ATTITUDE

A business man on his deathbed called his friend to his side and made one last request of him: “Steve, when I die, I need you to promise me that you will make sure that my body is cremated.” Steve replied, “What would you like for me to do with your ashes after I carry out your request?” He replied, “Just place them in a large envelope and mail them to the Internal Revenue Service and please write in red ink …Now you have everything!”

Paying taxes and experiencing death are the two inevitable events of life according to Mark Twain. How you approach both says a great deal about your attitude and the level of faith where you are living your life.

A quote from author, Charles Swindoll. “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude to me is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, 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 that 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 react a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play upon the one ‘string’ we have, and that is our attitude…I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our attitudes.”

DID YOU KNOW PETER QUIT - part 1

John 21 is the story of Peter being brought back into ministry. When you think about it, this is an amazing fact. Really, you could say that humanly speaking the furtherance of Christianity had been placed into Peter's hand. But now he has abandoned the call. 

Peter was unquestionably the leader of the disciples. Every time the disciples are mentioned in the Bible he is always mentioned first. He is the outspoken one. he is the one who answers question when no one has asked any. He dives in when the water is shallow. And he makes promises that he doesn't keep.

This is why he is fishing for fish and not men in John 21. He has quit. The reason seems obvious - he promised Jesus he would go all the way, even death, and soon after denied that he even knew Jesus. He gave up. He quit and returned to fishing.

Peter makes the announcement in verse 3 when he simply says he is going fishing. Here is the part we miss with the english translation - Peter spoke in the aorist tense meaning this was a continual habitual action. He wasn't saying he was going fishing for a while, but that he was returning back to fishing on an ongoing basis. Peter was quitting his calling as a disciple. 

That's the first tragedy. The second tragedy follows in verse 3 when six other disciples said they were going with him. That's usually how it happens when someone falls and goes astray - others fall too. We now have 7 disciples who have left their calling as disciples and Peter was leader of the pack.

 Crossing of the Red Sea

There's plenty of debate over exactly where God parted the waters for the crossing of the Red Sea (and even if it was a different body of water altogether), but based on best guesses of archaeologists, it's a pretty cool visualization:


--The crossing path was probably ten miles long and at least a half-mile wide to accomodate over 2 million people


--They would have walked downhill for a mile or two, then flat across the bottom for a few miles, then uphill to the other side


--At the bottom, the walls of water could have been over 5,000 feet high on either side of them! For comparison, the tallest building in the U.S. is Chicago's Sears Tower at 1,700 feet (including steeple/antenna). It would takethree of them to equal the height of the water that was parted for the Israelites as they walked across the sea floor.