Simple Prayers

Bob Hostetler offers a great reminder that sometimes the simple prayers are the best ones. . . .

A few days ago, a friend asked me to pray for an upcoming project to be a means of financial blessing to her and her family. Then she said, “Do you think it’s okay to ask that?”

I assured her that I think it’s more than “okay.” I think such prayers—short, simple, straightforward—are the best kind of praying we can do.

You may know the story in John’s Gospel about Jesus attending a wedding celebration with his mother, Mary. At one point early in the festivities, Mary came to Jesus and said, “They have no more wine” (John 2:3, NIV). Chances are, either the bride or groom was related to Mary and Jesus; in any case, they both would have known that running out of wine at a wedding feast would be a major embarrassment to the family.

Read the entire article, Pray Like Mary, here.

Giving it Back to Paypal

This week the American Family Association took out this full-page ad in PayPal's hometown newspaper in San Jose, California.  

Way to go AFA!  Read about it here.

Hate Crimes, North Carolina & Restroom Confusion

Sorry, expecting biological men to use the men's restroom and biological women to use the women's is NOT a hate crime. 

 "Say I wake up tomorrow and I feel like Taylor Swift. I can play guitar, sing her songs and mimic her movements. And let’s say I go to her next concert, show up early and tell them they need to allow me to perform because I feel like I am Taylor Swift. No one is going to stand with me and say because I feel like Taylor that I am Taylor. No one is going to label the people who stop me at the gate as 'haters and intolerant.' No one is going to label me as a victim of a hate crime, but merely someone who was offended because someone had the courage to tell me the truth." 

The problem is not with hate - it is with a lack of truth.

Read the entire article by Perry Noble here.

The War Room

The Daily Wire calls this the best political ad in decades.  

When the Godly Get Depressed

The following is a summary of my sermon, "A Depressed Prophet."  It is the eighth one in my series Elijah: A Man Like Us.  (I apologize for the font size change.  I cannot get it corrected!)

Godly people become depressed.  Sadly, the Christian community does not always have a box for their depression.  Instead, we subtly think that if we follow Christ, every day with Jesus should be sweeter than the day before. 

For years I have changed one line in the hymn "At the Cross."  Instead of singing, "and now I am happy all the day," I substitute "and now He is with me all the day."  Because following Jesus does not always result in happy days.


The nineteenth chapter of 1 Kings presents an incredible look at a depressed prophet.   For three and a half years this man has trusted God and experienced the victories of faith and obedience.  When God said rebuke the king, he went to the palace and became public enemy number one.  When God said go to the brook, stay there, and trust God for daily provision, he obeyed.  When God changed his directions, Elijah walked 100 miles, trusting God every step for safety from his enemies.  At Zarapheth, the man of God challenged a widow to walk in faith, and together they experienced miraculous provision of not only bread but of her son being raised from the dead.  After a long time, the Lord sent him back to Ahab in one of the most dramatic displays in the Old Testament.  God intervened dramatically on Mt. Carmel and vindicated his servant.  Then, one more time Elijah went to God in deep prayer, bringing the promised rain to fruition.  With every problem he trusted God.

Twenty-four hours later, Jezebel sends word to him, "I am going to kill you.  You are a dead man!"

He doesn't trust.  He doesn't pray.  He doesn't wait.  He runs, scared for his life.  And chapter nineteen outlines the depth of his immediate depression.  Full of self-pity, with his thinking all messed up, he wants to die.

Elijah was exhausted - emotionally, physically, and psychologically spent.  For three and a half years he has been trusting God in extreme circumstances.  The reality of his faith did not rule out the reality of his stress.  And then, following his greatest victory, it catches up with him and he temporarily snaps.


Elijah is human just like us.  He is a jar of clay.

God graciously and lovingly deals with Elijah:

He takes care of the man's physical needs.  He needs a lot of sleep, he needs food and nourishment, and he needs some exercise.  For forty days, God does not rebuke nor correct him.  He meets his needs and lets him refuel.  The man is exhausted.  He needs time to recuperate.

A Greek proverb says, "You will break the bow if you keep it always bent."

Finally, God speaks quietly and tenderly to him, reminding him that he is not as alone as he thinks.  There are 7000 other followers of Jehovah.  He subtly brings Elijah out of his self-pity.  

Depressed people don't think correctly.  Their thought-patterns become skewed.  God has to help his man realign his thinking.  

The man who trusted God for incredible problems in the past has to be reminded that God is bigger than Queen Jezebel.

