Taking Back My Joy

  All of us have a daily routine—a series of chores, errands, and tasks that demand our attention. To add to that pressure, we’re supposed to tack God onto an already over crowed schedule.

I admit it. Sometimes my feet are already running before they hit the floor in the morning. It’s difficult to find time to “be still” before God. I’ve discovered when I don’t take time to seek God’s presence and strength for the day, I become weak, anxious, and deplete of joy. When I allow my sense of awe and wonder drain away, I lose the value of who God is—my helper, provider, counselor, peace, and my source of joy.

Jesus realized our preoccupation with daily duties would cause us to worry about these things instead of live in the care of God. Jesus said, “Do not worry about your life, what your will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?” (Matt 6:25).

When I read these words I wonder, how can I live this life without worrying about the daily grind that takes time and attention to maintain?

I long for peace and joy in my life. It would be awesome not to worry about the basics by trusting in God’s care. But how?

You and I have to turn our attention to God. When we sit and mediate on the wonder of our great God, we experience a sense of love, peace and joy. We become certain that God knows right where we are. He hasn’t forgotten me. He is more than able to care for my needs.

When you and I began to see God in everything, joy fills our hearts. God is everywhere. He is with you and for you right now.

If life’s routines are wearing you down and stealing your peace and joy, take time to seek our God’s love, goodness and majesty that is revealed in creation. Let your joy be renewed in who God is—and who you are to Him. Then, you’ll find His strength, purpose and provision even in your most difficult moment.

Verse to mediate on: “Let not your heart be troubled: you believe in God, believe also in me” (John 14:1).
Truth to hide in your heart:

Turn your eyes on God who is willing to release us of our burdens and our cares—those things that weigh heavy on our hearts— and take them on himself.  That’s why he invites, come to me all you who are weary—from trying to please everybody, from trying to belong and fit in, from seeking security in material things, your job, or position or popularity—come and I will give you rest.

Create A New Habit

I came across an article this week that I really identified with. The author asked if I’ve ever noticed fear does its dirty work by asking questions? It asks you questions about you. It asks you questions about God. It asks you questions about your future. And it makes you doubt. So fight back with your own questions. Here’s some to get your started:

• Who is bigger – God or your problem?
• Who loves you with a never-ending love?
• Who promised you eternal life through his only Son in a place where fear will be no more?
• Who sees you as perfect and righteous due to your faith in Christ?
• Who knocked down the walls of Jericho?
• Who got Joseph out of prison?
• Who parted the Red Sea?
• Who saved Noah from the flood?
• Who really took down Goliath?
• Who died on a cross for your sins?
• Who defeated Satan, sin and death?
• Who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?      ~ Mitch Miller

The answer, of course, is Jesus! I like how his questions take the focus off of my problem and refocus my attention on Christ.

His exercise is similar to one of my mine when it comes to battling fear. As soon as fear starts to make me feel week, insecure or steal my joy, I quote scripture. “The battle is in the mind,” the bible says. And I want to be prepared to fight.

I began by choosing verses in the back of my bible on the topic of fear. Those that spoke to me, I wrote down on a piece of paper and kept it in a handy place. Whenever fear began its dirty work in my mind, I’d refocus my attention on God’s promises. Here are a few of my favorite.

“For I am the Lord, your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you” (Isaiah 41:13)

“Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again” (Exodus 14:13)

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6)

“So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can Man do to me?” (Hebrews 13:6)

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid” (John 14:27)

Listen, my friend. The Lord wants you and me to learn a new habit rather than worry. He wants you and I to say,

“I trust you with my cares.”

“Your Presence and love are like a shield of protection for me.”

“Peace is mine when I keep my thoughts on You.”

“You, Lord, are with me and for me. What or whom shall I fear?”

Forming a new habit takes practice and it takes time. But I promise if you change your habit from worry to faith, it will take hold and fear will lose its grip.

You are in my prayers today. If you have a specific request, leave it in a comment and I will be happy to lift your concern to heaven above.

Have a blessed week!!!

