Pure Grace

Lynell LaMountain on GodBrief today posted a question from his mailbag. A reader wondered “How to know for sure you are saved”?. The basis of his answer is this text:

“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:11-13).

God through his grace has provided eternal life.
Here’s the trouble I was watching the news the other day and the Catholics are up in arms because many of the Catholic democrats are pro choice and this is against the stance of the church’s teachings. A spokesmen for the church was concerned because there would be many that may to achieve eternal life if they are led down the wrong path by politicians. It’s not just the Catholic church all churches use eternal life as a basis for attending, volunteering and giving. God’s gift of eternal life has no conditions, only the human church has conditions. God’s grace extends to all churched and un-churched. 

Yesterday’s post about Attitudes and Content Creation got me thinking even more about attitudes. Our attitudes affect every aspect of daily experience, it’s not just about work or family, attitudes affect the drive into work, the interaction with the Starbucks barista, etc. I found an article titled Attitude- by Charles Swindoll I’m reposting the article here.

by: Charles Swindoll
The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

And so it is with you… we are in charge of our attitudes.

I guess the next question is how do we keep our attitudes in check to handle what happens to me 90% of the time?

Over the past month or so I’ve been writing about content creation. I’ve been thinking about attitudes and content creation. Are professional content creators capable of creating content with a sour attitude? Content creation happens everywhere, stay at home mom’s create content by the minute, Lawyers work to find an angle for their clients, Pastors spend an enormous amount of time creating new sermons and leadership programs, school teachers create new lesson plans, and the list goes on.

Life happens and it often gets in the way of creating content, traffic tickets on the way to work, a husband that doesn’t help at home, an employee that doesn’t show up, etc. I argue that attitudes affect the quality of the content created. Professionals often have to deal with life and create content no matter what the circumstances, some are able to adjust their attitude so that it doesn’t affect the quality of content creation, others allow life to affect the content creation process. We have very little control over the curve balls that life throws, but we can control the attitude we bring to the plate. Change your attitude, change the quality of the content. 

As I’ve blogged about before, this domain was used by the Las Vegas Mountain View Church in Las Vegas, NV for about 7 years. Over the past 15 months this domain has had no church content, but yet when you goto Google and search for “Las Vegas SDA church” you will find the Mountain View church linked to this domain. So I did some digging using Google’s Google’s Webmaster Tools and found a link of what the Googlebot sees. The Googlebot sees keywords on the page that represent what is actually here now, but the Googlebot sees external links with keywords relating to the Mountain View church. Obviously, Google gives priority to keywords that are located in external links. So keep in mind how other sites will link to you and what they say, it matters!

Yesterday I took a drive up to the mountains, it’s about a 45 minute drive. I really wasn’t in a hurry so I followed a couple that was out for a ride on their Harley. There are always lots of Harley’s on the road to the mountains, so we passed plenty of them along the way. The one thing I noticed was the greeting the riders gave each other. They give a gentle wave with their left hand, sometimes with two fingers other times just a gesture by lifting their fingers off the grip.

This got me thinking about different forms of community. For some it’s a church or a civic organization. For others it’s a Harley ride or a bike ride. For some it’s all of the above. Community matters, I think a community is any group that you draw something from and would miss if you couldn’t interact with them again. I started my own community list and using this definition, my list was much longer then I thought.  I even had to cross off a few that I thought were on the list for various reasons. How long is your list?