Jonathon shared Anne Cetas’ “If Only We Could…” read it here.
Name a liquid in your kitchen that you hope no one ever accidentally drinks: 1- dish soap or bleach (46 votes) 2- vinegar (30) 3- cooking oil (16) 4- soy sauce (4) 5- bacon grease (2)
Congratulations to Nathan from Mount Vernon, who guessed correctly and wins the WNZR drawstring backpack and a couple of Our Daily Bread devotionals.
As we prepare for Lifeline 2022, Joe and I shared our thoughts about this year’s theme: “You Keep Hope Alive”.
Romans 15:13 (ESV) “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
The world is a fearful and unsatisfying place without the hope of eternal life with Jesus. Apart from the expectation that comes from the hope of heaven, our world can seem to be lacking in peace, celebration, or joy.
There is life in hope. There is joy in hope. There is purpose in hope.
Hope is to be at the foundation of all our decisions, emotions, and pursuits. Hope fills us with joy in the middle of trials and perseverance in the midst of failure. Hope guides us to abundant life.
Our heavenly Father longs to make us a people of hope. He longs for his followers to live a lifestyle that declares to the world, “This life is not all there is.” He longs to fill us with a heavenly perspective that we might throw off pursuits of worldly pleasure and live for eternity with him.
Sometimes we can lose hope. We can get distracted, discouraged and unfocused. Why does this happen?
We fail to embrace to fruits of the spirit – the very things we ask for that we fail to do ourselves.
Do we love well? Or get bogged down in hate?
Do we choose joy? Or choose grumpy?
Do we promote peace? Or spread and promote conflict?
Do we demonstrate patience? Or fly off the handle?
Do we offer kindness? Or are we offering indifference?
Do we seek goodness? Or seeking the negative and critical?
Do we ground ourselves in faith? Or trust our own understanding?
Do we embrace gentleness? Or are we rough around the edges?
Do we embody self-control? Or is it anything goes?
What about things like forgiveness? Think about this: if God forgave you like you forgive others, where would you be?
Is it more about Him? Or more about us?
Name something you pick.
Flowers – 28
Fruit – 25
Nose – 23
Dog/Pet – 6
Teeth – 6
Congratulations to Dallas and Charla of Utica for correctly guessing this week’s Family Feud for a Voice of the Cougars drawstring backpack!
Today’s Monday Motivation starts with a message about our Lifeline theme, “You Keep Hope Alive.”
Romans 15:13 (ESV) “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
What is hope? As a noun, hope is: “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen…“a feeling of trust”…“grounds for believing that something good may happen.”
As a verb, hope or hoping is “wanting something to happen or to be the case…intend to do something; cling to a possibility.”
Romans 15 concludes Paul’s teaching that those strong in faith ought to sacrifice their own desires to live in harmony with other believers. Paul shows that God always planned to welcome the Gentile nations, and his mission is to introduce Gentiles to the message of salvation by faith in Christ. He’s letting all know that the hope God represents is not limited to a certain few; since salvation is for all, then hope is for all.
Why is God the God of hope? Because of the evidence of Christ’s death and resurrection. His triumph over sin and death. (“You keep hope alive, Jesus, you are alive!) His gift of the Holy Spirit, our advocate, who is with us and allows to always have hope in our future in eternity, with Him. Christ with us and in us IS, as Paul writes in Colossians 1:27, the “hope of glory.”
This is not just a New Testament revelation. Jeremiah 29:11 told us that God’s plans for us are to prosper us and not harm us, to give us a hope and a future.
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Jonathon shared Patricia Raybon’s “Hearing Us from Heaven,” reminding us that our Heavenly Father hears our prayers. Read it by clicking here.
Name something you might rent on a sunny day: 1- Boat (34 votes) 2- Car/Convertible (19) 3- Umbrella (14) 4- Bike (12) 5- Movie (9) 6- Jet Ski (3)
Congratulations to Shanna from Howard, who guessed correctly and wins the WNZR drawstring backpack!
Today we did the first of two ‘Beat the Box Office’ contests with the Ohio State Fair, to win tickets to see Zach Williams and We The Kingdom on August 1st.
Today’s question: Zach Williams was born in Pensacola, Florida, but calls what city and state home? Answer? Jonesboro, Arkansas!