There’s More Than Snails

I love the ancient legend about a swan and a crane. It goes like this…

A beautiful swan settled on the banks of a pond where a crane was wadding through the murky water looking for snails. The crane finally noticed the swan and inquired,

“Where did you come from?”

The swan replied, “I come from Heaven!”

“Where is that?” questioned the crane.

“You’ve never heard of Heaven?” replied the swan.

For the next few minutes the swan talk non-stop about the beauty of Heaven. She shared about the streets of gold. She told him about the pearly gates and how the walls were made of precious stones. She described the river of life to look like pure crystals. And on the edge of the river stood the tree with the power to heal nations! She went on describing the magnificent angles and the host of saints.

The swan paused for a moment to catch the cranes response. It was then she noticed the crane hadn’t shown the slightest interested in this marvelous place. Eventually, the crane asked, “Are there any snails there?”

The swan nearly slid off the bank. “Snails? What a hoarded thought!” exclaimed the swan. “Of course not! There are no snails in Heaven!”

“Well, the crane said in a causal tone, you can have your Heaven. All I want are snails.”

I have to admit that sometimes I’m like that crane. I miss God’s best by being satisfied with good enough.

Lord, I want more than snails. I want your best. Help me to not settle for good. Give me a desire to seek out and claim you best for me.

Testing of Your Faith

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
-James 1:2-3

How Well Do You Love?

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31 (NIV)

Yesterday we talked about the first of five factors that influence your identity. We have all been made wonderfully complex and full of flaws, but until we embrace who we are — including our flaws — we cannot make the changes in our lives that will bring about true transformation.

The second factor that influences your identity is your connections. Your connections give your life purpose, meaning, and identity. If you grew up with dysfunctional relationships, then you question your purpose and struggle with identity.

Jesus said that the most important thing we should do is love God and love other people (Mark 12:30-31). Life is not about your accomplishments or acquisitions, your popularity or prestige. It’s about how well you love.

There are three problems that keep us from loving fully as God intended:

1. We’re all imperfect. There are no perfect relationships because there are no perfect people.

2. Sin disconnects us. Adam and Eve had the first broken relationship and disconnected themselves from God and from each other. We’ve been excusing ourselves and accusing the people we love ever since.

3. The more disconnected we are, the more fearful we become. We crave intimacy, but we fear vulnerability. We crave acceptance, but we fear rejection.

You may not have had a say in the hand you were dealt in life. But God sent his son as your Savior to transform your cards into a winning hand. No matter what connections you’ve made in life, you will be held responsible for what you do with your connections today.

Will you let God affect your connections? Will you trust him for your future in spite of a difficult past? Will you nurture, protect, and build relationships so that God is more fully glorified in your life?

Resolve today to build healthy and not hurtful relationships with God’s help.

Talk It Over

• In what relationships do you need to invest more time or more of Christ’s love?
• How are you doing with “loving your neighbor as yourself”? How about with your difficult relatives, co-workers, or in a broken relationship?

Author:
Rick Warren

The Healing Power of Confession

“Before I confessed my sins, my bones felt limp, and I groaned all day long.” Psalm 32:3 (CEV)

It’s not just swallowing too much food that’ll torpedo your health in 2014. Swallowing your sin can have even more disastrous results.

One of the healthiest choices you can make for 2014 is to receive the forgiveness of God. Many people start the New Year carrying around a stinky garbage sack of sin. Carrying around that sack won’t just make you ineffective for serving Jesus; it’ll ruin your health, too.

The Bible teaches in Psalm 32:3-5: “Before I confessed my sins, my bones felt limp, and I groaned all day long. Night and day your hand weighed heavily on me, and my strength was gone as in the summer heat. So I confessed my sins and told them all to you. I said, ‘I’ll tell the LORD each one of my sins.’ Then you forgave me and took away my guilt” (CEV).

In fact an October 2013 study by scientists at Princeton University and the University of Waterloo scientifically verified what David said centuries earlier: Feelings of being physically “weighed down” by guilt are real.

