The headline read:  UNANSWERED PRAYERS: LETTERS TO GOD FOUND DUMPED IN OCEAN. The letters, three hundred in all and sent to a New Jersey minister, had been tossed in the ocean, most of them unopened.

Six weeks before he died, Elvis Presley was asked by a reporter, "Elvis, when you started playing music, you said you wanted three things in life: You wanted to be rich, you wanted to be famous, and you wanted to be happy. Are you happy, Elvis?" Elvis replied, "No. I'm as lonely as ___________ !"  Rich.  Famous.  But lonely. 

Prayer is perhaps the most unselfish thing we do in the body of Christ. We can teach, sing and even serve, and in each of these there can be an element of self-service or pride if we are not careful. Not so when people come humbly together to pray.

There are many things that can cause us to stumble in the Christian life: inability to walk in the Spirit, refusal to get into the Word of God, living with unconfessed sins and a lack of faith, to name a few. These can all be detrimental to our daily walk. However, over the years I have I come to the conclusion that there is one thing that impedes spiritual growth and success in the Christian life perhaps more than anything. I believe that to be an unforgiving spirit.

As many of you know, I am a lover and collector of great quotes. Especially do I gravitate to those that reaffirm or restate Biblical truth in modern terms. I felt the quotes below were worthy of the Shepherd's Staff.

Selfishness, when you think about it, seems to be one of man's greatest problems. To be delivered from it would seem to be man's greatest need. Everyone is plagued by it to a greater or lesser extent. Selfish desire doesn't have to be taught or learned...we possess it from birth.

The Apostle Paul had to learn this difficult lesson of not depending upon oneself. That mental process is seen in chapter 7 of Romans. The struggle he openly shares is a struggle of trying to depend upon the law for his spirituality. With a transparent heart he acknowledges the bankruptcy of such futile efforts. Thankfully, in chapter 8 Paul gives the answer to such a struggle.

An ancient manuscript compared the church to Noah's Ark. It declared: "If it weren't for the storm on the outside, we couldn't stand the stench on the inside." He was talking about the spiritual "body odor." The church is meant to be a divine beauty parlor in which hurting, ugly people come and are renewed by the Holy Spirit, loved by God's people, and are sent out in the world as attractive people for the Lord.

Is there someone who has wounded you deeply that you would like to forgive?  In what ways have you struggled with old memories and feelings about this person? 

According to an article in the New York Times from April 2002, the well-respected Oxford University philosophy professor, Richard Swinburne, used a broadly accepted probability theory to defend the truth of Christ's resurrection. He did this at a high-profile gathering of philosophy professors at Yale University. "For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Swinburne said. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."