WMBI Commentaries (article)

Monday: Tiny Steps

All of us are faced with thousands of small choices every single day, and each one moves us in one direction or another. In a sense each small decision is a temptation, a testing if you will, a moment when we decide whether we will walk in the light of God or go back to the darkness. Either you give in or you stand your ground. Each time you give in—even a little bit—you grow weaker, and each time you resist—even a little bit—you grow stronger.

A friend came to see me with news that after many years of struggle she had finally turned the corner in her battle against a debilitating addiction. I shared with her an illustration that has been very helpful to me. Every day we make thousands of decisions—most of them very small, such what to wear, which way to drive to work, when to go to lunch, which phone call to return first. Each decision we make is either a step into the darkness or a step into the light. I told my friend that each day she would be faced with a thousand tiny decisions and each one would either lead her back into the darkness or toward the light of life. I also reminded her that she didn't get where she was overnight. It took thousands of tiny decisions to get there and it would take thousands of tiny decisions to get out. But each day as she took tiny steps toward the light, she would move slowly toward a brand new life. And I promised her that one day after thousands of tiny steps in the right direction she would wake up surrounded by the light of God on every side. Months later she wrote me a wonderful note telling me how marvelously her life has changed in the last ten months. She lives and walks in the light of God's love every day. It is nothing short of a miracle.

Sometimes we make spiritual growth more difficult than it really is. If you want to make progress, you've got to start taking tiny steps in a new direction. You have to say no to sin and yes to God. And you have to do it hundreds and even thousands of times each day. Most of us won't get hit with the proverbial lightning bolt that radically changes us overnight. But by God's grace we can be changed little by little, by God's grace, as we move forward, in simple faith taking one tiny step at a time. And before we know it, the sunlight will come flooding in as we wake up to discover that we are walking with Jesus Christ, in the light of his love, and he is walking beside us.

This is Ray Pritchard of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park for Mornings on 90.1 FM, WMBI.

Tuesday: Year of the Stump

Oswald Chambers said that "faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time." Not long ago I preached on the story of Nebuchadnezzar losing his mind and becoming like a beast of the field for seven years (Daniel 4). It all started when the king had a dream of a vast tree with branches stretching out in all directions and birds of every kind coming to nest in the branches. Suddenly the tree was cut down and the stump was bound with iron and bronze. The good part comes at the end when the king's sanity is restored, his reign is increased, and he openly gives God glory for all that had happened. The whole story teaches us how God deals with his children. Sometimes he "shakes our tree" in order to get our attention and sometimes he cuts the tree down, but he never does it to hurt us but only to strip away our excessive self-confidence and bring us closer to him.

A few days later a friend sent me this note: "I want to thank you for your prayers and for the sermon. I found it most applicable! Now I have an image to work with-last year was definitely the tree shaking time and now I am little more than a stump-that's exactly how I feel. But how encouraging to know that from here, through the awesomeness of God, He will raise me up to be a tree again. And I pray a wholly submissive one! It helps to know that God does not cut us down to destroy us but to make us better. My sister said something cool that she kept reminding herself last year when going through a difficult time: It's okay to be the queen who reigns in the Land of Uncertainty for a time, because you know that your Father is the King of the Land of All-Knowing. I don't know where she came up with that, but it fits. Well, it will be an interesting year and probably a tough one, but with God in control, an awesome one."

You may feel more like a "stump" than mighty tree right now. The road ahead may seem difficult and the path unclear. Perhaps you are weary of the pruning and long to see the fruit of something new and positive in your life. Be of good cheer. Faith believes when it cannot see and trusts God when nothing seems to make sense. If your tree is shaking, or if you hear "Timber!" in the distance, don't despair. God loves to turn stumps into beautiful trees once again.

This is Ray Pritchard of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park for Mornings on 90.1 FM, WMBI

Wednesday: Blessed Peacemakers

"You don't make peace with your friends, only with your enemies." Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin uttered those words soon after Israel signed an historic peace treaty with the PLO in 1993. Within two years he would pay with his life for his commitment to peace. Whatever else we may say about Mr. Rabin, we must acknowledge the truth of his words. Peacemaking is a risky, difficult business. It's much easier to start a war than to end one. Recently I ran across some startling statistics: In the last 3500 years some 8000 peace treaties have been signed. The average time they remained in force was only two years. In that same period, there have been only 286 years in which the world has been entirely at peace. That's a ratio of 8% peace versus 92% war. According to that same source, since 1919 the nations of Europe have signed over 200 peace treaties, nearly all of which were broken more easily than they were consummated. Peace never just happens. You have to go of your way to make peace. That is why Jesus said, "Blessed as the peacemakers"—not the peacewishers or the peacehopers. In a world torn by strife and fueled by hatred, we need Christians who will step into the breach as true peacemakers.