God has given us a foolproof method for relief from those soul and body-destroying feelings of guilt: repentance. How do you do that?

1. Make a moral inventory. Psalm 138:23-24 says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test my thoughts. Point out anything you find in me that makes you sad, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” (LB). In other words, you start by grabbing a pencil and paper and asking God to bring to mind your sin. Take your time. Don’t rush it. Be specific.
2. Accept the blame. The greatest holdup to healing is you. Don’t rationalize it. Don’t minimize it. You may not own 100 percent of the blame, but accept the 10 percent of the blame that’s yours.
3. Ask for forgiveness. Believe that God will forgive you. Ask him to forgive you based on what he promises in the Bible (1 John 1:9). Don’t beg. Don’t bargain. Just believe that God is able and willing to forgive you.

Don’t put yourself at risk of spiritual heart disease. God wants to use you in 2014. Come clean about your sin. Start over.

Then see what God can do through you in 2014.

Fill Your Life with Love

“Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other.” Romans 12:9-10 (NLT)

If you want lasting change in your life, you must fill your life with love.

Love is the only thing that can change the unchangeable. Love invigorates. Love revitalizes. Love renews. Love refreshes. Love is the most powerful force in the universe, because God is love. It doesn’t say he has love; it says he is love. Love heals what cannot otherwise be healed. Love uplifts. Love strengthens. Love energizes. Love empowers.

“Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other.” Romans 12:9-10 (NLT).

“Take delight in honoring each other” — I love that! You know what that means? It means when people in your small group have a win in health, finances, or any goal they’ve set, you need to celebrate with them. Celebrate their wins. You lost two more pounds? Congratulations! You got a little bit out of debt? Fantastic! You had a breakthrough in your marriage? Terrific! The Bible says to take delight in honoring each other and show genuine affection.

Here’s the amazing thing: God has wired the universe so that when you help other people, God takes care of your problems. God is looking down on you not to say, “Are you helping yourself?” but “Are you helping others?” Do you want help with your goals? Start helping other people with their goals. Show love. Give yourself away. There is healing in giving back.

Remember the story of Job where he lost everything? He lost his health, he lost his family, he lost his wealth. He lost it all. At the end of the book, God gave it all back to Job. Why? Because Job prayed for himself? No. It says, “After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before” (NIV).

Why do you need to be in a small group? Not just so other people can help you, but so you can help them. So you can pray for those people, and then God can help you. Give yourself away in love, and then watch God work in your life.

Talk It Over

• Think of the ways you show love to others each day. What is the motivation behind your love?
• How has loving others blessed your life?
• Who are the people in your life who need your love and support or need you to celebrate with them today?

Paradox, Mystery, and Contradiction

The influence of various movements within our culture such as New Age, Eastern religion, and irrational philosophy have led to a crisis of understanding. A new form of mysticism has arisen that exalts the absurd as a hallmark of religious truth. We think of the Zen-Buddhist maxim that "God is one hand clapping" as an illustration of this pattern.

To say that God is one hand clapping sounds profound. It puzzles the conscious mind because it strikes against normal patterns of thought. It sounds "deep" and intriguing until we analyze it carefully and discover that at root it is simply a nonsense statement.

Irrationality is a type of mental chaos. It rests upon a confusion that is at odds with the Author of all truth who is not an author of confusion.

Biblical Christianity is vulnerable to such strands of exalted irrationality because of its candid admission that there is much paradox and mystery in the Bible. Because there are thin but crucial lines that divide paradox, mystery, and contradiction, it is important that we learn to distinguish among them.

We are quickly confounded when we seek to plumb the depths of God. No mortal can exhaustively comprehend God. The Bible reveals things about God that we know are true in spite of our inability to understand them fully. We have no human reference point, for example, to understand a being who is three in person and one in essence (Trinity), or a being who is one person with two distinct natures, human and divine (the person of Christ). These truths, as certain as they may be, are too "high" for us to penetrate.

