forgiveness whether given by us or received by us is a gift from God to be treasured. God is here to help us in either situation.

In Matthew 6:14-15 Jesus tells us, "For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." This is speaking about an attitude of heart and action from that attitude.

Geroge Herbert once wrote - "He who cannot forgive others breaks the brdige over which he must pass himself."

Read more...

Training up a child to:

Originally posted by Scott on August 29, 2009


What is it we as parents are suppose to train up our children to do, be, want, or come back to? Have you as a parent ever wondered that? I know I have numerous times.
The entire verse goes like this:

“Train up a child in the way they should go and when they are old they will come back to it” -Proverbs 22:6

I have seen the numerous wayward children just like everyone else has that so far has never come back to anything their parents taught them or have they gone the exact direction their parents taught them? Interesting subject I know. I have started exploring exactly what it is we are to teach our children growing up that when they are “seasoned” rather than just old they can come back to it and it be of some profit to them.

Proverbs 22 builds around this verse 6 it seems. It tells us some of what we are to teach our children as they are growing up. Each stage of their life we can teach them more and more, going deeper and deeper into each subject. I want to warn you that very little has to do with what job they will have, what college they will attend to what degree they should get. God has placed within each child a “bent” that they are moving towards regardless of what us parents really think or desire for them. It is our job as parents, in tune with our heavenly Father, in the power that He entrust to us, to learn over time what our children’s personality traits are, what kind of character God is moving them to be, and build that training around this.

One example I will share:

Train up the child to: (Proverbs 22:3 “A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.”)

-exercise sound, good judgement and to use their God given common sense on a daily basis.

-be careful about their conduct around other people

1. be cautious in their decisions on what they are doing from what they eat, to what they are wearing, to what they say, to how they act, to the people they hang out with, to how they spend their money and time and so on.
2. look for the danger signs, the warning signs around them of doom that might be coming if the continue in a direction they are going. Teach them to seek out shelter and refuge in the Lord if they can see those danger signs.

-provide carefully for the future

1. not be frivolous with their time, financial spending and actions
2. learn to save not only spend
3. budget their time, resources, and money at all times
4. be looking ahead as best they can to be sure they are not caught off guard
5. be a person worthy to be trusted by others and accountable

This is one example of our parental training. This example of course can go as deep as anyone would want to take it of course. Most of us parents can teach this from past experiences, from what our parents taught us, and most importantly from what the Word of God instructs us in these areas of life.

In the Proverb to train our children, this comes as no easy task, but it is commanded to us by our heavenly Father as instructed to us in His Word. So, if we only teach our children worldly things without any of the important points here, we are setting our children on the path of doom to never to stay on the path of godliness or to return to it if they get off track.

Read more...