Unbelieveable!

You know I can't believe sometimes how long it has taken me to learn things. Sometimes I think I've learned them and then I guess I forget and have to learn them all over again! I know that I am no different than you, to say that I am puts to much emphasis on me, makes me the center of my universe. I know that all of us go through the same kinds of things, maybe the circumstances different, but the struggles the same. I want to come back to the thought of what reality is, you see God is working in my thoughts and my heart so that I may comprehend more of His greatness. I have been thinking this week through the prompting of scripture and through the teaching in; In Search of a confident Faith of how I am in need of a paradigm shift, ( I don't really use big words like that on my own, so I borrow them!). In my life I get bogged down with the practical stuff and I forget how big God is. If you try to deal with all the daily stuff without the remembrance of your awesome Lord you will get bogged down. You know that He is so big and so different than anything that is, all of creation cannot hold Him, (Psa. 139:7-12) and yet I don't live my life in such a way that people know how big He is through me. How sad. So I have to step back and ask myself what is it that I believe about Him. Look at Luke 24:4-11. What did the disciples believe about Him before His crucifixion? Did they believe every word He spoke, and if so look at their response, they were just like you and me. They thought the women's words were "nonsense". It did not seem plausible to them that He would be alive, it was beyond their realm of possibility. Praise God that He doesn't work in our realm of anything! Yet when we continue to look at the passage it looks like Peter and John (John 20:8-9) went ahead to the tomb, maybe the words of Jesus, that they did not fully understand began to reverberate through their minds. When they got there, their confidence began to swell, their paradigm began to shift! It was plausible, in fact it was then factual He had risen! The more I walk with God, (my santification) the more I see Him work in my life the more my faith swells also! My friend Lisa and I have been studying the book of James, how powerful! We have in our lives been caught kicking and screaming through trials that God intended to use to grow us in our faith! We cannot now and will never grow fully without them!!! They are the instuments of God's hand that shakes up our patterns of life, our paradigm of the way we see reality. What if, just what if we approached life through the eyes of faith (true reality), what if when suffering happens, when trials come we smiled at the Father, the "giver of all good things" and allowed Him to build us up, teach us to become more of the image of Christ? Wow, thinking about that right now causes my heart to rise with awe for my precious Father! How small minded of me to forget that. In saying that though, we have to realize it is apart of our growing to allow the Spirit of God to identify areas and then agree with God on them and allow Him to shift our paradigm. What other things have I made bigger than God? What things are just not possible? NOTHING! I could ramble on about this, as a matter of a fact let me challenge you to look at the story of Peter walking on the water. (Matt. 14:24-33) You know the story, he saw Jesus, apparently they all did, and he ask to come to Him, and of course the Lord always allows us to come to Him. Peter then stepped out, trancending all physical matter, walked on the water out to Jesus....lost sight of the who he was walking toward and then needed to be rescued by the Savior. The thing that never dawned on me was what happened after that, hand in hand with the Savior they had to go back, walking on the water. That is the why to my needed paradigm shift, to believe that the impossible is possible and then to walk with my Father in the truth of that no matter what the trial. I know that I really sound like I am aimlessly ranting about all of this, but my mind is being taught so much that I find it hard to express it all in intelligible writing, but my heart really wants to say it with a challenge to think about what we consider is possible, then what we believe about God and how the two meet! Think about it...

The Beauty of the Lord

What is beautiful to you? My eldest daughter had her 22nd birthday last week and that caused me to think back on the day she was born. (of course!) I remember holding her in the hospital and thinking about how perfect she was to me, not unlike all of you in the same situation. I have a picture of her being held by her dad, and I can see the awe in his eyes as he cradled his newborn baby girl. How beautiful! Now as she turns 22 and is still as beautiful to me as she was then, I am reminded of how life is fleeting, because her birth seems like yesterday to me. What about beauty though? In Psalms 27:4 David speaks of wanting to gaze upon the beauty of God. "One thing I have desired of the LORD, that I will seek; That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in His temple." Did you ever think about God being beautiful? I haven't , though it would make sense, we can look around us in nature and every human being and all our diversity and the beauty of it all. How awesome is this God that we serve and how absolutely beautiful is He?! God is as much beautiful as He is majestic and powerful! Yet we don't meditate on the beauty of the Lord. As we continue the journey learning more of Him everyday, as we consider His attributes and praise Him for them all, lets stand and gaze into the beauty of the Lord our God! Think about it.

