Pensamientos para hoy (afterthought for today)

Broken Spoke

Ever had a day when nothing seemed to be going right? We all have days like that. You wake up to find that you forgot to buy milk for breakfast. You get stuck in a bad traffic jam. Someone at work is out sick and you have to do their work in addition to your own. Usually these kinds of things just happen coincidently, but sometimes we have a bad day because we're not walking with the Lord.

One of the men who mentored me as a young Christian was Harold Matolka. Harold once told me that when he missed his morning quite time his day just didn't seem to go right. Men and women of God know that they need to spend time with God reading the Bible and in prayer. God designed us in a way that makes us dependent upon him. When we neglect our Bible reading and prayer time we are leaving God out of our life and it's no coincident when we have a bad day. Jesus says, "I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing (John 15:5)."¹

Recently I broke a spoke on my bike. A broken spoke is a bad thing. It's like a bad hair day times fifty. The Bike is all in perfect shape except the wheel is out of true. The wheel is wobbly, lopsided, and rubs against the brake pads making the bike almost impossible to ride. When you look at the bike it looks perfectly fine, but it won't ride right. So too our lives may look fine. To all appearances you have everything together, but God can see the broken spokes in your life and unless you fix them your life will be like that wobbly, lopsided wheel. You can fix that problem easily by spending a few minutes every day reading your Bible and praying. Don't go another day with a busted spoke. Make your quite time a daily routine. If you miss your quite time with God, just get back to it the next day so that those days when things don't seem to be going right really are just a coincidence and not the result of leaving God out of your life.

Happy riding,

Pastor Steve
January 21, 2011

¹ John 15:5, NASB (New American Standard Bible). Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.

Jesus is the greatest teacher who ever lived. One of Jesus' techniques was to relate spiritual ideas to common everyday life. Pensamientos (afterthought) is an attempt to follow Jesus' method of teaching. Its title is in Spanish because we recognize the importance of multi-culturalism. We hope to translate some of these messages into Spanish soon.

Find more afterthoughts at Pensamientos (afterthoughts).

You can read recent sermons by Pastor Lorenz at Featured Sermon.