Sunday September 7, 2008
Stephen Porter - 10:09 AM ADT
105 BLANK
It’s Sunday and my page is a day late. Usually, I wake up on Saturday morning with a topic or more in my mind to begin my teaching page with and the Lord adds to the topic as I type but yesterday morning I had nothing and didn’t get anything all day.
I questioned God about that but didn’t really give Him all of my attention. I just kind of casually asked Him then went on with my day doing the things that I wanted to do. This morning, I realize that He gave me this heading yesterday but, I got caught up in my day and didn’t get back to the computer to type anything.
I also learned that He had made my pages come so easy that I had become spoiled and started to take them for granted that they would always come that easy and that I would not have to do a whole lot of work to get them.
In my conversations with Him, this morning, He made me realize that I had missed doing the page yesterday so, in staying home from church today, I had also missed a day to gather with His people and worship Him. [I missed doing two things that He loved for me to do]
I had become complacent. Any other time, I would have come into the office, sat at the computer and started something while I waited for Him and it would not be very long before He would give me something and I would get it faster than I could type, [like right now.]
I did NOT start so God let me mess up and miss His blessing. He waited, patiently, while He watched me do my own thing, saying nothing and doing nothing; knowing that I would come to this place of understanding and regret with only one option left. Ask His forgiveness and get back to the task that He has given me. [I have long since made the decision to stay with Him, no matter what, so, continuing to do my own thing and ignoring God from then on was not an option for me; even though I have seen others that have chosen to do this.]
Having lost out on those blessings that I should have enjoyed yesterday and today and can only continue on today and hope for His blessing and enjoy His presence now.
He loves us but He will not force Himself on anyone. We have to do it His way if we want to be His friend. When we make a mistake, He requires us to go to Him [trusting Him] and apologize; then receive His forgiveness and continue on with the love relationship that we started at our first acceptance of Jesus and our first repentance for our sins that put Jesus on the cross in payment for them.
Any blessings and successes that we missed are gone and should not be brought back into our minds to continue to beat ourselves with. God considers this to be an abuse of ourselves and is not allowed to be done to someone that He loves. However, the lessons that we have learned from our failures should remain to teach us how to handle a similar situation in the future and teach us how to help others that need the correct knowledge to deal with that situation in their lives.
This page is written today, showing my failure and shame so that others can see how to handle failure and shame before their God and how to take the proper actions to restore their right relationship with Him and how to get back into His good graces.[and how to stop beating yourselves with your old past mistakes and trust Him to renew a right spirit in you.]
May God bless you one and all.
Wednesday September 3, 2008
Stephen Porter - 8:33 AM ADT
16 FOR THE RECORD
Just for the record, it has been said that I should not let a tailgater change my driving habits. Anyone coming up behind me, beside me, or pulling in front of me changes my driving habits. Anyone getting close enough to be a hazard to me or themselves has to be calculated into any situation that I could be driving into.
If a child runs out between two parked cars, would I get stopped in time only to have that vehicle behind me push me into killing that child anyways?
Would that vehicle beside me swerve into me if something happened on the other side of it?
Is the driver that just pulled in front of me able enough to get stopped if an emergency took place in front of them and would I be able to miss them, if it did happen?
Everyone around me becomes a calculation when I am driving safely. While I hope that they are watching out for me, I must be watching out for them. We are on this road together and required to keep each other safe.
Anyone not obeying the highway regulations near me, makes me nervous and, if anything dangerous happens, I will protect the innocent first. If I have to make a choice between taking out an innocent pedestrian or a guilty driver, my choice will always be to take out the guilty person. If they are going to disobey then they should be the ones to pay, not the innocent. [However my first thoughts and reactions will be to save both, if I can.]
There is also a thought process that is popular among the law-breakers that those slow drivers cause crashes by provoking them to unlawful actions. So they are trying to tell us that they are not in control of their own thoughts, emotions and actions; should these people actually be allowed to drive a large steel object around other people?
The driver’s seat is the place where these steel objects are controlled from and that person is totally responsible for the actions of that object. The driver is the one responsible to see, calculate and act upon any situation that occurs around that vehicle; even if it is an unexpected event, they are required to be prepared for it. [Most people driving do not have transport truck training, but that is what is taught in the transport driver training schools.]
In closing, except in a 50 Km and, possibly, a 60 Km, zone, it is my preference to drive 5 to 10 Km. under the posted speed. The reason that I don’t drive slow but maintain the speed limit [and go the extra by giving a 2 to 3 Km difference to make up for my tire wear and, possible, speedometer difference] is to help those drivers that think they have to hurry, to go as fast as they legally can.
