Spilled Walnut Stain

Yesterday in my 8th grade shop classes the students were staining their oak end tables. We spent three days staining 100 of these tables. Finally on the third day the inevitable happened. As one student was repositioning his end table he knocked another student's one quart can of dark walnut wood stain on the floor. The stain splattered everywhere and on everything in a 10 foot radius. If this ever happens to you the first response is to prevent the students from walking away from ground zero which would result in stain being tracked through out the shop. The student whose stain was spilled quickly escaped ground zero to get something to begin cleaning up the mess before the wrath of Mr. Wiemers was released. After having left walnut foot prints all the way to the sink and back, she returned to ground zero with two paper towels.

It was at this point I realized I was observing a future sermon illustration. This poor student was going to try to hold off my anger, disappointment and frustration by bringing two inadequate paper towels to clean up a quart of walnut stain pooled up on the floor and splattered in every direction. Not to mention, in her attempt to help, she had tracked the stain across the shop and back and others were preparing to follow her. The usefulness of this illustration is enormous and its application will surely be used some Sunday morning.

It did remind me of the time a friend of mine cut his thumb off on the table saw in high school. With the student's thumb laying on the table saw the teacher that day said, "I'll go get a band-aid," and then left to locate a bandaid!? Both paper towels and band-aids are useful but not when we are dealing with a quart of walnut stain and a severed thumb.

Galyn Wiemers
http://www.generationword.com

Quadrants of Life

Through out the scriptures we are told that God is good. When we hear this we tend to describe the word good in terms of immediately recognizable “good.” Our definition of the term “good” could alternately use synonyms like “pleasant, pleasing, desirable, pain-free, or sought-after.” When we study the verses that often surround the praise “God is good,” we see that part of God’s “good” activity towards us is not within our definition. Things like “testing,” “trying,” “examining,” and “sacrificing.” In Psalm 107, which begins and ends with statements attesting to the “goodness” of God, forty-three verses are laced with real life situations where the goodness of God is manifested to people. Some of these people were lost and wandering, some had been subjected to bitter labor by God, others where caught in a storm sent by God, some of them were suffering in divine discipline for their rebellion. Although each group was in a different situation and for a different reason (some had rebelled, some had obeyed, some were guilty, some were innocent), they all were in the goodness of God.

The truth that God is doing something in our lives to change us is so obvious it goes without saying, but yet it is one of the things we must be taught so we do not go to extremes.

In Philippians 4:12-13 Paul says he has “learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.” With the phrase “learned the secret” he uses a technical term that refers to the process of initiation. The initiation would include more than knowledge but a sequences of life experiences. The situations in life are then listed by Paul forming a quadrant. Paul says he has learned to be content when “well fed,” “hungry,” “in plenty,” or “in want.” These four may seem redundant in the English Bible as if saying “prosperity or poverty, or prosperity or poverty.”

The tenses of the verbs that Paul uses in the Greek text develops the quadrants that can categorize every situation in life.

The first prosperity phrase (“well fed”) is passive. Meaning Paul was the recipient and not the doer of the verb. In other words he did not cause it to happen. This is true of the last phrase (“in want”) indicating there were times that Paul was in need that were out of his control. Paul did not deserve or cause the lack in this situation, it was given to him. The other two phrases (“hungry” or “plenty”) are in the active tense meaning Paul did or created both of these in his life at some time.

All of these serve a purpose and is the manifestation of the goodness of God in our lives. You may be suffering undeserving like Joseph or deserving like Samson. You may be prosperous undeservingly like Solomon or deserving like Abraham. But, one thing is true, God’s goodness will eventually take you to all four quadrants and through his initiation you can be content in any of them.

Galyn Wiemers

http://www.generationword.com

Three areas that cause us to sin:

1. Pride
2. Self-preservation
3. Lust

Five things we need to avoid sinning:

1. Fear of God
2. Trust in God
3. Be Humble Before God
4. Learn of God
5. Walk with God

Galyn Wiemers
http://www.generationword.com

Connxions - Event Center and Bookstore

Last night Toni and I had the privilege of attending Jerry Chiaramonte's grand opening reception for his new bookstore/event center in Urbandale. It has been a forty year dream for Jerry who began writing down ideas and drawing images of this project as a 20 year old college student. He told me he was going through a folder the other day containing pages of plans he had collected over the years and came across a forty year old sketch he had made of the layout of the store with a baby-grand piano in the center. Then he pointed right behind where I was sitting at the new baby-grand piano. Every detail of the store had been in the process of development over all these years. This is an inspiration for all of us who have dreams and plans. Abraham waited 25 years for a son, Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness before delivering Israel, and now, Jerry Chiaramonte has built his bookstore after forty years of planning and waiting.

One of the many features of Jerry's bookstore is the classroom he has set up right across the hallway from the event center. Beginning in January I will be teaching a weekly class in this classroom at Connxions beginning at 7:00 PM. (We are still discussing which night.) We will be handing out copies of our new 550 page book called Framework for Christian Faith and teaching through this Bible School material in a year.

Visit Connxions website

Download the .pdf files here for the new Framework for Christian Faith book which will be available in print in about a week.

Galyn Wiemers
http://www.generationword.com