August 18, 2010 by Sal Termini.

How many really close friends do you have? How many acquaintances do you have?

If you’re like most people, acquaintances far outweigh your close friendships. Close friends are those you spend time with and trust. Close friends are people you love deeply and share your life with. Close friends are those you communicate with frequently and share intimate things about your life.

Acquaintances are people you like. They are people you are friendly with and see once in awhile. They are not people you can’t live without or really need to be with. You enjoy them when you see them but they are not significant to your life. While Acquaintances are nice, what we all need are close friends we can love and trust.

We were created to give love just as much as we were created to receive love. Relationships are important to all of us. Without having people in our lives who care about us life would be cold, sterile, and meaningless. Loving others and being a part of their lives is part of true human fulfillment. We all must have meaningful relationships. Parents, siblings, and close friends are those relationships that nurture us and hopefully we nurture them. We all desire to love and be loved.

What is your status in your relationship with God? Is God a friend or an acquaintance? While God does not need a relationship with us, He desires one. God does not want to be an acquaintance. To do this would break the first and greatest commandment to love God with your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.

He is worthy of our love and friendship. To treat God as an acquaintance is like mistreating a parent, sibling or a really caring, trusted friend. A relationship with God is the ultimate relationship. To ignore that fact or to take it too lightly is a catastrophic mistake. If we mistreat God while on earth do you think we will be accepted as a close friend when we die? Begin today to put God on your friends list.

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August 10, 2010 by Sal Termini.

Lady Gaga, the newest symbol of sexual freedom, poses nude for Vanity Fair magazine. I guess the title says it all, “Vanity.” The dictionary defines vanity as conceit, narcissism, self-love, self-admiration, self-absorption, self-regard, egotism; pride, arrogance, boastfulness, cockiness, and swagger. We live with eyes wide open but see so little. The very title of the magazine is open for all to see and understand. What draws us to vanity?

Vanity is foolishness dressed up as wisdom and meaningless as importance.

Lady Gaga’s shameless self promotion mocks us all into believing there is value in her over-the-top antics. Her pictures and videos are filled with nudity. It seems talent is not enough — we need the masses gawking at us with prurient interest. The natural tendency of people is to look at the naked body when it is unclothed. The exploitation of this fact is in itself a meaningless act. Anybody can do it but too many crave the spotlight.

The unclothed body was designed by God to illicit sexual desire. The immediate visceral response is desire. Desire is the foundation of modern advertising. What we desire is sex, money, power and pleasure, all without a value system. What we get is destruction and pain. Yet we advertise by pulling on the basest human emotions. Like lemmings we fall off the cliff over and over again. The multitude of people parading around nude for attention has now reached the status of serious mental illness for our culture, obsessed with such icons. The desire for sexual freedom from repressive religious belief has now turned into a unhealthy obsession.

God is not anti-pleasure. God created pleasure. He puts pleasure in a context where it brings value to the human soul. The problem is sexual desire left unchecked becomes perversion. The more outrageous a person’s behavior, the more interest seems to be created in that person. The same old tactics are used over and over again: nudity, attraction and perversion equals wealth.

The man who created Girls Gone Wild is nothing more than a video voyeur. The same vanity, need for attention and pleasure without value lures us like moths to a flame. It is meant to draw out of us perverted prurient desires for the purpose of fame and profit. Its damage to society and people are ignored, overlooked, or rejected. Madonna, who perverted a generation of young people, is now trying to protect her child from the corruption that media produces in the younger generation. The glaring hypocrisy is missed by her hordes of adoring fans.

We tempt with evil desires to create success. The price and the cost is, we all become diminished, dehumanized, humiliated, and lessened by coarse ideals. The problem is, we are pleasure driven so we struggle to condemn many things that are evil. We like evil. We want to participate in it. In doing this we justify it, and ourselves, as normal or innocent. Standards are lowered and society is self-destructing. We keep falling for the same old thing over and over again. Nothing new, good, or creative will ever come out of seeking to elicit the lowest and basest part of our being. Who will have the courage to ignore or reject those who exploit us for their own ends. We make them rich and famous while we remain poor in spirit, character and moral truth.

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August 3, 2010 by Sal Termini.

John 4:23 - Indeed, the time is coming, and it is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. The Father is looking for people like that to worship him.

We are created to worship God. We are created to be fully engulfed in God’s love for us. The discovery of that love is the foundation of worship and a meaningful life. When we discover His love for us we will respond with rich praise and thanksgiving for who God is. Too may people are distracted by life and never seek to truly know and love God. Many fail to understand that the true significance of life is to place God at the center. Money, work, ambition, pleasures, and things cannot love us back. The things we desire and love most cannot give meaning, virtue, hope, lasting joy, or purpose to our lives. We love the temporal things that have little meaning and are passing away. We must learn to love the things that are eternal even more. The world is suffering because it has failed to worship God’s character, which reveals a love that gives us a standard to live by. If we live, loving as God loves, evil would be eradicated. All that is good in life comes from God.

Our neglect of worship for God is like a man who builds a beautiful house for his wife and she falls in love with the house and decorating it more than her husband. We fail to love and appreciate God who made us and gave us all things pertaining to life. We take for granted that we have been born, have life, exist, make choices, and can choose our destiny. All this is a gift from God. In essence we have become idolators replacing a deep intimate love and friendship with God with our natural life. Instead of living life with Him we live it without him treating him as a stranger and in some cases as an interloper.

God should be our hero – the person we want to be like and most emulate. We should want to live like God lives, holy, joyful, victorious, meaningful, truthful, loving, hopeful, eternally minded, and purposeful. We need to admire His attributes, character, and love. God is so misrepresented that He is ignored or despised. If you saw the goodness of God and understood His ultimate purpose for you, you would fall in love with Him. God’s plan is for us to spend eternity with him, reveling in His love and enjoying His creation with Him. God desires a passionate love as real and as powerful as any we can experience in this world. We are so enamored with all things of the earth that we fail to see the supremacy of a heavenly life and a spiritual love.

A recent survey asked people if they believed in God. 90-percent of those people said yes. They then were asked, how many make God an important part of their lives. Only 12 percent answered in the affirmative. If we make God a stranger while living in His earthly home we will not be invited to His heavenly one.

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