Saturday August 30, 2008
Stephen Porter - 10:16 AM ADT
104 PAY DAY
Our whole purpose for working is to earn a living. If we are thrifty, we can save enough to retire on later. [If it is not all taken away from us.]
The world system is getting better and better at taking away what we are trying to keep and selling us things that we do not need or that will not last long enough to pay for their overall cost.
It has us so far in dept for our future earnings that the slight increases in the day to day costs are cutting into what we were planning to save for later so that we are, more and more, living to survive right now, let alone later, when we are too old and weak to maintain the same pace that we are setting now.
By taking away our future security, the world system is taking away our peace which, in turn, is taking away our health; making us older and weaker faster.
The system does not care about you or me; the system cares only for itself and each one in that system is in danger of accepting this attitude of caring only for themselves. Their wealth, their health and their security gradually takes over more and more of their thoughts and time every day. They are pushed harder and harder by their dept, their need for so much income and their present wants that they are selling their future to keep up today.
Few have escaped this system which, in today’s smaller world, is now world wide in scope. Those poorer and less able people have already fallen behind and are living, day to day, with little or no hope while the rest of us are drawing closer and closer to their position every day. Every day, we loose a great number of our population into the too poor and hopeless ranks.
Even those that have arrived to retirement with enough to live on, are worried that, with the costs going up, maybe they cannot remain secure.
All of this takes place on a day-to-day base, unnoticed, until payday; when we try to make up for what we have spent in the past and then try to provide for our present needs and see that what is left for our future is gradually disappearing.
God also has a payday; a day when all our actions of faith or disobedience will determine our security for our future.
This world system of disobedience started with Adam and Eve and progressed to where it took all but 8 of the people of the world before God decided to have a ‘payday’. Of those 8, one had a future because of faith and obedience to God, one had a secure future because of obedience to a faithful husband, three had a secure future because of obedience to a faithful father and three had a secure future because of their obedience to husbands that were obedient to a faithful father.
Our secure future depends on our faithfulness to our God on a day-to-day base but will only be evident at payday.
[To those doctrinal Christians, read carefully; nothing was said about salvation but, will your ‘payday’ leave you feeling secure and peaceful or with regrets at how much of your ‘paycheque’ you spent on things that you did not need?]
Tuesday August 26, 2008
Stephen Porter - 8:08 PM ADT
15 LAWS & LINES
The laws were made and are enforced to keep you safe from other reckless and dangerous drivers or to keep them safe from you; depending on weather you are a safe obedient driver or one who doesn’t care. They are well thought out by the legislators and officials with the help of police, transportation staff and the highway engineers.
Those who don’t obey those safe driving laws, are putting themselves above the law and are acting out the part of one who knows better than everyone else in their country and community.[In other words they have a faults sense of their own self-importance and ability and everyone else’s lack of importance and skill]
No matter how good you think you are, sooner or later you will make a mistake. When you obey the laws, you will have a better chance of someone else compensating for your mistake and keeping you both safe. If you don’t obey, the mistake and its end results are not an accident but a deliberate result of your inability to handle all and every situation and you are to blame for those results.
The lines marking the highways are there to tell us where we can do certain things and were we are not supposed to do certain things.
We are not supposed to cross a solid line; we are not supposed to cross or be in a yellow lined area or crosswalk. A broken line can be crossed but only if it is safe to do so.
There is more to these lines than what we can see; the sensors for the left turn signals, at intersections, are under the pavement just behind the stop line for the left turn lane. It senses the vehicle that is waiting in that lane but only if that vehicle is near the sensor. If one is across the line or too far back so that the sensor cannot sense it then it thinks that no one is there and does not give them the green arrow. The sensor only has a 5 or 6 foot range and picks up the heavier front end of a car easier than the lighter back end.
There is no excuse for not knowing the driving laws because they are readily available; there is only self-imposed ignorance or deliberate disobedience; both of which are unacceptable to a safe and honourable driving experience.
Saturday August 23, 2008
Stephen Porter - 8:51 AM ADT
103 MIRACLES
As I said earlier, you can tell when God does a miracle, not by watching for a great event or by seeing something extraordinary, but by getting what you asked for.
I was at a healing seminar, quite a long time ago, where many miracles took place every day. [It lasted 3 days] People with constant migraines were healed, internal lumps disappeared, bones were made healthy and so on; did you notice that all the things that were healed could not be seen with the naked eye?
Many of the things healed we had to take the persons word for it that it was gone. Many sent documented proof to the evangelists, later, but most of us had to take their word for it right then and get our own healing. That is how faith works; taking an honest persons word for something.
