I hope to bring this site back to life now and post on a more regular basis. I would also appreciate any prayers that you, my readers, may wish to offer.

Blessings,

LD. “Mick” Turner

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You need to ask this simple question to get yourself properly adjusted and in focus: What should I be doing? Every one of us has a unique and important role in human history. All of us have been created by God to bring him honor through serving humanity and doing something that makes a difference in the world. There is a hero within you waiting to be awakened. Some were born to be the hero of a story of epic proportions, others perhaps the hero for one small child sponsored across an ocean. Both require a hero’s soul and have a hero’s call. While you can’t do everything, you were created to do something of incredible importance. The tragedy is if you try to be everything and do everything, you may so diffuse your effect that you will not optimize who God made you to be and what he created you to accomplish. This is why you need convergence. You need to bring together all of your talents, gifts, passions, intellect, energy, time, and resources and harness them in such a way that you focus on the mission God has given you for your life.

Erwin Raphael McManus

(from Wide Awake)

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Expectation is the power to have an idea become so real that you see it and feel it before you can hold it. It is like a giant magnet that attracts what you expect into your life. Expectation empowers you to think the unthinkable and do the undoable, and it turns uncertain hoping into certainty……….Expectation can be defined simply as fixing your eyes on the promised blessing with an eager anticipation of its arrival. An expectation is a strong desire that is filled with anticipation and confidence about obtaining what is expected. To live with expectation is to live with hope, dreams, imagination, and desires…………..You have a choice. You can slumber and sleep your way through life, or you can wake up and live life to the maximum. Life is meant to be filled up with all the great things God seeks to do for you, in you, and through you. Expectation is best received and lived out as you align your total life to God and His Word, living with abandonment to His desires for you and setting yourself to be in agreement with God.

Frank Damazio

(from The Attitude of Faith: Saying Yes to God’s Power in Your Life)

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So the great issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or by culture, are identified as “Christians” will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of Heaven into every corner of human existence. Will they break out of the churches to be his Church – to be, without human force or violence, his mighty force for good on earth, drawing the churches after them toward the eternal purpose of God?

Dallas Willard

(from The Great Omission)

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Earth’s unlimited resource is the gifts, talent, passions, imagination, and ingenuity of its citizens. You would think that we know this by now, but we often seem to miss the gift right in front of us. The world needs you to find the hero within you. The real battle is not between good and evil but between less and more. Most of us don’t choose the worst life; we just don’t choose the best. We can’t afford for you to sleep through your dreams…..The world needs you at your best. This planet is made better or worse by the people we choose to become. If you live a diminished life, its not only you who loses, but the world loses, and humanity loses. There is a story to be written by your life, and thought it may never inspire a graphic novel, it is a heroic tale nonetheless. Though you may not recognize it, there is a greatness within you.

Erwin Raphael McManus

(from Wide Awake)

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Whether due to poverty, ignorance, oppression, illness, spiritual blindness, procrastination, or just plain disobedience, multitudes of people either fail or never have the opportunity to fully become everything God meant for them to be. They take all their hopes and dreams to the grave and their glory dies with them……..As long as we are alive the possibility exists for us to reach our full potential. God has endowed us with gifts, talents, and abilities and He wants us to use them for His glory and for mankind’s good. We should strive to freely pour out all that is in us in unselfish service to the world. If we fully express ourselves in this life as God desires, we will not take any unfulfilled potential to the grave. Our goal should be to “die empty.”

Dr. Myles Munroe

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God’s children, in whom He has done mighty things, have come from checkered careers. Moses was a murderer. Look what Jacob did with Esau and Laban. Abraham tricked King Abimelech. David committed adultery with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed. Peter denied Jesus three times. John and James fought to be the highest. Paul went to Damascus breathing murder and threats. Our checkered careers, our utter sinfulness and degradation, our falling into all manner of vain seeking, become by the grace of God on the cross and in the resurrection the inevitable writing of wisdom on our hearts. Our hurts and sins have become our schooling and preparation. Would that we could learn purity the easy way. Praise God that His mercy is such that He turns the depth of our sin into the strength of ministry. We are not proud of our wrongdoing, but the sweet grace of God is such that in the end we thank Him for it. Our sins have become our training for high calling rather than our disqualification.