And Jehovah points his man to three other people who can be involved in his ministry in the future.  For the past season, Elijah had to primarily go it alone.  Now he needs to link arms with some friends.

Charles Swindoll writes, "God has not designed us to live like hermits in a cave.  He has designed us to live in friendship and fellowship and community with others."

R. T. Kendall shares valuable insights about depression in his book These Are the Days of Elijah  [the points are his and the notes mine]. . .

1.  We fail to realize that the best of Christians can sometimes become depressed.

2.  If you happen to be a leader or a person with some profile, you are especially vulnerable to the kind of satanic attack Elijah was under.

Christian and secular leaders are prone to fall in at least one of three areas: sexual temptation, pride/lack of accountability, and financial indiscretion.  Reading the biographies of noble Christians, I have discovered that when a man or woman stands above those temptations, there tends to be a fourth area that can trip him - discouragement and depression.  It is as if Satan sees if he can't trip them up in one of those deadly three areas, he will send a thorn of dark discouragement.

Read the stories of godly heroes like Charles Spurgeon, Billy Graham, Hudson Taylor, and others.  They at times battled severe bouts of discouragement and depression.

3.  We are all capable of extreme depression if we have been overworking and get overtired.

Working all the time, never taking a vacation, and always bending the bow are not marks of spirituality.

4.  This time in Elijah’s life shows that some of the best of God’s people have been suicidal.

In the Bible Elijah, Moses, Job, and Jeremiah all faced times when they wanted to die.

5.  A person under attack, as in severe depression, may not always demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit at a time like that.

When someone has been under severe stress, give them a break.  Only Jesus acted like Jesus all of the time.

6.  There is more than one cause for depression.

Look for the root.  If there is a chemical imbalance, which can result from prolonged periods of stress, seek medical and medicinal help.  If the root is exhaustion, look for a way to get more rest.  If problems in your past are triggering it, find ways to deal with the emotional and psychological roots.  If the problem is relational, work on your relationships.  If your life lacks margin, seek ways to build margin.  And, if the problem is spiritual, seek the Lord, repent of your sin, allow Him to realign your life with His Word and fill you with His Spirit.  If the root is spiritual, no amount of therapy or medication will solve the problem.

I am thankful that God gave us this picture in Scripture.  Even the godliest of people wear out and get in the dumps.  Thank the Lord that He was gracious with Elijah.  

May we be wise to learn from this example. 

The following is an excellent resource about godly people walking through depression:

Leading on Empty by Wayne Cordeiro

For more help, see These are the Days of Elijah by R T Kendall and Elijah: A Man of Heroism and Humility by Charles Swindoll.

Taking A Leap of Faith

"I tend to get caught up in the process of life. I’m an analytical sort of person and definitely a planner. With every project, I try to anticipate any possible potholes and pitfalls. I build timelines and set expectations.

This was definitely true when our son was in the military and deployed, and I was anxious for his safety.

I truly believed that I could figure out solutions—in advance—to every possible scenario that might occur. In a lot of ways, I was packing my parachute for those life-moments when I would have to jump into the unknown."

Read the entire article by Edie Melson here.

Hanging Out

Living Life Upside Down

The following article is my monthly column appearing today in The Clinton Chronicle . . .

In my college days, the music group TRUTH popularized a song called Living Life Upside Down.  The lyrics warned, What if we’ve fallen to the bottom of a well thinking we’ve risen to the top of a mountain?

America has been on moral free-fall for several decades.  In the Old Testament, one prophet warned that days would come when wrong behavior would become so normalized that we would forget to blush.

We’re there, folks.

The most recent indictment in our moral landslide is the Charlotte City Council passing a much-contested ordinance that transgenders can use the bathroom of their choice.  In response, the North Carolina governor quickly responded by signing a bill banning people from using public restrooms other than their birth sex. 

How about a few facts?  There are 808,676 registered sex offenders in the USA.  16,709 of those live in SC.  

Estimates say that 0.3% of the United States population identify themselves as transgender.  The answer to this debate is not to change basic bathroom dignity rules affecting the 99.7% of Americans who identify with the sex of their birth anatomy given to them by their Creator.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council aptly said, “This is where the Left leads us when left unchecked by common sense: The privacy of women and children must be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. This reckless abandon of common sense threatens the safety and freedoms of Americans from Seattle to Houston”

Laws that allow individuals the right to use the facilities of the sex with which they most identify provides legitimate safety concerns for a greater number of people than the number of people whom the laws accommodate. 

