Daily Devotional #1,678

I remember that the wonderful pastor and speaker, Stuart Brisco, had a description of the requirements for a pastor. He said that a pastor must have the mind of a scholar, the heart of a child...and the hide of a rhinoceros! I can relate to all those!! A lot of us have situations where we cannot be thin-skinned and creating that "hide" helps to keeping us from giving up under criticism and pain. The problem with that though is that we often don't just create a hard outer protective skin...but our heart sometimes gets hard along with that. The balance for all of us is to not take everything said or done to us so personally that we just quit in life. But we have to make sure that the heart stays soft and even childlike in its innocence and willingness to trust and to love and to forgive. When the heart hardens, then the voice of God's Spirit is increasingly hard to hear, much less respond to. And when the heart begins to stray away from the love and kindness of this Jesus we follow, some bad stuff happens. Jesus said "A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. So, the key is being tough enough on the outside to keep on loving, forgiving and following in the steps of this Jesus...without allowing our hearts to grow bitter or angry or resentful. And the key to doing that is to just spend time with this Jesus who is the keeper of the hearts of those who love him. Keep praying, keep reading that Bible and keep worshiping with the family of God. Do that and you too will be able to keep that heart of a child...even with a hide of a rhinoceros! Here's our Bible verse for today..... 
Mat 12:35 NLT A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.
Remember I'm praying for you! 
With love, PJ