My Heart Is On Fire By Doug Apple - A Short Christian Devotional To Open The Scriptures And Make Your Heart Burn Within You!

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) I was training an intern in the art of digital audio editing. I said, “You’re going to be doing a lot of zooming in and zooming out.” “Why?” she said. “Because you have to zoom in close to make tight cuts,” I said. “But then you have to zoom back out to listen to the edit and make sure it’s right.” The same is true in graphic design, and video editing: a lot of zooming in and zooming out. I did the same as a photographer with my trusty old 35mm camera. I’d zoom all the way in on a subject to set the focus, then zoom back out to see the whole picture. Imagine Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. He had to get up close to paint, but he had to move away to see the whole thing…which is not easy when you’re painting a ceiling that is over 60 feet high! Speaking of 60 feet high, that’s how big the presidential heads are that are carved into Mt. Rushmore. For him to

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Honor your father and mother…but what if your parents aren’t worthy of honor? It’s pretty clear in the Bible that we are to honor our parents. It’s even in the Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:12 says, “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” But here is a question I have heard many times. “How can I honor my parents when they are such dishonorable people?” Here’s my answer. You don’t honor them because they are honorable. You honor them because YOU are honorable. We are called to be people of honor. I like First Thessalonians 4:4 which says possess your vessel in honor. Here’s a fun example, and this goes back to 1922, to a book by Emily Post about etiquette in society. She wrote, “If a lady drops her glove, a gentleman should pick it up... offer the glove to her and say: 'I think you dropped this!

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Psalm 145:18 says, “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him…” Well…I’M calling upon Him! Are you? I am calling upon the Lord every day and this is great news! When I call upon Him, He is near to me. I want the Lord to ALWAYS be near to me because I need Him. I need His presence, His love, His light, His direction, His guidance. I want Him to lead me, to teach me, to mentor me. I want to hear Him say, “This is the way, walk ye in it.” I want Him near to me for more reasons than I can count, so with this in mind, I call upon Him, almost continuously. Looking back at Psalm 145:18, I didn’t give you the whole verse. Here is what the whole things says, “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth.” So that’s an extra layer, “in truth.” What does it mean to call upon the Lord “in truth”? Well…just be honest. Come to H

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) The Character of Caleb. It’s easy to study the life of Caleb because there’s not that much about him in the Bible, but what IS there is very inspiring. He shows up in Numbers chapter 13 when God tells Moses to send spies into the land of Canaan. Moses has to pick one man from each tribe, and that man must be a leader. Different Bible translations use different words, like “chief” and “ruler” and “prince.” Whichever word you choose, the evidence is clear: Caleb was a chief man of the tribe of Judah. So, the 12 spies went into the land of Canaan and brought back a report to Moses. They all agreed that it was a bountiful land, but 10 of the 12 spies said they should NOT go into the land because it was well-defended, even by giants. This negative report spread fear throughout the people of Israel. But not Caleb. Numbers 13:30 says that Caleb “quieted the people before Mo

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) I heard an acrostic for the word “poor” and I can’t get it out of my mind. It said the letters P-O-O-R stand for Passing Over Opportunities Repeatedly. In other words, if you want to be poor, just keep passing up on the opportunities that come your way. Sometimes people are looking for provisions to be handed to them, but what is handed to them instead is an opportunity, and they miss it. I see people come to this fork in the road. A good opportunity comes their way, and they have a decision to make: take the opportunity or not? Many times, I see people pass over the opportunity, and then later they wonder why they are still stuck, or they are lacking what they need. Sometimes I see Christians crying out to God to provide for them, and then they wonder why He doesn’t…but what they didn’t see was that He gave them an opportunity. They were blind to the opportunity becau

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) “For Thine is the kingdom.” That’s what it says near the end of The Lord’s Prayer. I pray through The Lord’s Prayer most days and when I come to this part I expound on it. “Lord, the kingdom is Yours. Everything belongs to You, and I belong to You in your kingdom.” A kingdom implies a king, and Revelation 19:16 says that Jesus is the King of Kings. Psalm 47 says God is the King of all the earth. He reigns over the nations and sits on His holy throne. Isaiah said, “My eyes have seen the King, The LORD of hosts.” And what was Isaiah’s response when He saw the King? It was great humility and repentance. He said, “Woe is me, for I am undone!” Isaiah also responded with a great desire to serve the King. In Isaiah 6:8 he said, “Here am I! Send me.” This is a proper response to a king, an offer to serve. So that’s what I do when I come to “for Thine is the kingdom.” I

