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ACCEPTANCE

A freelance reporter for the New York Times was interviewing Marilyn Monroe years ago. He knew about her past of going to one foster home after another. The reporter asked Marilyn, "Did you ever feel loved by and of the families with whom you live?’She got teary-eyed as she told about the only time she felt loved. She said, "Once, when I was seven years old, the woman I was living with was putting on make-up and I was watching her. She was in a happy mood and she reached over and patted my cheeks . . . for that brief moment I felt loved."

ACCOUNTABILITY

Paid in Full - Romans 14:1-12
This activity will help members of your congregation examine their priorities and discover if their daily activities are bringing honor to God. During your message, tie in the concept of using an appointment calendar.

Say: A planning calendar usually becomes a record of events. Each record is unique and personal. It is usually sketchy and consists of a word or phrase written down as a reminder. To look at someone else’s calendar is to get anincomplete picture of what actually happened. The same is true when we examine someone else’s life. We get only an incomplete picture. We don’t understand the motives or the circumstances of a given event. The only person whose calendar we can fully interpret is our own.

Ask participants to think about all the events recorded on their calendars for the past week and reflect on how those events connect to their lives as Christians. Did the events honor God? Did they provide an opportunity to love in Jesus’ name? Were there events they would rather not bring before God? How do they think God would evaluate their calendars?

As part of this activity, offer opportunities for both confessing sins to God and dedicating the weeks ahead to serving God more fully.

ADAM & EVE

Russian School Teacher: "Who were the first human beings?"
Christian Student: "Adam and Eve."
Teacher: "And what just what nationality was this Adam and Eve?"
Student: "Russian, of course."
Teacher: "And how do you know that they were Russian?"
Student: "Easy, they had no roof over their heads, no clothes to wear, and only one apple between them, yet they still called it paradise!" -- Reader's Digest

ADVERSITY

Several years ago Charles Stanley said that he was struggling with some opposition. During that time an elderly woman from his church invited him to her retirement community for lunch. Although he was very busy and under serious pressure, he went and ate lunch with her. Afterwards she took him up to her apartment and showed him a picture hanging on her living room wall. It was a picture of Daniel in the lion’s den. She said, "Young man, look at this picture and tell me what you see." Dr. Stanley looked at the picture and saw that all the lions had their mouths closed, some were lying down. Daniel was standing with his hands behind him. Stanley told the lady everything he knew to tell her. Then she asked, "Anything else?" He knew there must be, but he couldn’t see anything else. She put her arm on his shoulder and said, "What I want you to see is that Daniel doesn’t have his eyes on the lions, he has his eyes on the Lord."

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of these expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers, and applause from onlookers. A minute later they were both eaten by a killer whale.

A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist toward the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a plank of wood left by the back door, breaking his arm in two places. Until that moment he had been happily listening to his Walkman.

There are some flowers that will not yield their perfume till they are bruised.

ATHEISM

"Atheism is rationally ridiculous. The most anyone can claim about the nonexistence of God is agnosticism -- to say you don't know. But as soon as one takes the atheist's viewpoint, he opens himself and his philosophical system to a dilemma. No finite being can say there is no God, for outside the limits of his knowledge, God may exist. To be an atheist, one must claim to know everything. Of course this is one of the attributes that only God pocesses. Therefore, the only way one can prove God doesn't exist is to be God which is rationally ridiculous." -- Bill Gordon