Here's todays...
Read: Psalm 100
Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. —Psalm 100:4
Bible In One Year: Isaiah 50-52; 1 Thessalonians 5
In his book Folk Psalms of Faith, Pastor Ray Stedman says he wishes that all churchgoers could stand in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and watch the faces in the congregation during the sermon.
Although most people seem to give the minister their attention, many have their minds elsewhere. Stedman writes, "It would be fascinating at the end of a service to know where everybody had been!"
To receive the greatest benefit from a church service, we must prepare our hearts and become active participants. We must become wholeheartedly involved in singing the hymns, silently praying as the pastor leads the congregation in prayer, and worshiping from the heart as the choir sings.
Finally, we need to discipline ourselves to listen intently with a receptive heart to the teaching of God's Word. We must develop a hunger for truth that quiets our spirits, inspires worship, evokes praise to God, and moves us to serve Him.
It's easy to blame the pastor if we leave the service feeling empty and discouraged. But he's just one participant; we must do our part. Those who get the most out of worship are those who put the most into it. —Richard De Haan
The Cowboy and the Yuppie
A west Texas cowboy was herding his cattle in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas.
He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color,
150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the cowboy. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a consultant for the National Democratic Party." says the cowboy.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything about my business........
Now give me back my dog."
Very good point.