Congratulations to Rodney from Gambier, who got the answer right and wins the pair of tickets!
From Bob Weaver’s “A Word from the Weaver”
SYNERGY may not be a word you use every day, but hopefully you put it into practice every day. It is the idea that two people working together on a project, can accomplish more than they could working on the same project, separately. Working together can be difficult, you may have to surrender your individual will for the good of the team. In a society deluged with advocates touting messages of individualism, the old Biblical theme of unity still holds great value.
Ecclesiastes 4:9 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor”. Or, if you go fur ther back to the creation story, God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), so He created someone to help the man so the two of them could work together.
At a state fair in Southern California there was an event where horses were being hitched to sleds piled high with weights, to see which horse could pull the most weight. Two horses individually pulled 9,000 pounds. They then hitched these two strongest horses together on the same wagon. The horses didn’t pull 18,000 pounds – a doubling of their individual efforts, instead; together, in true teamwork, they pulled 35,000 pounds.
We could use some of that kind of team work in Congress, in our churches, and in our families!
When asked what he considered the most valuable skill in employees, John D. Rockefeller once replied, “The ability to get along with people!” One of my professors in Bible College used to say that the devil works in subtraction and division while God works in addition and multiplication. If you look around our world today, I think you will agree that we more division or subtraction, but addition and multi plication would be nice. Be willing to lend a hand to someone else, or accept their offer of help with your project; both of you will be glad you did.
Oh, Lord, make me a team player, instead of a lone ranger.
Jonathon shared “Success and Sacrifice” from Our Daily Bread and Jennifer Benson Schuldt
Today on the show I shared two devotionals from Our Daily Bread. We also had our weekly family feud trivia where one lucky person has a chance to win a prize for answering the top two answers on the board.
Here are the two devotionals that I picked from Our Daily Bread:
One was titled, “Loving God”. You can find the link here.
The other was titled, “Never Say Can’t”. You can find the link here.
Name a reason you might not leave your house all day?
1- Bad Weather (40)
2- Sick (28)
3- Watch TV (7)
4- Day Off (4)
5- Wait Repairman (3)
6- Too Tired (3)
Congratulations to Karen of Mount Vernon for correctly guessing the top two answers! She wins a 50 day devotional book by Bob Weaver titled “A word from the Weaver”.
Spring Break is underway for us here at MVNU, but we still want to give you some motivation for those preparing for another typical week.
I shared two special devotionals tied to togetherness.
First, Xochitl Dixon’s devotional “We Are One” shared an inspirational story from a small farming community.
Despite the negativity that can come with natural disasters, Winn Collier’s “The Joy of Good News” shared how Alaskans came together to spread joy through the chaos.
Dylan shared today’s Our Daily Bread devotional, ‘The Power of Love.’ Click here to read it.
Our second devotional comes from what Joe shared at the 2020 Valentine’s Banquet:
Late last year (2019), I had the chance to read a fantastic book called Hidden Christmas by Pastor Timothy Keller.
Chapter 2 of this book dives in to the importance of the genealogy of Jesus. Keller spends some time focused on the fact that Matthew doesn’t start his Gospel with “once upon a time.” As he writes, “that is the way of fairy tales or legendary fantasy stories.” He starts with what? The genealogy of Jesus. Keller writes that this is critical because Matthew is grounding who Jesus Christ is…and what he does…in history, with a genealogy. In Matthew 1 we learn that Jesus is not a metaphor. He is real. This all happened.
Just before Peter Jackson released the first of his Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies in 2001, there were a number of articles by literary critics and other cultural elites lamenting the popular appeal of fantasies, myths, and legends. They were saying that so many of them promoted regressive views. In other words, modern people are supposed to be more realistic. We should realize that things are not black and white but grey, and happy endings are cruel because life is not like that.
One critic in the New Yorker magazine even wrote that to give into stories like Lord of the Rings “betrays a reluctance to face the finer shades of life that verges on the cowardly.”
So why does Hollywood keep recycling fairy tales, fantasy and super heroes? You might answer, well, it’s because people hunger for them. Okay then, again, why? I mean, the great fairy tales and legendary stories like “Beauty and the Beast,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Excalibur”…none of those things really happened and they’re not factually true.
