Questions to ask to stay spiritually sharp

In the middle of the twentieth century the Christian Business Men's Committee urged each other to confront themselves with these questions daily:

1. Does my life please God?
2. Do I enjoy being a Christian?
3. Do I cherish in my heart a feeling of dislike or hatred for anyone?
4. Am I studying my Bible daily?
5. How much time do I spend in secret prayer?
6. How long has it been since I led a soul to Christ?
7. How long since I had a direct answer to prayer?
8. Do I estimate the things of time and eternity at their true value?
9. Am I praying and working for anyone's salvation?
10. Is there anything I cannot give up for Christ?
11. How does my life look to those who are not Christians?
12. Where am I making my greatest mistake?
13. Do I place anything before my Christian duties?
14. Am I honest with the Lord's money?
15. Have I neglected any known duty?
16. Is the world better or worse for my living in it?
17. Am I doing anything that I would condemn in others?
18. Do I hav e a clear conception of my place in the Lord's work?
19. What am I doing to hasten the coming of Christ?
20. Am I doing as Christ would do in my place?

(David R. Enlow, Men Aflame: The Story of CBMC (Zondervan).

And guess what...it is not just AIDS

It is tragic that the facts are rarely articulated historically or in the contemporary age about the good work that Christianity is about in the U.S. and around the world. One example - if it weren't for the religious community in America precious little would be getting done concerning the post-Katrina damage that has so damaged our state of Mississippi. On issue after issue, tragedy after tragedy it is frequently Christians who arrive first and stay late. At any rate, this paragraph from the LA Times. Bless them.

"Bush and his Christian supporters seldom get the credit they deserve for their role in the global fight against AIDS. U.S. spending on the disease overseas has risen more than tenfold under Bush, while Christian groups have given unselfishly to the cause. Churches, in fact, run health clinics in much of rural Africa; without them, stemming AIDS would be all but impossible. So praise the Lord and pass the antiretrovirals." More, here

Think there's nothing you can do about neighborhood blight? Think again!

Great article.

You also took on the local liquor stores. Why?
I got that idea from Charles Sheldon's In His Steps, the book about people who asked, "What Would Jesus Do?" They tried to get the local bars closed because they had lots of problems with town drunks, and they thought that's what Jesus would do. But in the book they don't succeed.

After reading that book, I was driving down a street in our area and counted 26 liquor stores in 19 blocks. I thought, They don't have that kind of proliferation in the suburbs.

I got our attorneys to research what it takes to vote a community dry. In Chicago, we learned, you can vote a whole precinct dry.

So I preached a sermon (everything is connected to a sermon, by the way), "The Real Truth Behind the Liquor Industry." I talked about how it's destroying communities. I talked about how affluent communities don't have four liquor stores to each block, and it's something that keeps impoverished people in poverty. I told the church we had to go out and get 10 percent of the registered voters to sign a petition to put the issue on the ballot.

We accomplished that. Then, the Sunday before the election I preached a sermon called, "Let's Get Ready To Rumble." It was about Jehoshaphat going out to battle, and he takes the choir with him. They do all this singing. So we took our choir, and put them in front of this great, big march.

We had a band on the back of a truck and music and our church marched through the community. And as people came out on their porches, we reminded them that this was the week that we vote our community dry.

It worked. All those stores in our district are gone. Then to anyone who lost a job working in one of those liquor stores, we offered to send them through job training and we would pay their salary until they got another job.

Then we put a Christian bookstore in the building where the largest liquor store used to be.

Woohoo! Anybody feel the "call of God" on their life right now?