Tag Archives: Faith

Timing

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18And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the LORD is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait for him. Isaiah 30:18 KJV

Does it seem like you have been short on patience and time? And the waiting is never ending? I know that’s how I’ve felt recently. But what a joy it is to know that if we wait for Him, we will be blessed.  We must focus on the goal at hand, serving the Lord and doing what is in His will for us right now. And everything in the future will fall into place at the right moment. It’s just a matter of having the patience to wait and to not force something to happen when it’s not God’s time.

Wait…

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14Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.”  Psalm 27:14 (KJV)

Be of good courage, what does that mean to you? To me it means have faith, soldiers going into battle must have faith in their commander. We should have faith in our commander, the Almighty. We must also wait on Him, to wait on Him takes a great amount of faith. But as the psalmist says, “…He shall strengthn thine heart…”. So, if we have enough faith to wait on the Lord, then He will give us that strength we need to fight the good fight. All we have to do is wait.

Implusive?

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20“But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,” Jude 1:20 (KJV)

There was nothing of the nature of impulsive or thoughtless action about our Lord, but only a calm strength that never got into a panic. Most of us develop our Christianity along the lines of our own nature, not along the lines of God’s nature. Impulsiveness is a trait of the natural life, and our Lord always ignores it, because it hinders the development of the life of a disciple. Watch how the Spirit of God gives a sense of restraint to impulsiveness, suddenly bringing us a feeling of self-conscious foolishness, which makes us instantly want to vindicate ourselves. Impulsiveness is all right in a child, but is disastrous in a man or woman—an impulsive adult is always a spoiled person. Impulsiveness needs to be trained into intuition through discipline.

Discipleship is built entirely on the supernatural grace of God. Walking on water is easy to someone with impulsive boldness, but walking on dry land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is something altogether different. Peter walked on the water to go to Jesus, but he “followed Him at a distance” on dry land (Mark 14:54). We do not need the grace of God to withstand crises—human nature and pride are sufficient for us to face the stress and strain magnificently. But it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours of every day as a saint, going through drudgery, and living an ordinary, unnoticed, and ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus. It is ingrained in us that we have to do exceptional things for God—but we do not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life, and holy on the ordinary streets, among ordinary people—and this is not learned in five minutes.-Oswald Chambers, “My Utmost for His Highest”

Don’t be impulsive, sounds easy enough right? Not so much. Sometimes we allow our human-ness to impede the development of our “disciple-hood”. Think about it, actions and words, when taken impulsively, can cause a lot of hurt to those around us.  That’s why it’s so important to think and pray about what we do and what we say before we do it or say it. We must allow God into those actions and words for them to be truly used for His glory. As Mr. Chambers mentioned, we must allow Him into our ordinary everyday lives.  Because isn’t that what our lives end up being, a lifetime of everyday? Why not put God into everyday, so in the end you’ll have a lifetime that was spent giving every minute, hour, day and year to the Lord. How wonderful would that be?

When?

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Patience

By Ruth Harms Calkin

Lord, as I read Your Word today

I underlined these words:

“Don’t be impatient for the Lord to act.

Keep traveling steadily along His pathway

And in due season He will honor you with every blessing.”

I know I need more patience Lord.

But I simply cannot create it.

I plead with You to do it for me.

And, Lord could You hurry a little?

“22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Galatians 5:22-23

Patience is such a fleeting thing for people today, myself included, one moment I have it and the next minute it’s gone. Or maybe I never had it in the first place. Like Ruth mentioned, patience is not something that can be created by us. It’s a gift from God. In our culture today, everything can be bought or found instantly. But when it comes to the fruits of the spirit mentioned in Galatians, we can’t be find those up for auction on Ebay. Those fruits are things that we must wait for God to bless us with as we walk along the path that He has set before us.  It does us no good to cross our arms and tap our toe, and ask God when? How? Are you listening? Because we cannot know the when or the how only the Lord knows our “due season”.  The only thing we can do is wait, listen, and keep walking.

Today

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It is true, the Lord is with His children  every minute of every day, but it makes such a difference to spend that time in His presence. To drown out all the noise and listen to His still small voice. That is why I try to set aside that all important time with Him. It’s like a standing appointment with God, a time for me to “dish” with my Heavenly Father.

They say you should spend quiet time with Him first thing in the morning so that your day is started off on the right foot, in God’s presence. But that’s not feasible for me and my morning un-alertedness. Yes, I pray  as soon as I wake-up, or after I realize how late I am for work. But I don’t take the time to sit quietly and soak in His presence.  So, I try to set aside sometime in the evenings before I go to bed, and at least one point during the day to stop and just be with my Lord.

To keep myself accountable for this time with God, and to share the blessings found in His word, I would like to share what God has laid upon my heart for that day. It may be an entry from my current devotional, or it may be scripture that has really spoken to me  that day.

Don’t worry, this blog will still remain a happy place, where I can share my home improvement fumbles. But I find it so important to include the Lord in everything in my life.  Even if that means including Him in this silly little blog.

So to start us off with this new endevour, I’d like to share with you a verse that I use in my life daily, if not hourly and minutely and secondly (?). It is found in Matthew 6:34

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”

This is something that I must remind myself of everyday. So often, I get lost in worry, and I end up in a vicious cycle of internal questions: What will I wear tomorrow? Will I get to work on time? Will I not hear my alarm and oversleep again? Will I have time to scrub the shower today? These questions, although important to me today, will they matter a year from now, or even 5 or 10 years from now? Probably not. But what will matter is how I used today, because today is really all we have. Tomorrow is not promised, yesterday has passed, but today is what God has given us.  We must use today as it was intended, as a testament to His love. As a way to show others who Jesus is, so that they might know that joy and peace. So, to be worried about the little things does not show the perfect peace that resides in my heart. Instead, I want to use my todays to serve and glorify the Almighty. How do you want to use your todays?

What do flowers pray for?

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This evening I noticed my sunflowers have come to a point where their heads are too heavy for their little stems to hold them up, so they droop. But to me, they look like they are enjoying a prayerful moment with heads bowed. It got me to wondering what flowers pray for. Do they pray for the same things that we pray for? Do they pray for help in those dark times? Do they praise God in those bright and happy times? Or do they pray for more flower appropriate things like rain and less bugs? Do they hope for the day that they will be plucked and used in a beautiful arrangement? Much like we hope that God will pluck us and use us in one of His arrangements.  Or  do they find hope and peace like we  find in the Lord, when our heads seem too heavy for our stems to hold us up.

This reminds me of a verse that was a favorite of my fathers it’s got nothing to do with flowers specifically, but I find it appropriate for times when it seems that we cannot hold our heavy sunflower heads up by ourselves:

“But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

Isaiah 40:31

So, just like these little sunflowers wait upon the Lord and show complete and utter dependence on God, we should do the same when life seems to make our heads too heavy for our little stems to hold us up.