The threat is not imagined or exaggerated. Any high school male claiming to be a female for the day could enter the girls’ locker room at any time. Any group of males choosing to identify as females for the day could enter women's facilities at any time. No legal protection. No legal recourse. 

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory summed it up well last week: “If you have the anatomy of a man, you should not be allowed to use the women’s restroom, shower, or locker room facility. It’s basic common sense. It’s etiquette of privacy that we have had for decades. And it’s amazing that the nationally politically-correct police have descended upon my state [North Carolina] and unfairly smeared [NC]. This is a lot of media-elite hypocrisy. It’s demagoguery at its worst.”

As McCrory cited, the big business bullies showed their faces last week.  Paypal, for example, cancelled their plans to open a center in Charlotte.  That, folks, is called a corporate bully.  And it is called blatant hypocrisy.

Paypal, like several corporations who have jumped on the bandwagon, does business in many countries where transgenders, gays and lesbians face legal punishment.  Paypal works in 25 countries where homosexual behavior is illegal.  In five of those the penalty is death.

Yet North Carolina wants to keep a man from going into the bathroom with my thirteen year-old girl, and Paypal wants to not give Charlotte any business?  Bruce Springsteen just cancelled a concert in NC due to the new bathroom law.  

Thankfully, the Governor and key lawmakers did not bow to pressure in spite of raging opposition. Paypal and Bruce, don’t let the door hit you on your way out of North Carolina.

McCrory wisely said, "Girls' bathrooms are for girls, boys' bathrooms are for boys. The fact we are even debating this is a sad commentary on where we are as a society.”

It is indicative of a society that is living life upside down.

Kite Fun

Obama's Morality

Cal Thomas writes another word worth reading here about the ambiguous moral slide in our society . . .

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — In a recent interview for the BBC2 series “Inside Obama’s White House,” President Obama sounded somewhat wistful as he spoke to an interviewer about how he has tried to use his voice “to move things toward a more ethical and moral outcome.”

The question of morals and ethics has been debated since the dawn of humanity. It won’t be settled by the shifting winds of politics, because not everyone can agree on what is moral and what is not.

 Dictionary.com defines morality: “Conformity to the rules of right conduct.”

Read the entire article here.

Blatant Big-Business Hypocrisy

PayPal, the website known for processing online payments, believes grown men have a constitutional right to use the same bathrooms as little girls.

So when North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bill that banned people from using bathrooms not assigned to their birth sex, PayPal became enraged and retaliated.

They canceled plans to open a new operations center in Charlotte – a facility that would’ve employed more than 400 workers.

Read the entire article by Todd Starnes of Fox News here.

Worry and Prayer

This story was shared in Streams in the Desert about a doctor addressing the elderly mother of a young man.

"You are worrying too much about him. Once you have prayed for him, as you have done, and committed him to God, you should not continue to be anxious. God's command, "Do not be anxious about anything" (Phil. 4:6), is unlimited, and so is the verse, "Cast all your anxiety on him" (1 Peter 5:7). If we truly have cast our burdens upon another, can they continue to pressure us? If we carry them with us from the throne of grace, it is obvious we have not left them there. In my own life I test my prayers in this way: after committing something to God, if I can come away, like Hannah did, with no more sadness, pain or anxiety in my heart, I see it as proof that I have prayed the prayer of faith. But if I pray and then still carry my burden, I conclude my faith was not exercised."

Religious Liberty Law in Mississippi

JACKSON, Miss. (BP) -- Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has signed into law a bill safeguarding the religious liberty of individuals and organizations who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings or gender identity transitions.

Bryant, a Republican, announced today (April 5) via Twitter that he signed House Bill 1523 -- the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.

"I am signing HB 1523 into law to protect sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions of individuals, organizations and private associations from discriminatory action by state government or its political subdivisions, which would include counties, cities and institutions of higher learning," Bryant said in a statement. "This bill merely reinforces the rights which currently exist to the exercise of religious freedom as stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

Read the entire article by David Roach here on Baptist Press.

Politically-Correct Hypocrisy

“If you have the anatomy of a man, you should not be allowed to use the women’s restroom, shower, or locker room facility. It’s basic common sense. It’s etiquette of privacy that we have had for decades. And it’s amazing that the nationally politically-correct police have descended upon my state [North Carolina] and unfairly smeared [NC]. This is a lot of media-elite hypocrisy. It’s demagoguery at its worst.”

Quote of the Day

“Sometimes God lets you hit rock bottom so that you will discover He is the Rock at the bottom.”  - Tony Evans