John and Paula Sandford

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Discipline is the believer’s answer to God’s call. It is the recognition, not of the solution to his problems or the supply of his needs, but of mastery. God addresses us. We are responsible – that is, we must make a response. We may choose to say yes and thus fulfill the Creator’s glorious purpose for us, or we may say no and violate it. This is what is meant by moral responsibility. God calls us to freedom, fulfillment, and joy – but we can refuse them. In a deep mystery, hidden in God’s purpose for man before the foundation of the world, lies the truth of man’s free will and God’s sovereignty. This much we know: God who is sovereign chose to create a man capable of willing his own freedom and therefore capable of answering the call…………..In space, astronauts experience the misery of having no reference point, no force that draws them to the center. The effort of performing ordinary activities without the help of that pull is often vastly greater than it would be under normal conditions (try pouring a glass of water, eating a sunny-side-up egg, or turning a screwdriver – water will not fall, the egg will not stay on your fork, and the screwdriver will not revolve, you will.) Where there is no “moral gravity” – that is, no force that draws us to the center – there is spiritual weightlessness. We float on feelings that will carry us where we never meant to go; we bubble with emotional experiences that we often take for spiritual ones; and we are puffed up with pride. Instead of seriousness, there is foolishness. Instead of gravity, flippancy. Sentimentality takes the place of theology. Our reference point will never serve to keep our feet on solid rock, for our reference point until we answer God’s call, is merely ourselves. We cannot possible tell which end is up.

Elisabeth Elliot

(from Discipline)

You continue to pursue him, to search for some kind of real and personal connection with your Creator, yet feeling all the while as if you’re running in place. And the faster you run, the more exhausted you become. Eventually your heart grows weary, and you do the only thing you feel you can do: succumb to spiritual numbness…….Don’t you wish you could stop running and let God chase you for awhile?…….What if I told you that’s exactly what God does? What if I could prove that God has never gone a minute without thinking of you, wooing you, whispering in your ear, I’m right here? What if I could show you that God ot only pursues you day by day, minute by minute, but he actually screams for your attention? …….You don’t have to chase God. All you have to do is awaken to his voice.

Tim King and Frank Martin

(from Furious Pursuit)

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L.D. Turner

I firmly believe one of the reasons so many people hold a negative view of the Christian faith stems from the fact that the church has failed to preach and teach the entire gospel, but instead, has given believers a watered-down, single-faceted version, which is at best a half-truth. Focusing on Christ’s “vicarious atonement,” the church has evolved into an institution that is obsessed with sin and the forgiveness of sin. Now don’t get me wrong – I am not in any way minimizing the importance of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, even though I fully admit I don’t particularly understand it. What I am saying is this: by focusing so exclusively on the atonement and the forgiveness of sin, the church has jettisoned the empowering half of the gospel and, as a result, turned out cadre of well-meaning but spiritually impotent believers who are consistently unable to live the Christian life as envisioned by the Master.

This situation is not only tragic, it is wholly unnecessary. Christ was quite clear about the full extent of his gospel and the kingdom he came to establish. Further, to make sure his message got through, he scared the living wits out of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road, and in one bold action did away with the fledgling church’s most ardent persecutor and, at the same time, conscripted into service its greatest Apostle. Neil Anderson, one of the most thorough Bible teachers on the contemporary scene, takes great effort to describe the gospel of Jesus from a more complete perspective:

The coming of our Lord Jesus Christ for our redemption fulfilled a twofold purpose. First, “the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8).  . . . . . . . . . .The second purpose for Jesus’ coming was stated by Christ Himself: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). He was not talking about our present physical life, which He is going to make full by giving us an abundance of physical things. He was talking about our spiritual life, which is our relationship with God.

Anderson continues with what in my view, is an unexpected but highly accurate assessment as to what constitutes this “life to the full.”  

The fullness of life is the fruit of the Spirit, which is “ love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22,23). He was talking about a redeemed humanity that is fully alive in Christ. What a gospel!

When we look at the gospel message, the “good news,” which Jesus consistently preached, beginning with the time he stepped forward in the synagogue and read from Isaiah 61, it is hard to fathom why many so-called “sincere believers” walk around looking like they have been baptized not with water, but with vinegar and pickle brine. Our faith is a joyous affair and we, as living epistles of Christ, should spread that joy in all that we think, do, and say. This is what it means to be fully alive in Christ.

(C) L.D. Turner 2011/All Rights Reserved