And, yes, I received in that seminar also. I went there with ‘tennis elbow’ in my right elbow that the doctor that was treating it told me, after three trips to him, that if the medicine that I was taking did not fix it soon, I would have to have cortisone injections into the joint by needle. Like most people, I don’t like needles and especially into a joint.
When the prayer for healing time came, I joined the rest of the people that needed a healing, and went up front so they could put their hands on me and pray to God for my healing. It was instantaneous; God heard their request and gave me a healing right away.
I had no more pain from that instant on, even though it was paining when I went there. How do you know that I’m telling you the truth? You don’t; you will have to take my word for it. Your reaction could be faith which will help you get a healing, when you need one; doubt, which will hinder you when you need a healing; or scepticism, which will cost you your healing and your belief in a loving God.
As for me, weather you believe or not, does not matter, I don’t have that pain anymore; however I do have something from those meetings that is very evident in the physical world. After 5 years of seeking for the baptism of the Holy Ghost, with the evidence being the utterance of ‘tongues’ [a different language that I had not learned], I received it in those meetings and can speak ‘in tongues’ at will now. [Yes, I had it tested by the linguists at UNB and it is another language. There are only about 3600 known languages in the world and in mankind’s history.]
Another point of proof for me was when I was asked to place my hand on another person’s back and pray for their healing. This person had an S curvature of their spine. After my prayer, I watched what no one else could see; while they were watching that persons face and could see the joy that came there, I was watching their back and watched the muscles and bone bulge in and out, move back and forth and side to side as God moved them around to place them into the places that they were normally supposed to be.
That person was healed by God’s great power and love and I had the privilege to watch Him do it. It only took a few seconds and, if I had looked away, I could have easily missed it but that person left the building with out that spine curvature.
The proof of a miracle is not a great event but did what was prayed for happen the way it was asked for. If you simply asked for something, did you get it? If you didn’t need it right away, did it come when you did?
The end result is the proof of a miracle not the event itself.
Tuesday August 19, 2008
Stephen Porter - 7:19 PM ADT
14 ESCAPES
Whenever you get in your vehicle to go for a drive, no matter weather it is just to the corner store or a 3000 mile vacation, always remember that it is the most dangerous thing that you can do today. You’re going to be travelling at a potentially fatal speed if something happens.
Once you get familiar with your vehicle and are paying attention to the road ahead and to each side, spend some time locating escape routes for yourself. If a pedestrian stepped out in front of your car, right now, and you could not stop, could you steer your car to avoid hitting them and anything else?
Get in the habit of being constantly aware of who and what is around you and where they are and always have a place that you can go if something unexpected happens in front of you. An open lane to your right, a road shoulder or sidewalk, into a shallow ditch, an opening between cars on your left that you can swerve into and back again, if you have to, any place that you can go to avoid hitting someone or something and get stopped safely.
This takes practise and attention but, if you are continually thinking about an escape route and use it once to save a life, the time will be worth it. You will only die once but you can escape many times.
Many stories and songs have been written about truckers who have turned their wheels to avoid killing someone and lost their own lives doing it. They have become heroes, but you don’t have to die to miss killing someone; all you have to do is miss them. You can scrape a building, knock down a tree, run over a curb and flatten your tires but you and the other person will live through the minor bumps and scrapes.
An escape route may not be the smoothest place to drive or the quietest and it may dent your car some but having one will increase your chances of living longer by a big margin.
Once you have an escape route planed and someone moves into it, slow down or change your travel area to make another.
This will also increase your awareness of driving and who and what is around you and it will make you harder to hit.
Driving safely is not always driving very, very slowly but driving smarter.
Sunday August 17, 2008
Stephen Porter - 10:16 AM ADT
102 THE POWER OF GOOD
God is good, His word is good and His son, Jesus, is good; God also says, in His word, that the earth is good, all that He created is good and mankind was made to be good. That’s God’s outlook on the situation and it hasn’t changed. It is going to be good because God is going to make it good. He is giving good and evil a chance to continue to be good and to change from evil to good.
In the end, God will keep all the good and remove, out of His presence, all that is evil.
God has described for us, in His word, what is good and what is evil; what He will keep, in His coming kingdom and what He will reject out of His kingdom and out of His sight.
That’s the way God said it will be and, now, He expects us to learn about Him and make this decision of good or evil for ourselves and be wherever we have decided to put ourselves in His future.