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) I finally fixed our shower doors. I don’t know why I waited so long. At first they just started closing a little roughly. It finally got to where one of the doors wouldn’t move at all without making the loudest screech and feeling like it was going to fall off and shatter. But hey, you really only need one of the doors to work, so I still didn’t do anything. Finally one morning I woke up and thought, “I really need to fix those shower doors.” I bought new wheels that the doors hang on for basically pennies and within just a few minutes both doors were working like they were brand new. It was so satisfying to feel how smooth they operated. Why had I waited so long? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think this is our calling in the world, to make things run more smoothly. I love this imagery in the book of Luke, chapter 3 verse 5, “…the crooked places shall be m

You can read the whole text here: https://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Are you keeping your eyes on aging family members and calculating what you will get when they die? Are you ready to fight with other people to get what you think should be yours? Why are you doing that? So many family divisions have happened over stuff. People value the money and the things more than they value the family relationships. It’s greed. It’s a lack of faith. It’s storing up treasures in the wrong place. It’s putting stuff before people, which is ultimately putting stuff before God. In Matthew 19 we read about the rich young ruler. Jesus said to him, “Follow Me,” but the rich young ruler chose not to follow Jesus. Why? Matthew 19:22 says it was because “he had great possessions.” It makes me wonder, “How great were they, really? Great enough to literally turn your back on Jesus so you could focus on your stuff?” You know, it wasn’t long until that man

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) “I’ve spent a good portion of my life disappointed with God.” That’s what he said, and it got me thinking. Am I disappointed with God? Have I been disappointed with God? Was I ever disappointed with God? I can’t think of a time when I was ever disappointed with God. Oh sure, there have been a thousand times when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to go, but that didn’t make me disappointed with God. Why not? I guess it is because I always just figured that if things didn’t go the way I expected, it’s because I didn’t really know how things are supposed to work. For example, there was the time as a baby Christian when I concluded that I didn’t have to lock up my bicycle anymore because God was going to protect me from theft. Then I came home one day and found that my bicycle was gone! Of course, I was disappoin

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) How can you have more freedom by living with more restrictions? It sounds counterintuitive. It sounds like nonsense. We want to be free to do whatever we want, whenever we want. The more limits, the less freedom, right? It’s a one-to-one ratio. Yet we find a different concept in the Bible. Psalm 119:45 says, “I will walk at liberty; for I seek Thy precepts.” The precepts are God’s commands, His laws, His principles, His boundaries, His guidelines. It’s God’s blueprint for how to live. It says we can have liberty and freedom as we seek to live within His boundaries. But there is something inside of us that doesn’t want boundaries. Tell a man not to cross a line and some part of him is itching to do it. And God lets us cross the line. We have the free will to crisscross His boundaries all day long. But there are consequences for crossing

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Yay, it’s time to go to the festival! Thankfully you have an umbrella stroller for the baby. Just unfold it, strap him in, and off you go. Watch out for rocks, though. And uneven sidewalks. And sticks. In fact, just watch out for everything, because the wheels on an umbrella stroller are so janky that even a pebble can potentially block the wheel. On the other end of the stroller spectrum is the jogging stroller. You can actually run with a jogging stroller and its big wheels will easily roll over all the little obstacles, giving baby a smooth ride. This is a good illustration for life, because as you know, life is full of little obstacles that can stop you in your tracks. But listen: they don’t have to. You can approach life as a little janky hard plastic stroller wheel, or you can approach life as a big shock absorbing jogging stroller wheel. When little hard wheel

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) “The bathtub has arrived!” A huge man waddles in carrying a heavy bathtub. It’s a new house. The walls are up. The smell of sawdust is in the air. And it’s time to install the bathtub. The man sets it down in the only place it can go, touching the walls on three sides. Then he looks down the drain and says, “Uh oh.” Uh oh. That is something you never want to hear. You don’t want to hear it from your dentist. You don’t want to hear it from your potty-training toddler. And you sure don’t want to hear it from your plumber. What happened was, he set the bathtub down, looked down the drain hole, and what did he see? He should have seen nothing but a black hole, but instead he saw the floor. No hole. No drain. What he didn’t know was that a few weeks earlier, when his assistant was installing the tub drain pipe, he didn’

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Jesus said something that sounds almost cruel. He said, “Whoever has, to him more will be given, and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.” That sounds like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. So let’s look at this verse more closely. It’s Luke 8:18 and it says, “Therefore take heed how you hear. For whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.” This can be a hard verse to understand, but the key is in the beginning when Jesus said, “Take heed how you hear.” The words “take heed” are a warning. It’s saying watch out, be careful how you listen. Are you being careful how you listen? You can’t just open up your brain and dump everything in! You have to listen with an ear toward wisdom.

