40 Days

Sunday was our first official day to start reading the Purpose Driven Life. I hope you have enjoyed your devotional time with God each day. For many of us, this is forming a healthy new habit of setting aside dedicated time for God in our pursuit to grow closer to Him. For others, you are reinforcing a previous commitment you made to Him, and He is well pleased.

Scripture is very clear about the significance of a 40 day journey. A great number of people that God used to change this world and the lives of others had to go through a 40 day transformation. To some, that transformation was seeing the vision of a new land. Others, however, were changed on the inside. They needed a reformation of their attitude, trust in God, and dedication to their purpose.

What will 40 days do for you? Do you need to be reinvigorated by seeing a vision of where God wants you to go? How about renewing your trust in Him and what He plans for your life? Maybe, you need to reform your attitude and begin to see life as peaceful, beautiful, and as joyous as God meant for it to be. Whatever the change may be, let's embrace it over the next 40 day period of our lives.

Moses was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the LORD.

~Exodus 34:28-29

If you haven't signed up yet for the online discussion group, please do so by visiting http://groups.google.com/group/allchosen. I look forward to your comments.

Until next week...

Are You Wasting Life?

One of the most fundamental questions of life happens to be, "what is my purpose?" We often ask ourselves that question because we do not want to squander the most valuable asset we have...time. So we continuously analyze our daily 'doings' to realign ourselves with what we believe to be the best use of our time. Yet the question remains..."am I wasting my life?"

The answer can be found only by asking our Creator what He intended for our life to be when He created us. What does God want from your life and what does it take to fulfill it? The short answer to those questions are that He wants your whole life, and it takes discipline in order for you to give it to Him.

Christ is consistent when He asks you to follow Him, and it is impossible for you to call yourself a Christian and disciple if you have not begun to discipline your life to indeed follow Him. Many of us excuse ourselves from following Christ wholly by the statement, "let me first do____ (you fill in the blank)". This is the same thing that many of Christ's early disciples proclaimed (Luke 9:59, 61).

Let's stop making excuses when it comes to following Christ and truly offer our whole lives to Him as a living sacrifice. We can begin by participating in this study. Our group will start to read and discuss the book beginning next week. I pray that you will join us. You can log in to the group discussion by visiting http://groups.google.com/group/allchosen. Feel free to invite your friends and family. This is a journey you will not want to miss!

Until next week...

"please don't squander one bit of this marvelous life God has given us."

~ 1 Corinthians 6:1 (MSG)

Find Out

We spend a lot of time trying to discover what life is all about. A lot of this time, however, is spent looking in the wrong place. The problem is that while we're growing up, no one really points us in the right direction so we end up stumbling over things we believe will fulfill our life. This is not what God had planned for us. He tells us that He has plans to prosper us, give us hope and a future, but instead we often find ourselves insecure about who we are and where we are going.

But there is hope. You CAN find out who you are and why you are on this earth. God has a plan for you and His plan is the best plan for your life. His plan will open doors to the things you have a desire to fulfill for yourself. The unfortunate thing is that we are hesitant to follow God's plan because we don't really know if it will work. Sometimes we don't even know what it is! I want to urge you to find out!

Find out what your life is all about. Find out where you are and where God wants you to be. Find out how to make the most of your life without sacrificing time going down dead end paths. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to help you find out.

Responses for our study on the Purpose Driven Life have been great! And it's not too late to sign up. If you would like to join us for the online study group, please send an email sharing your interest. Also, if you haven't already done so, please respond to last week's question, "What is your life's purpose?" Click here to see what other's have had to say. I look forward to reading your comments.

Until next week.

It's in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for.

~Ephesians 1:11 (MSG)

Stop Wandering

Have you ever felt like you were wandering through life? No purpose, no plans, and no prospects of where you are going or where you will end up? Well all of that is going to change. We here at Chosen Ministries are about to embark on the journey of our lives. In the next few weeks, we will begin 40 Days of Purpose, a study on the Purpose Driven Life by Pastor Rick Warren. This will help us to answer the question "What on earth am I here for?"

In the Bible, God told the children of Israel to send people to explore the promised land for 40 days and report on their findings. Was this land just as God had promised? The answer, of course, was yes! But the majority of those sent to check it out came back with a report of negativity and doubt instead of joy and anticipation. This caused a ripple effect throughout the community that resulted in them wandering for 40 years - one year for each day they explored.

Let's not allow that to be our fate! Let's stop wandering through life and begin to live life on purpose for God. Join us as we position ourselves to enter into the promise of the life that God has for each one of us by participating in the 40 Days of Purpose with Chosen Ministries. If you're interested, simply reply to this email and I'll explain how you can be a part of this awesome journey. Until then, I'd love to hear your comments on the question, "what is your life's purpose?"

"Because they have not followed me wholeheartedly, not one of the men twenty years old or more who came up out of Egypt will see the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - not one except Caleb...and Joshua..., for they followed the LORD wholeheartedly."

~Numbers 32:11-12