Now comes the hard part, we have a fuzzy idea about good and evil. Everyone has an idea about what is good and what is evil and they want themselves to be right without having to put a lot of effort and thought into it. People want a ritual ‘good’ that they can do so that they can get on with their busy lives and not have to pay attention to what or why they do the things that they do.
They find ‘experts’ to tell them what God expects and then they do it, thinking that, if it’s not right then, it’s the other persons fault, right? No! God made the responsibility for your decisions totally yours and will hold you accountable for them. He has put everything in your sight, area of hearing, area of logic and, basically, everything around you to help your mind make the right decisions. So, the wrong decisions come from within us; our lusts, desires and greed.
God’s word tells us what is good in the situations that are described there and why they are good. Many take the ‘what’ of the situation and think, practise and preach that that is God’s way, will and law; looking for that easy way so that they can feel secure that they are right and not have to worry about it again. Eve thought this way when she made her first mistake, too, and reinforced her ‘right’ wrong decision by giving it to Adam. He thought it must have been OK because the woman that God gave to him, to help him, had done it and nothing seemed to go wrong, so, it must be alright. [The old ‘monkey see, monkey do’ thing.]
Good, in God’s world, is not the ‘what’ that Jesus spoke about, but the ‘why’. If you love God, you will obey Him; asking His advice in every situation until you are familiar enough with His desire for you so that He can let you start making some of the decisions yourself.
Once you understand why He wants something done a certain way, then you can understand what He wants done. You then become a leader that does not need the rest of the crowd to agree or support you in your decisions because you know they are right from the one who is the master of right, God Himself.
This ‘power of right’ sets you free from all dependence on anyone or anything else; making you the power of yourself within yourself. This ‘power of right’ will stay with you as long as you stay connected to the source of this power and that is God, Himself.
Saturday August 16, 2008
Stephen Porter - 10:20 AM ADT
13 MORE TIPS
Here are some more driving tips that you can practise after you get familiar with the vehicle that you are driving.
Watch as far ahead as you can but still watch for things happening close to you. Start at your car and look for things that are moving in your driving area. As you check off each moving [or object that is going to move] within your travel lane and eliminate it as a hazard to you, keep looking ahead as far as you can until you come to whatever object is directly ahead of you. As you are doing this, use your peripheral [side] vision to keep track of the moving objects close to you to see if they stop or speed up.
Also take note of any object that could start moving into your travel lane before you get past them. Focus on their tires [really, their hub caps] because this will give you the most visible warning that the car, bicycle, truck or, even, wheelchair is starting to move.
A car, sitting at a stop sign with the driver looking the other way will tell you it is starting to move by you seeing the hub caps starting to turn; also, but not as visible, the front of the car will rise slightly as the driver starts to accelerate from a complete stop. These are both warning signs that the driver is intending to pull out in front of you and gives you some time to start slowing down to avoid a dangerous close call.
Another tip is to expect the unexpected; don’t expect that pedestrian to stop when they reach the curb. Pedestrians have caught on to the fact that, if they step off the curb, then they have the right of way and they take it irregardless of how much danger is involved to them. [I know, I know. How can a pedestrian have the right of way when you have the green light? It’s because they are smaller than you, in your car, and, in a collision, they would be the most hurt. Law officials will tell you to give them the right of way and leave it up to the law to prosecute the jaywalkers.]
You have to be ready for everything and anything, when you drive, because the rest of the population does not seem to know or care where they are or what danger they are in. Pedestrians, bicyclers, other car drivers and truck drivers do not seem to know or care where they are going or where they are supposed to be travelling. Bicyclers travel on the wrong side of the road or on sidewalks; sometimes they will act like a bicycler and other times like a pedestrian.
There is also the surprise factor; someone in a line of traffic will blow their horn at someone they know, the person at the front of the line hears the horn and, without looking, thinks that the light has changed. They jump on the gas and are out in front of you before they realize their mistake; it is too late for them to stop which leaves them at your mercy. You have to be ready in case you have to stop to save their life.
Saturday August 9, 2008
Stephen Porter - 10:08 AM ADT
101 THE LAW
The laws here in Canada, once they are empowered by legislature, are part of the law of our land and cannot be changed or negated except by another act of legislature. This is the same with God’s law; it cannot be changed or negated except by God.
Many have said that the old laws of God no longer apply to us today because Jesus gave us a new covenant but a new covenant is not a new law. Jesus has made a new agreement with us, His disciples, based on mercy and not conducts.
The Old Testament animal sacrifice was to show God that they were sorry for their sins and that they were willing, as animal lovers, to pay the price to obtain God’s forgiveness.
