The One who sent me is with me. I always do what is pleasing to him. So, he has not left me alone. John 8:29 (Life Application Study Bible)
Jesus Tells Us…Try to please me first, before yourself, before others. As you go through your day, you will have lots of choices to make. Most of them will be small, everyday choices that you have to make quickly, what to wear, who to sit with at lunch, what to do your book report on. Many people make their choices out of habit, they choose to do the same things that please themselves or others. This is not what I want from you. Choose to please Me, in your big decisions, and in the small ones too. When your greatest desire is to please Me, making the right choices becomes easier. A quick one-word prayer, “Jesus”, is all it takes to call upon My help and guidance.
Jesus Concludes… Seek to please Me in everything you do.
John 8:29; Hebrews 11:5-6; Psalm 37:4
Footnotes John 8:24 People will die in their sins if they reject Jesus, because they are rejecting the only way to be rescued from sin. Sadly, many are so taken up with the values of this world, that they are blind to the priceless gift Jesus offers. Where are you looking? Don’t focus on this world’s values, and miss what is most valuable-eternal life with God.
Passage Hebrews 11:5-6 5By faith, Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: “He could not be found, because God had taken him away”. For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God. 6And without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Footnotes Hebrews 11:6 Sometimes we wonder about the fate of those who haven’t heard of Christ and have never even had a Bible to read. God assures us that all who honestly seek him, who act in faith on the knowledge of God that they possess, will be rewarded. When you tell others the gospel, encourage them to be honest and diligent in their search for truth. Those who hear the gospel, however, are responsible for what they have heard. (see 2 Corinthians 6:1-2)
Passage Psalm 37:4 Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Footnotes Psalm 37:4-5 David calls us to take delight in the Lord and to commit everything we have and do to him. But how do we do this? To delight in someone means to experience great pleasure and joy in his or her presence. This happens only when we know that person well and when we have been a faithful friend. Thus, to delight in the Lord, we must get to know him better and be faithful in our relationship with him. The certainty of God’s great love for us will then indeed give us delight. To commit ourselves to the Lord means to entrust everything, our lives, families, jobs, possessions-to his control and guidance. To commit ourselves to the Lord, means to trust in him, believing that he can care for us better than we can ourselves. We should wait patiently for him to work out what is best for us.
Jesus Tells us is from the Jesus Calling 365 Devotions for kids.
THE WORLD…we see history
LEO TOLSTOY
Late in life, the Count grew ever closer to the people, and sometimes went forth in peasant- garb, mingling with the poor and aiding them with his considerable riches.
He thought Shakespeare was very much overrated, but then, no one’s right about everything. Born into an aristocratic family in the 19th century, Leo Tolstoy was destined to parse life in imperial Russia much as Dickens (whom he did admire) parsed Victorian England. But Tolstoy went overtly further than his titanic fictions. He is rightly remembered for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but in his learning and teaching he became a proselytizer for Jesus Christ as a philosopher king. He saw great wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount and became a pacifist and an activist for nonviolent protest, as expressed in The Kingdom of God is Within You. He carried on a mentoring correspondence with Gandhi, who called him “the greatest apostle of nonviolence that the present age has produced,” and in the United States, later, he had a profound influence on Martin Luther King Jr. Tolstoy was a vegetarian, a supporter of the Esperanto movement, a wealthy man who contributed the money from his inheritance to neighboring peasants. All of this is overshadowed, as it must be, in the common conception of Tolstoy. War and Peace is justly considered one of the greatest novels of all time, and by commenting on Russia’s social and political situation in the 19th Century, he commented universally. But after Anna Karenina, even Tolstoy’s fiction, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Resurrection, was informed by his radical (in Russian) pacifist Christian philosophy and this led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Readers worldwide know that Tolstoy was immense, one of the few true titans of the novel. What they don’t know is what he meant to people throughout the world who had never heard of him, people who perhaps could not even read, because disciples of his philosophical and religious works put his thoughts into practice.
Source https://www.life.com/history/lifes-100-people-who-changed-the-world/