Faith=Confidence

Hebrew 11:1-2 says, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony" The picture that I think I have had of faith in my mind and my heart is sort of mystical, you know something that you can't really understand, but you know that it is an important part of your walk. I think this illustration used in "In Search of a Confident Faith" says it better. The author speaks of a young girl who asked of him one time, "If you can prove that God is real what would be the purpose of faith?" This really is the way I have looked at faith, just something to fill in the gap to that which is unknown. When we understand faith as being a confidence in God (which is a literal meaning) it shines like a beacon on scripture and on how important it is to know intimately our Heavenly Father. When I read chapter 11 of Hebrews, which is familiar to most believers and I put in the phrase "God confidence" where the word faith is it was like that beacon shining through to my heart! How did these ordinary people, unexpected people do such extraordinary things? God confidence! Faith! Their faith was counted to them righteousness! We know that our righteousness is counted to us on behalf of our Savior, it is my confidence in God, not myself or the things I have done, or the things I will do that make me righteous before Him, but because I have confidence in the Father's work of salvation on my behalf through Jesus Christ! Wow! Rejoice in that today and tomorrow and the next day! What freedom comes to my heart when I understand and you understand that it is not faith just for faith sake, but a deep rooted confidence in an Almighty, Sovereign Father that leads us through this life and into the one to come. Can you say Hallelujah? Think about it!

His reality or mine?

Reading in a devotional the other day I was reminded of a movie that I have seen called "The Truman Show", maybe you've seen it. In the movie Jim Carrey plays Truman who lives a life that many would love to live, seemingly perfect but in reality not reality at all. You see Truman IS a reality show and doesn't even know it. All the people in his life are just actors playing a part. In the devotional the author ask the question of truth and reality, what is it? Truman at a point in the movie begins to see something is wrong, his reality is falling apart. He tries to escape one day by getting in a sailboat and sailing away when he runs into the end of the set that his life is lived on; his reality just ran out! That hit me like a rock because not too long ago my reality, the life that I had constructed slowly began to fade and ended one day. It wasn't the death of someone dear, not even the suffering that many go through with physical issues, but it was the death of my carefully designed life that I loved. I loved everything about it, and then it was taken away and I caved! I was so mad at God, I even audibly said, "if You are really even there appear to me right now tell me what I am suppose to do!" You might think how brazen that was and really it was, but at that moment God began something new in my heart and looking back, it had to hit the wall before freedom could come. Where did my freedom lay, in Christ, in who I am in Christ, in who He is in me! My identity was not in the things that I loved, for they are temporary but in the things unseen, because they are eternal. Read 2 Cor. 4, the whole chapter and that thought of what reality really is culminates in the last verse, "...while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal." I have not come to the end of this journey of understanding what God is teaching me about this, but I understand that my reality is not that illusion of what I have created, but is in my Sovereign who reigns over all! Think about it!

Turn off the default

I operate my life on a set of "known" ideas, such as theologians are
smarter than I, rich people are intimidating and if I lose the weight I will just gain it back. Although you say these thoughts aren't necessarily true, you and I both live with such thoughts that dictate what we do and will not do. Where is God in all that? If God is as big as we think He is, why do we not give him our default thoughts and ideas about our lives. As I pondered this I couldn't help but think about the woman at the well and how she was just like me operating in default. In John 4 1-27 is the story of when Jesus was by Jacob's well and there at the well was a Samaritan woman. Jesus ask her for a drink, but of course she was in default, not even considering what this Man could do, when she in a rebuking tone asked why in the world would a Jew be speaking to me a Samaritan. Yes in the culture there was a separation of the two groups and as far as she was concerned there would be no reason for Him to speak to her, after all she wasn't as good as Him. I thought, how many times is God trying to do something new in my life and I operate in the "known thoughts" like, "I can't do that". I say put the known thoughts on the back burner and give God what He so deserves and that is me, all of me! As a work out my salvation with fear and trembling, I am humbled at the thought that He desires to work in me at all, and thus how deserving He is of every place in my heart as well as my mind! Think on the mighty works of God, what He has done is just a taste of what He wants to do! Think about it!

Things I ponder...

I wanted to start this blog for the reason of sharing what God is working out in my heart and mind. I was so encouraged by two friends to share with all who would read this; but I must admit my heart is alittle faint at the thought of posting what I am wrestling with and the "working out of my salvation". I am convinced and convicted in my own life that I must know the One that I say that I follow in a deeper more intimate way. To "love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind" seems to be what I am pondering as of late. To love Him with all my heart seems natural as a woman because we live on such a sense of depth from the heart, though there is even more to that than meets the eye. To love Him with all my soul seems to convict me of the depth of my relationship, or the lack thereof; but loving Him with all my mind, that is the one that quickens my heart, that is the one I know that most scares me. My mind is so rattled most the time because of the urgency that is so apparent, that thinking deep thoughts about such an Almighty God literally hurts my mind! So what do I do with that, I push them to the back, I hide in my complacency and "churchanity" because that would take something that I don't want to give, my time and my mind! I am reading the book, In Search of a Confident Faith; and in the book the authors tell me that sometime in our walk when we ponder the deep things of God, we are afraid because we don't think there is a sense of honesty in our community as believers enough to share what we struggle with. How sad! So we tend to settle back into a superficial Christianity. That is why the world thinks as Bill Maher has said that we have a neurological disorder that keeps us from thinking! So I want to post a challenge to all to think big thoughts of our Mighty Sovereign who wants us to know Him, really know Him to the depths of our being, so if the day should ever come in our lives and it will to most, and He should be all that we have left, I pray that He will be all that you and I want and need!