Category Archives: Devotional

Christian Life Lesson From An Exercise Bike

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Motivation

  1. The true driving force behind ME exercising is the Doctor said, “Get rid of the excess weight, strengthen your heart, and improve your endurance or your race maybe shorter than you like and it may not be what you want.”
  2. People may start to use exercise machine for many different reasons, just make sure that you plan to finish your goal. So that means you HAVE to set one!!

The Bike

  1. Something I noticed that is almost heart breaking – pedaling faster does not speed up the clock.
  2. Given the variety of machines and the different programs and features they offer one things still remains true – you have to use the machine for it to do any good!
  3. You may pick an exercise program or you can go manual.
  4. My bike gives the option of changing the amount of pressure I have to deal with, but does that help me make my goal?

Others Thoughts

  1. To be effective on the bike you have to breathe well! Bringing in a fresh breath is important, but so is breathing out after the breath.  Get and give out.
  2. Both the use of the manual program and a prescribed program are useful. Change (for you) is a factor here.
  3. When there is a change in the resistance or you purposely change your routine, you will experience trouble. The thoughts of quitting or “this is too much” will show up.  They are real and you will need to work with them and through them.  If you keep going and go to another level, they will go away.
  4. These changes will make you breath differently.
  5. You will see and feel changes in your heart, breathing, and overall health, but are they your goal? Don’t slack off keep going and review your goals!
  6. Given programed workouts, resistance settings, and media influence I have noticed that I tend to start and/or slip back too something that I call a natural pace. This can fit into anything you choose to do. A natural pace is how fast you go unless you focus on changing the intensity of the workout.
  7. Anything amount of exercise you do should benefit you, but will just going at a natural pace allow you to reach your goal? I have noticed that my natural pace has increased (gotten higher) over time.  I credit this to pressing myself to change the workout.
  8. What you put on (clothing) can affect your workout.
  9. Working out with someone is good. But does that person encourage you to do your best or has it become a competition to see you will do the best/most.

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Passover to Pentecost – Joshua’s Passover and His Fifty Days

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Passover to Pentecost – Joshua’s Passover and His Fifty Days        Week 2 Day 5

The Lord your God did to the Jordan just what he had done to the Red Sea. Joshua 4: 23 (NIV)

Joshua is a man of God, one of the faithful spies, the protégé of Moses, and the leader of Israel who would take them into Promised Land.  We will look at the experiences of Joshua and Moses; there are some interesting comparisons and contrast. Refer to Joshua 3 – 8.  Numbers 14 is the reference for the forty years of wandering.

Leaving

Both of these great leaders were leaving a tough circumstance and going into something unknown.

  • Moses was leading a group of slaves who thought they would quickly enter a “Promise Land.” These people thought they would have to fight for their new home; they had two years to prepare.  An enemy was left in the Red Sea never to bother them again; God had fought the battle.  They had tasted the food of Egypt and had memories of it.
  • Joshua was leading a group of shepherds who had enjoyed freedom. This group knew they were going to fight for their new home; they had forty years to prepare. They had inherited a new enemy that would help prepare them for the battles they would fight.  Most had never eaten Egyptian food and had only known manna.

Entering

  • Moses and his people entered their baptism with the Cloud of the Lord blocking the enemy from attacking. All of the men had been circumcised.  They had new clothes and the riches of Egypt in their possession.  The memories of slavery were being left in the Sea.
  • Joshua and his people entered their baptism with the Cloud leading the way, and they were about to attack the enemy. Many of the men had not been circumcised.  Their clothes had not worn out for forty years and the riches of Egypt were now family possessions that had been passed on from their parents.  Stones of memory were picked up from the River for future generations.  Some people were “baptized” twice.

Passover

  • Moses’ first Passover was in the land of slavery and celebrated with food from Egypt. When the “old” food ran out they were given manna.  The yeast of Egypt was removed from them, and blood from the lamb was put on the door.
  • Joshua’s first Passover was in the Promised Land and celebrated with manna. When they got “new food” from the Land the manna stopped.  There was no yeast and many of the males were “bleeding” from circumcision.  The men forty to fifty-nine years old protected them and got the “new food” from the Land.  (The typology of cutting away the old flesh as you enter the Promise will have to do as to why Moses and the community stopped circumcising.  Especially in the light of Exodus 12: 48.)

Riches

  • Moses and the people left rich with gold, silver, clothing, and flocks and herds. They gave offerings to make the Tabernacle.
  • Joshua and the people were to devote the riches of Jericho to God; all of it was God’s. Achan disobeyed and was destroyed (See more on him in What Type of Metal Are You – Part 6).  The plunder of Ai belonged to the people.

Going In Circles

  • Moses and the people wandered in circles and complained for forty years.
  • Joshua and the people went in circles thirteen times around Jericho in silence. (See The Number Thirteen in the Bible.)

Battles

  • Moses and Joshua had to fight the Amalekites. The typology of Moses praising won the victory.
  • Joshua and the people won the victory with a shout of praise.

End of the First Fifty Days

Since I can’t prove either of these I will let the pattern speak for itself.

  • Moses and the People were at Mount Sinai and were given the Law.
  • Joshua and the People were at Mount Ebal and Gerizim reading the blessings and curses from the Law. (See The Tribes of Israel and Shechem.)  It is possible that Joshua 8:30 was on the Day of Pentecost. This reading was ordered by Moses in Deuteronomy 27.  (See Family List.)  Joshua also copied the law of Moses on stone tablets.
  • This mirrors what Moses did after breaking the tablets God had given him.

