Read more: The Renewing of the Mind

• Created on 27 July 2011.

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You only get to be young once, so get everything you can out of it! In baseball, you get three strikes before you are “out.” So, if you are up to bat and you miss the first swing, it is no big deal—you still have two strikes left. However if you “zoom out” from your daily routine and view the scope of your life objectively, you will realize that you do only get to be young once. You only get one try at it. Once you reach your twenties you can’t say, “Wait a minute, let me have a second try.” Once it’s gone, it is gone forever. This sobering reality behooves us to gird up our minds and apply ourselves to maximizing our precious teen years.

Thomas von Imbroich (1533-1558), also known as Thomas the Printer, was a young minister in the Anabaptist movement. He had joined the movement only about four years before he wrote this letter from prison, to his wife.

My desire for you is grace and peace from God the Father and a burning love for all virtue (Co. 1, 1 Pe. 4, 2 Pe. 1), through Jesus Christ our Savior, and that the Holy Spirit strengthen your heart. Oh that you may, unspotted and with a pure mind, persist in doing God’s will, until the day of the appearing of the Great God! In that day His furious wrath shall go forth against all the ungodly ways and the unrighteous deeds which men have worked. But to those who with patience have labored in good works, He shall give blessing, unto eternal life. To Him be praise and honor, now and into eternity. Amen! Ps. 11, Is. 13, 2 Th. 1, Ro. 2

Faith untried may be true faith, but it is sure to be little faith, and it is likely to remain dwarfish so long as it is without trials. Faith never prospers so well as when all things are against her: tempests are her trainers, and lightnings are her illuminators. When a calm reigns on the sea, spread the sails as you will, the ship moves not to its harbor; for on a slumbering ocean the keel sleeps too. Let the winds rush howling forth, and let the waters lift up themselves, then, though the vessel may rock, and her deck may be washed with waves, and her mast may creak under the pressure of the full and swelling sail, it is then that she makes headway towards her desired haven.

The ungodly are saying that we drink something out of a bottle, and the devil himself has no idea what is in that bottle. Whoever drinks from the bottle isn’t happy [with the status quo] any more, acts differently, and has no concern for money or life. He must do whatever he is told to do.

Well, you people without God, I want to explain it to you. I will let you call it a “bottle.” And it is true; the devil doesn’t know what is in that “bottle”! And it is true that whoever drinks from that “bottle” becomes a different person!

The drink in this bottle is simply the smashed, beaten, ground up, and troubled heart, crushed by the mortar called “the cross.” God’s grapes have to be pressed in the winepress called tribulation, otherwise there would be no wine.

Based on a message preached by David Keeling on 10-3-10

I grew up in a conservative Christian home where we had no TV. My parents were very careful that the world’s influences would not get a foothold in our hearts and lives. Occasionally we might go over to a friend’s house and watch some simple child’s movie, but very, very seldom. Our minds were not thinking about movies and TV, and we never thought that they could become a major pitfall.

Ladybrand, South Africa

It is appalling to me the amount of empty, silly foolishness that characterizes the western world, and nowhere is this drivel so prevalent than on blogs, websites, and other means of communications. Our culture, as a whole, worships at the altar of entertainment and sacrifices to the god of humor. But what is even more shocking is the nonsense that is spewed out by those who name the Name of Christ.