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) I was talking to an evolutionist, the kind that believes that everything evolved from nothing after a big bang. I said, “Just look at food, for example. You think it just evolved on this big rock hurtling through space after a big bang?” “Well, it took billions of years,” he said. “Always with the billions of years,” I said. “Incredible complexity rising from simplicity after starting with nothing, just given enough zeros on the calendar.” I said, “Look at this banana.” “I’m looking,” he said. “Look at this astounding bright yellow color. It’s magnificent! It’s beautiful to the eyes! I’m so glad it evolved into something beautiful.” But wait. There’s more! When you pick up a banana, it’s smooth to the touch. When you peel a banana, it’s ready to eat! No

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) A highway is a road built up to make travel easier. That’s what the footnote in my Bible says under Isaiah chapter 35 verse 8. That verse is talking about a highway, so the footnote tells us what a highway is. It’s a road built up to make travel easier. You aren’t going through the mud on a highway. You aren’t going through the briars and the thorns. My grandma called it “the thicket.” A highway makes travel easy. It’s a piece of cake traveling on a highway, so smooth and level and wide. It’s a pleasure. It’s a joy! On the other hand, traveling OFF the highway is NOT smooth. It IS muddy. There ARE thorns and thickets. You have to slow down and stop and keep getting your bearings. “Where am I now?” You ask that question a lot when you get off the “hard road” as Grandma called it. “Where am I?&rdquo

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Why is Home Depot on lockdown? I just wanted to run in, buy a new weed eater, and go home. But that’s not how it works these days. Why? Because Home Depot is on lockdown. What I mean is, some of their stuff is now literally chained up behind bars right there on the shelf. Am I in one of those big cities with looters and riots? Hardly. I’m in sleepy Tallahassee, Florida. And yet here I am, looking at weed eaters, not Rolex watches, chained behind bars. I will have to wander around the store and find an employee to unchain it for me. Now why would they do this? Because of theft, of course. They didn’t want to do it. It’s a pain for them, and a pain for their customers. They wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t have to. That means the theft was getting so bad that they had to invest in anti-theft measures, and that makes me sad. Now let’s t

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) A man makes his plans, but the Lord directs his steps. That’s what it says in Proverbs 16:9. We see a great example of this when looking at Mary Magdalene at the tomb of Jesus. Jesus was crucified. He declared, “It is finished.” And Mary Magdalene was part of the crowd who watched. Joseph of Arimathea took His body down, and he and Nicodemus prepared it for burial and placed it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. And they rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb. Then Matthew 27 verse 61 adds this interesting part of the story: “And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the tomb.” The crowds were gone. The sun was setting. The great Jesus was in the tomb. And there was Mary Magdalene, sitting opposite the tomb, watching. Observing. Thinking. Feeling. Fast forward and we find Mary Magdalene and other women

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Colossians 4:6 says, “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt…” Speaking with grace might seem obvious, but what does it mean “seasoned with salt”? Here’s one way to look at it. Seasoned with salt makes it delicious and people want more of it! How do most people feel about potato chips without salt? Yuck…that’s how they feel about it. How about peanuts without salt? Or meat without salt? Or maybe worst of all…popcorn without salt! On and on it goes. But put a little salt on those chips and look out…you can’t stop with just one. You want more and more. Why? It’s the salt, man! So the question is…is our speech like that? Colossians 4:6 says, “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt…” Ephesians 4:29 says that our speech should “impart grace.” Does our speech impart grace? Does the other person feel the grace when we speak? Are we imparting g

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) Have you ever heard of mesothelioma? Most likely you’ve heard of it from the class action lawsuit ads on television. The ads are run by lawyers who want you to sign up for the class action lawsuit, IF you are one of the people negatively affected by the defendant. If you answer the ad, sign onto the lawsuit and join the “class,” then you are in line for any benefits that come from winning the lawsuit. But what happens if you don’t answer the ads? You don’t sign onto the lawsuit. You never join the class. No one even knows that you, too, were a victim of the defendant. What will you get if they win the lawsuit? Nothing. You didn’t join the class, so you don’t get the benefits of being in the class. Sometimes I think of salvation this way. It’s like Jesus has already won the case and is paying out benefits to anyone who joins the clas

Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ Read the blog here: http://dougapple.blogspot.com/ +++++++ I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32) What is sin? The Greek word for sin in the Bible is ἁμαρτία which is pronounced ham-ar-TEE-ah. It’s literal meaning is “to miss the mark.” Sometimes we whitewash sin. We give it different names, like adultery becomes “having an affair.” We try to minimize the impact by acting like it’s not so bad, if it’s even bad at all. So let’s look at it from a different angle. Let’s look at it through Jesus’ construction analogy at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 7 Jesus said, “Whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house…” That’s a construction analogy. He “builds his house.” When you build a house or some other large structure,