But…they seem to fulfill a set of longings in the human heart.
I would also add that some of the more realistic fiction and love stories that we watch in these days also reflect those longings in the human heart. Keller writes that deep in the human heart there are these realistic desires to experience the supernatural, go on great adventures, to escape death, to know love that we can never lose, to not age but live long enough to realize our creative dreams and maybe even to fly, and communicate with non-human beings and obviously, triumph over evil.
If the stories are well told, we find them incredibly moving and satisfying. Why is that? Keller argues it’s because even though we know that factually those stories didn’t happen, our hearts long for those things; and quite honestly, they scratch that itch.
Beauty and the Beast tells us that there’s a love that can break out of the beastliness that we have created for ourselves. Sleeping Beauty tells us we are in a kind of sleeping enchantment in there is a noble prince who can come and destroy it. We hear the stories, we see the stories, and they stir us because deep inside our hearts we believe or want to believe, that these things are true. Death should not be the end. We should not lose our loved ones. Evil should not triumph. Our heart senses that even though the stories themselves aren’t true, the underlying reality behind the stories somehow ought to be. But our minds say no and the critics say no…when you give yourself to fairy tales and you really believe in moral absolutes and the supernatural and the idea that we could live forever that’s not reality, and it’s cowardly to give yourself to it.
But then we come to the Christmas story. And at first glance The book of Matthew looks like the other legends. A story about someone from a different world who breaks into our world and has miraculous powers and can calm the storm and heal people and raise people from the dead. Then his enemies turn on him and he is put to death and it seems like all hope is over but finally he rises from the dead and saves everyone! We read that and we think: another great fairy tale. It looks like the Christmas story is just one more of those stories…
But Matthew does not start his Gospel with “Once upon a Time.” He says this is no fairytale. Jesus Christ is NOT just one more lovely story pointing to these underlying realities. Jesus IS the underlying reality to which all the stories point. Jesus has come from that eternal supernatural world that we sense is there; that our hearts know is there; even though our heads may say no. Keller writes, “at Christmas, Jesus punched a hole between the ideal and the real; the eternal and the temporal; and came into our world. That means if Matthew was right, there IS an evil sorcerer in this world and we ARE under enchantment; there IS a noble prince who has broken the enchantment, and there IS love from which we can never be parted and we WILL indeed fly someday and will defeat death; and in this world even as Psalms says, “the trees will dance and sing.”
1st John 4: 9-11puts it this way: “this is how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
So Keller writes, even though we know that these fairy tales aren’t factually true, the truth of Jesus means all the stories we love are not escapism at all. In a sense, they will come true in Him.
The gospel means all the best stories will be proved in the ultimate sense, true!
During an indoor game of hide and seek, name a specific place where kids hide: 1- closet (63 votes) 2- under a bed (17) 3- behind a couch (9) 4- under a table (4)
Congratulations to Ron from Mount Vernon, who guessed correctly and wins a WNZR drawstring backpack!
WNZR’s Spread the Love contest is underway – listen for chances to win some great Valentine’s prizes all week.
Our winners today included Kim from Mount Vernon, who won a $10 gift certificate to Gospel Christian Life Shop.
Her question: Valentine’s Day in the United States is symbolized with hearts, cupids and flowers, but in Germany, the most popular symbol is what barnyard animal? The answer? A pig.
Our second winner was Jenn from Danville, who won a $10 gift certificate to Happy Bean Coffee Shop.
Question: Which state produces the most red roses? The answer? California.
Today for Monday Motivation, we returned to Our Daily Bread to talk about what there is to look forward to after celebrating a holiday such as Christmas. Read the full devotional from Adam R. Holz HERE.
We also covered New Years as 2022 is quickly approaching! Tim Gustafson shares a story from Ezekiel in his devotional entitled “Back to the Basics”.
Name a book that could knock you out if someone hit you over the head with it.
Dictionary 39
Encyclopedia 25
Bible 14
Phone Book 14
War & Peace 6
Congratulations to Aranae of Fredericktown for correctly guessing our top two answers! She wins the $5 gift card to Everlasting Cup for today. Make sure to tune in tomorrow for your next chance to win!
Driving Notes 