We face similar problems in the natural world. We understand that gravity exists, but we do not understand it, nor do we seek to define it in irrational or contradictory terms. Most everyone agrees that motion is an integral part of reality, yet the essence of motion itself has perplexed philosophers and scientists for millennia. There is much that is mysterious about reality and much that we do not understand. But that does not warrant a leap into absurdity. Irrationality is fatal both to religion and science. Indeed, it is deadly to any truth.

The late Christian philosopher Gordon H. Clark once defined a paradox as a "charley horse between the ears." His witty remark was designed to point out that what is sometimes called a paradox is often nothing more than sloppy thinking. Clark, however, clearly recognized the legitimate role and function of paradox. The word paradox comes from the Greek root that means "to seem or to appear." Paradoxes are difficult for us because at first glance they "seem" to be contradictions, but under closer scrutiny resolutions can often be found. For example, Jesus said, "He who loses his life for My sake will find it" (Matthew 10:39). On the surface this sounds akin to a statement like "God is one hand clapping." It sounds like a self-contradiction. What Jesus meant, however, is that if someone loses his life in one sense, he will find it in another sense. Because the losing and saving are in two different senses, there is no contradiction. I am a father and a son at the same time, but obviously not in the same relationship.

Because the term paradox has been misunderstood so often as a synonym for contradiction, it now appears in some English dictionaries as a secondary meaning of the term contradiction. A contradiction is a statement that violates the classical law of non contradiction. The law of non contradiction declares that A cannot be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect. That is, something cannot be what it is and not be what it is at the same time and in the same respect. This is the most fundamental of all the laws of logic.

No one can understand a contradiction because a contradiction is inherently unintelligible. Not even God can understand contradictions. But He can certainly recognize them for what they are—falsehoods. The word contradiction comes from the Latin "to speak against." It is sometimes called an antinomy, which means "against law." For God to speak in contradictions would be for Him to be intellectually lawless, to speak with a forked tongue. It is a great insult and unconscionable blasphemy to even suggest that the Author of truth would ever speak in contradictions. Contradiction is the tool of the one who lies—the father of lies who despises the truth.

There is a relationship between mystery and contradiction that easily reduces us to confusing the two. We do not understand mysteries. We cannot understand contradictions. The point of contact between the two concepts is their unintelligible character. Mysteries may not be clear to us now simply because we lack the information or the perspective to understand them. The Bible promises further light in heaven on mysteries we are unable to understand now. Further light may resolve present mysteries. However, there is not enough light in heaven and earth to ever resolve a clear-cut contradiction.

1. Paradox is an apparent contradiction that under closer scrutiny yields resolution.

2. Mystery is something unknown to us now, but which may be resolved.

3. Contradiction is a violation of the law of noncontradiction. It is impossible to resolve, either by mortals or God, either in this world or the next.

1 Peter 1:15-16

but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

Surrender Your Dream to Jesus

“I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” Philippians 4:12-13 (NLT)

You’ll never achieve your dream until you learn to give it up. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true.

Surrendering your dream to Jesus is always the safest decision you’ll ever make in regards to your dream. God typically takes your dream through six different stages. I’ve seen him do it hundreds of times in my life and thousands of times throughout the lives of others.

• God gives you a dream.
• You decide to go after the dream.
• Your dream is delayed.
• Your dream encounters difficulties.
• Your dream hits a dead end.
• God delivers your dream.

Throughout each of these stages, you’re working on your dream while God is working on you. More than anything else, God wants you to trust him. The Apostle Paul says it like this: “I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength” Philippians 4:12-13 (NLT).
The Bible says emphatically that you can do anything — along with God’s help. You’ll need much more than positive thinking as you pursue your God-given dreams. You’ll need the power of God.
Many people have read one motivational book after another and still haven’t made progress toward their dreams. We need the supernatural help of God.

Have you been trying to sail to your dreams on your own power? If so, I guarantee you’re getting nowhere — at least on the dreams that really matter in your life. The wind is dead.

Surrender your dream to God. Let him empower them...