In the 1960s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked his followers to sign the following pledge:

1. Meditate daily on the teachings and life of Jesus

2. Remember always that the movement seeks justice and reconciliation—not victory.

3. Walk and talk in the way of love, for God is love.

4. Pray daily to be used by God so that all men might be free

5. Observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy

6. Seek to perform regular service for others and for the world

7. Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue or heart.

Those principles strike me as wise and realistic. The world would be a better place if we all lived that way. Someone has to take the first step. –Will you be the one to pick up the phone? –Will you take the time to write a letter? –Will you stop making excuses? –Will you make the first move?

Jesus said, "Love you enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). First he said it, then he showed us how to do it when he died on the Cross. Would you like to make peace with your enemies? You can, but it won't be easy. If you would rather live in anger and bitterness, that option is always open to you. Or you can follow Jesus to the Cross and die there. The choice is yours.

This is Ray Pritchard of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park for Mornings on 90.1 FM, WMBI

Thursday—Too Short to Have a Bad Day

I happened to catch a few minutes of an interview Tim Russert did with Hamilton Jordan, Chief of Staff under President Jimmy Carter. He has written a book with the intriguing title, No Such Thing as a Bad Day. It's his own story about being diagnosed with cancer on three separate occasions before the age of 50. "Where did the title come from?" asked Tim Russert. Hamilton Jordan said he called a friend with cancer who is also a father with several young children. After they chatted for a bit, Mr. Jordan asked him, "Are you having a bad day?" "When the doctors tell you that you have only three months to live, there is no such thing as a bad day," the man replied.

What a world of truth lies in those simple words. If you know you're only going to live for a few weeks, every day becomes precious and you simply don't have time to have a "bad day." You get up every morning, smell the roses, and drink deeply of the elixir called life. Even the moments of sadness are there to be savored and remembered because soon those moments will be gone.

I think Mr. Jordan's point is that in some strange way what happened to that young father was a gift from God. Not the dying part because that is heartbreaking to contemplate. But the other part, the realization that since you won't be here long, you simply don't have time to dwell on the negative. You see the sand slipping from the hourglass and you choose and choose again to make every moment count.

How different this is from the way most of us live. We can afford to have "bad days" because we're planning on living a long time. A "bad day" is a luxury we give ourselves because we figure with so many more years to go, we can pout or be miserable or have a pity party or feel sorry for ourselves today. The dying have no such luxury. Only the living dare to go into the corner and sulk. All the virtues and all the vices are choices we make. Happiness is a choice. So is anger. And gratitude. And kindness. And sloth. And patience. And doubt. And faith. We are the way we are because we choose to be that way. And we stay the way we are because we choose not to change.

Ecclesiastes 12:1 reminds us to "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘‘I find no pleasure in them" Don't live seventy years and end up missing the whole point. Life is too short to have a bad day.

This is Ray Pritchard of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park for Mornings on 90.1 FM, WMBI

Friday—The First Law of Spiritual Progress

Do you feel stuck in your spiritual life? You need to get started again, you need a new direction in your spiritual life, you want to begin again, but you don't know how and you don't know where and you don't know what to do. Maybe you've tried and failed so many times that you feel like giving up. Often it's our guilt over the past that holds us back. Sometimes our frustration over unfair treatment in the past keeps us from striking out in a new direction. When Pete Peterson was named American ambassador to Vietnam, his appointment generated enormous publicity because he served six years as a prisoner of war in the dreaded Hanoi Hilton. Now he has returned to the land where he was held captive—not for revenge, but to represent the United States. When asked how he could do such a thing after years of starvation, torture, and inhuman brutality, he replied, "I'm not angry. I left that at the gates of the prison when I walked out in 1972. That may sound simplistic to some people, but it's the truth. I just left it behind me and decided to move forward with my life."

Several years ago I formulated this principle into a truth I call the First Law of Spiritual Progress. It goes like this:

I can't go back

I can't stay here

I must go forward

You can't go back to the past—not to relive the good times or to seek revenge for the bad times. But you can't stay where you are either. Life is like a river that flows endlessly onward. It matters not whether you are happy in your present situation or whether you seek to be delivered from it. You can't stay where you are forever. The only way to go is forward.

A man whose wife suffered greatly at the hands of her enemies told me that she had taken a "vow of silence" regarding her critics. She decided that rather than lower herself to the level of her enemies, she would simply not reply at all. This is difficult, but at least it frees a person to move forward with God. God only has one direction for his people: Forward! He never leads us back into the past and he rarely lets us stay where we are very long. That's why the first two letters of the gospel spell out our marching orders: Go!

When you tempted to get even with those who hurt you, remember that you can't go back, you can't stay where you are, but by God's grace, you can move forward one step at a time.

This is Ray Pritchard of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park for Mornings on 90.1 FM, WMBI.