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Passover to Pentecost – Seven

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Passover to Pentecost – Seven        Week 1 Day 3

Count off seven full weeks.  Exodus 23: 15b (NIV)

Genesis 2: 2-3 is the foundation for the use of seven when it comes to Sabbaths and special holy days as they are stated in Leviticus 23 and 25.  In Genesis, God ceased working, rested, and blessed the seventh day because He had finished creating. Leviticus should clear up any doubt that God is serious about us resting.

The Feast of Unleavened Bread, Weeks, Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles are special holidays and all of them have a “do not work” or “no regular work” component in them.  We will look at this on day six.

The patterns of seven days or years than adding a day or year is seen in the Feast of Weeks/Pentecost, the Sabbath Year, and the Year of Jubilee.  The extra day/year was to give an extended rest to the people and the land.  Remember, part of the reason for the exile of Judah/Israel was to give the land its Sabbath rest.

I once heard someone preach about Matthew 18: 21 and Luke 17: 4 where the disciples were willing to forgive seven times; the person assumed they picked seven because they were being generous.  Now I might wonder if it may not be connected with putting the matter to “rest.”

It is interesting that in Exodus 16 (part of the first fifty days) where it seems that the people ran out of Egyptian food. Now the people would have to “work” again for their food God reminded them of the Sabbath. He reinstated the Sabbath before they got to Sinai and the Law.  I imagine that the Egyptians did not give them a day off because their God had demanded it.  God also gave them a special miracle for forty years with the manna on the sixth and seventh days of the week; so they had no excuse not to rest (it did not go bad overnight as it did on the other days).

Hezekiah was a king who tried to follow God and was given several special signs for the things he did.  One thing he did was celebrate Passover (2 Chronicles 30) and one special sign he received sounds a lot like Jubilee when it came to planting and reaping (2 Kings19: 29).

The Bible and Science – Just a Cloud

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I saw this driving home today (I did pull over to take the pic).  The two vertical columns are raincell 2developing rain cells.  Even though we see this frequently in south Texas, the science behind this common scene never ceases to amaze me.

H2O

Water molecules get heat from the ground by convection and start to rise.  They bind to dust particle to form droplets.  The heat keeps them going up until the air becomes cool (loss of conventional heating).  The clouds do absorb some radiant energy, but the majority of the heat comes from the ground.  Those clouds contain hundreds/thousands/millions of gallons of water and will have more mass than the car I am sitting in; yet they are floating, and I am stuck on the ground.  There is a lot of chemistry/physics here: bond angles within the molecule, positive and negative charges that form ions with other chemicals in the air, and the movement of electrons that cause lightning.

HEAT

The force behind all of this is radiant energy from our sun.  The photons or bundles of energy made an eight to nine minute trip from the sun to get here.  Talk about speeding that is 670,616,629 mph.  This heat affects us at the local, continental, and global level.  These clouds/moistures are being pulled into a weather center thousands of miles from the Texas Gulf Coast.  Heat and rotation of the earth build and move these fronts with the help of jet streams (wind bands) around the earth.

COLOR – Black and White

The white part of the clouds maybe easier to understand, but it is still awesome.  Light is reflecting off of all those drops.  They jumble the different colors of light together so we can see the clouds as white.  The black part of the cloud is where the light is being reflected so that it does not make is to your eye.  Someone at a different angle will not see what you see.  We can say it is thicker or really heavy with water, but it still comes down to the light reaching our eyes.

COLOR – Blue

I tend to take the physics of a blue sky for granted.  The angle of the earth and sun, air particle size, moisture, and pollutant level all contribute to our blue skies.

EYES

The very fact that we see it at all is another miracle.  Our eyes are very complex chemical, muscular, and nerve-based organs that are protected inside our skull.  They are attached to a marvelous creation that not only allows us to see the cloud, but to feel emotions and make hypothesis about what is happening, our brain.  I am stopping and not talking about the camera that allowed me to take this picture.

JUST A CLOUD, I DON’T THINK SO.

∞Father thanks for Your creation, and help us to remember that there are miracles all around us.

The Bible and Science – Bernoulli’s Principle

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We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed – 2 Corinthians 4:8 (NIV)

They will soar on wings like eagles – Isaiah 40: 31(NIV)

A fluid (gas or liquid) that has high pressure with low velocity can change to have low Bernoulli_principlepressure with high velocity; that basically is Bernoulli’s Principle.  This principle is seen in many different ways in our world, from wings and vortex circles to fluids moving through pipes and hoses.

In the workings of this principle I see a connection with our lives as Christians.  When there is high pressure and low movement this resembles the times when we are in test and trials of our faith.  When we are having problems it is seems like everything around us slows down or even stops.  Though the pressure on us is great it just seems that the test and trials take so long.  The bright spot here is that they do come to an end.  When the pressure on us decreases we go faster making up for lost time.  God moves us quickly to our next assignment in life and we have accelerated growth in the Spirit of God.  These “low pressure periods” will “LIFT” as though we are on wings of eagles.

∞There is always pressure either high or low and we are always moving fast or slow; so Father thanks for the leading and that You are always surrounding us.

Pic By Unknown – Popular Science Monthly Volume 83, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20747798