Spending Your Thousand Dollar Life by Arabah Joy

I step over a pile of green mucus the person in front of me hawked on the ground and board the bus. Body odors and foul air greet me, the stench of the unbrushed and unwashed.

I’m the only fair skinned one on this bus and I stick out like an alien with purple polka dots.

I’m traveling to a rural town called “Spirit Mountain” and when I arrive, I do sense the spirits, the long time resident ghosts that have kept this place in darkness.

I take light into the darkness.

I proclaim “Yesu” to giddy girls in dorms, to hardened taxi drivers who laugh cynically, to beach goers who can’t get past my white skin and pregnant belly.

Traveling home now, spent. Grimy and smelling myself. Aching back and blistered feet. But I’ve given my life to Jesus and I’ll spend it for Jesus and there is a glory in the work.

Five years later, I’m a virtual hermit, trapped on the 6th floor of an apartment building on the other side of the world with no car, no family, no outlet, not even a backyard…and 4 kids, 3 of them under 3 and in diapers.

This is not how I envisioned spending my life for Jesus.

(Continue HERE)

Why Do We Let Girls Dress Like That?

Why Do We Let Girls Dress Like That? I read this on the blog Promoting Beautiful Womanhood and just had to share. It was quoted out of a newspaper article in the Wall Street Journal that asked this very question. 

I hope and pray that we are a generation that will lead our children back to modesty and respect. Children who love their Lord and themselves enough to preserve purity and innocence for the day when they are given to a godly man or woman who will cherish these virtues in them. Let us stand for raising our children in the love and fear of the Lord. Modesty is something that is mostly aimed at girls but boys need to be encouraged in this direction as well...boys need to be taught how to dress modestly and how to encourage modesty in the girls they are around. I want my son to be as uncomfortable with immodesty in himself as he is with immodest girls. 

If you haven't already--read the article here: Why Do We Let Girls Dress Like That?

Guideline For Open-Air Preaching - I'll Be Honest

Great instructions for how to share the Gospel to anyone in your life. 

For more videos like this please go to illbehonest.com

Do We Really Believe What We're Saying? -David Platt

David Platt addresses the ongoing debate over Rob Bell's Universalism. Many would step aside and say, "let them sort it out." This is what the disciples defended, guarded so that we could hear as well. We must defend it for our children and others who will come after us. We must guard it without wavering. "If they go to hell, let it be over our dead bodies" -C.H. Spurgeon 

Taken from The Global Initiative blog  

Do We Really Believe What We're Saying? from The Church at Brook Hills on Vimeo.

The Preaching That Kills -E.M. Bounds

"The preaching that kills is non-spiritual preaching. The ability of the preaching is not from God. Lower sources than God have given to it energy and stimulant. The Spirit is not evident in the preacher nor his preaching. Many kinds of forces may be projected and stimulated by preaching that kills, but they are not spiritual forces. They may resemble spiritual forces, but are only the shadow, the counterfeit; life they may seem to have, but the life is magnetized. The preaching that kills is the letter; shapely and orderly it may be, but it is the letter still, the dry, husky letter, the empty, bald shell. The letter may have the germ of life in it, but it has no breath of spring to evoke it; winter seeds they are, as hard as the winter's soil, as icy as the winter's air, no thawing nor germinating by them. This letter-preaching has the truth. But even divine truth has no life-giving energy alone; it must be energized by the Spirit, with all God's forces at its back. Truth unquickened by God's Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error. It may be the truth without admixture; but without the Spirit its shade and touch are deadly, its truth error, its light darkness. The letter-preaching is unctionless, neither mellowed nor oiled by the Spirit...... (To continue go HERE)