The animal sacrifice did not give them forgiveness; their willingness to give up something that they wanted and cherished, for God, obtained them forgiveness.
The rest of the law they were expected to keep as a continuance to obey the God that they said, by their actions, that they loved. The law of God is for the good of God, society and mankind; which good is the responsibility of every human being to work at keeping.
Jesus, our master, did not do away with the Old Testament law of God but, rather, He fulfilled that law to God, His father’s expectation. By doing this, His father gave Him the kingship of all of His, God’s, creation so that everyone in God’s kingdom must accept and acknowledge that Jesus is their king and master or they just won’t be there.
That’s God’s requirement and He expects us to know and obey that requirement or just not expect to end up in heaven. He is taking every available avenue to get this truth to every human being on this earth; He has His word published worldwide, He has His servants telling and showing everyone that they come in contact with and He will even send one or more of His angels to make this truth known to someone who wants to know the truth.
Jesus showed us that only love can fulfill God’s law; love for God first, love for Him second, as God’s son, and love for each other. This love keeps us telling others about God, Jesus and God’s mercy even when they don’t want to hear it and get angry with us because we know, and they don’t, that it is really for their good and God’s increase for us to continue and not for our own gain.
No one can say that they love God and/or Jesus and not keep the law that God gave in the beginning. All the law is to show God how much we love Him and is good for our mental and physical health. The only part that is not there now is the animal blood sacrifice which is the part that Jesus took on because we were confusing it as a ritual that we were supposed to obey instead of a personal sacrifice that we had to give up willingly.
Jesus, our master, will not expect anyone, who is not able, to keep the whole law of God even though that is what is required and expected; He will expect us to keep obeying each part that He introduces to us, when He introduces it to us because when He sees that we have progressed far enough to handle more, He will give us more to obey.
As our master, He will expect us to do the same things that He does, which is to please His father by obeying Him; showing God that we love Him and that we love and want to honour our master, Jesus, His son, by our obedience to Him.
Love willingly fulfills all of God’s requirements just to be with Him; the rewards are nice but secondary.
Tuesday August 5, 2008
Stephen Porter - 8:16 PM ADT
12 SOME TIPS
I thought that I would give out a few tips to help people improve their driving ability.
First; get to know your vehicle. You should be able to turn the lights on and off without looking for or at the switch; the same with the windshield wipers, the signal light, the door locks and power windows.
In tractor-trailer school they would teach you to glance at your instrument panel and in both left and right rear-view mirrors every 12 seconds. After you practice it long enough, it becomes a habit that you don’t have to think about but will keep you aware of what is happening behind you and what your vehicle is doing. When you check your instrument panel, look at your speed, if there are any lights on, on your emergency group, your battery charge and your oil pressure. [If you lose your oil pressure, you only have seconds to shut your motor off before it seizes.] Check your tachometer, too; over revving your motor will burn too much fuel for what you are doing. Use a higher gear if the tachometer is too high.
In a car, if you tach over 2000 you are using too much gas to pull away from stop signs and lights. Ease up on the gas pedal a little and keep your tach below 2000; that way your transmission will shift into a higher gear and you will go faster but burn less gas. By keeping your foot down on the gas, your transmission thinks that you are passing someone and will stay in a lower gear, making your motor rev higher before shifting into a higher gear.
Second; after you get to know your vehicle, get to know where your vehicle is in relation to what is around it. How close are you to the center line when you are driving down the road? Most road beds are 24 feet wide; 12 on your side of the center line and 12 on the other drivers side. Most cars are about 6 feet wide. This means that you have 6 feet to move from one side of your lane to the other. Seems like a lot of room but, if your in the center of your lane, you only have 3 feet on either side before you are out of your lane. That’s a little better than the length of your arm.
One way to check to see where your car is when you are driving down the road is to look in your rear view mirror at the road by your tires. How close is the center line? If you think that your tires are only 6 inches from the center line, you are too far to the left. [Remember that you are looking in a mirror and the rear tire is almost 6 feet behind you. What looks like 6 inches is probably closer to a foot or more.]
While cars are 6 feet wide, transports are up to 9 feet wide [I know, I know; they’re only supposed to be 8 feet 6 inches but the mirrors have to stick out beyond the sides to be able to see past the trailer and they are usually about 9 feet.] so transports need a lot more space travelling down the road and in the turns.
In my truck, I habitually travel 6 inches from the side marker line. This keeps me as far away from the rest of the traffic as possible but still gives me good solid road to drive on.
You can check how close you are driving to the edge by using your right side mirror and the side marker line beside your rear tires instead of the driver’s side mirror and the center line.
