Each tree here was started with only one seed. It is this one seed that has birthed the hundreds of oranges and thousands of seeds they will give in just this one season of fruiting. This one season will make available many thousands of seeds for planting and these can yield millions of seeds in their own harvests.
Each one of us ought to be adding to the landscape of life from a stock that we bring. Look carefully and find those features, ideas and imaginations that are uniquely yours. Do not despise them or imagine that they are not legitimate. They are. Deploy them to push your life forward.
The blessed assurances of faith do not know insignificance or weakness. They only know the power of faith in the heart of a believer who believes in the goodness of a glorious Father.
Ehud’s escape from the court was easy. It was as if the soldiers milling under the palm trees were used to men fleeing from private trysts with the king. Rushing to the mountains of Ephraim, he retrieved the trumpets hidden at the foot of the mountain. With the thirty men waiting for him, the trumpet blasts cut the air and ruled the waves of sound for more than an hour.
The effect of leadership is so deep that your entire future is shaped by those values, ethics, emotions and visions that galvanize you to action. This is why we must be ever conscious and protective of our environments, and what is influencing us. Don’t allow anything to take root in your life that you do not want to bear fruit in your life.
God is the very epitome of excellent leadership, and this is what the whole Bible reveals. He sets the standard for what should be expected in every leader. He is creator, shepherd, king, and father. As creator, He teaches us the leadership skills of setting vision and goals, planning, preparing and executing plans through the incredible stories of how He created a physical nation and a spiritual kingdom in the old and new testaments.
What a guilty conscience does to us insidiously and invidiously, especially when we are unconscious of this consciousness, is to envelope us with a blanket of heaviness. Quietly, it reminds you of the time you so sinned you couldn’t pray and then you fell into trouble. So this anxiety raises this horrible wall….what if I don’t go to heaven because of the ‘likelihood of sin’; the ‘probability of transgression’; ‘the possibility of trespass’.
In the worship of the baals, the Canaanites abandoned themselves to active sex with the priests, priestesses, neophytes of the cults, killed their children and threw them in fire. The bloodier and more sensual, the stronger the worship. Since the battles had raged with conquests and push backs, no one was quite sure what was truth about history and religion anymore.