Joy and Strength (Christian life and music)

God is building us.  God is after our hearts.  God is chipping away at us until He is formed in us fully. This is no instant endeavor!  I always marvel at how everything in life takes time to build.  Nowhere else in the world are there "instant" results.  And yet sometimes, we Christians want the easy way through difficulties.  We want that miraculous, instant deliverance from the Lord. Yes, He is more than able to deliver and heal instantly.  But these cases are the rare ones.   It's not that the Lord wants to see us suffer.  But He is the Master Technician knowing exactly which tools to use to bring us to our knees.  He wants us humbly at His feet because that is where the power is!  When we are weak, He is strong.  Even the children's Sunday school song reminds us of that.  The paradox is that He wants us strong!  Over and over again in Scripture, He tells us to be strong and courageous.  He tells us not ...

I believe with all that is in me that we are never good examples when we think we are, when we are trying to be. I believe that when we are yielded to Christ, His life in us, His will for us, that then, and only then, are we influencing those around us.  And we never, no never, know when we are doing this.  We are not supposed to know because then we may become affected or, worse yet, we may think that we have something to do with it! Jesus never set out to be an example.  He simply was.  As He stayed connected to His Heavenly Father, the life of God poured out through Him in thought, word, and deed.  And of course, He really is the only example in life for all of us.   Leaders will fail. "Experts" are limited. Good deed doers may be acting out of the flesh, not from fellowship with the Holy Spirit. So of course, we look to our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ as our only example because His example is flawless and true.  His example can come to life...

God is Omnipotent.  There is no higher or greater power than Jehovah God. When we are born again, He comes to live in our hearts via the Holy Spirit. We now possess all that He is!  We are not God - nowhere near.  That is for the New Ager's way of thinking. No.  Where once our spirits were dead, darkened, and lost, they are now made alive!  We now worship, love, and obey God only because His Spirit lives inside us.  Up until then, we may choose to be "good" people, and do the right things in life.  But there is a vast difference between a person living a "good" life in the flesh, and the born again Christian who allows the life of Christ in her to rule and live His life through her. There is a power to God's goodness.  His Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  All of these attributes live within us as born again believers in Christ. Our job now is to allow  the Holy Sp...

Jesus deserves our wholehearted devotion because He is Lord.   When we follow and obey Jesus wholeheartedly, we may stand out from the rest, seem odd, or even fanatical to some.  But to please man before we please God leads to disaster.  If we regard our reputation more than the Lord, we are not wholehearted toward Him.  God looks at our hearts.  We may lose some friends along the way, maybe even some family.  But God is worthy of our absolute devotion, wholeheartedly, no matter what the outer circumstances. There is always a cost to following Jesus wholeheartedly, whether it be giving up something or someone that we want.  Or it could mean the death of our idea of what our life "should" look like.  But I don't think our outer, short-term reality matters as much to Jesus as our hearts do. We may think we are giving up too much, at a loss, if we give Jesus our absolute all.  But what we gain is so much more valuable, and it is eternal. We...

Did you ever wonder why certain thoughts pop into your mind?  Are you aware of the enemy's tactics in this realm? You may have heard that the battlefield is in the mind.  Our thoughts steer our actions, our lives. So as a Christian, it is crucial to know when a thought is a spiritual attack.  The enemy wants us to believe thoughts that mess with our identity.  But remember, he is crafty!  So it's not always so easy to discern.  He may even disguise himself as an angel of light (one of his guises) so that your thought may even seem "good." He takes God-given desires and needs and twists them so that we want to get them met outside of God's will.  That road leads to disaster and our destruction and the devil knows it! Now I much prefer focusing on the beauty of the Lord, and wish I could just ignore that the devil even exists.  But exist he does!  And once we are in Christ, he is truly our total enemy.   He wants to get us so caught u...

Is it easy for you to receive God's personal love for you?  Maybe you see Him as far off, or His love as all-encompassing but not for you personally. Yet Jesus suffered unimaginable pain and agony on the cross not only to make a way to heaven for all of us, but so that we can enter His Presence here and now, in this broken, on-its-way-out world! I admit I have struggled with accepting how much God loves me personally.  Why?  Because I know how unworthy I am of such a vast, deep, permanent, and unconditional love.  When we are honest with ourselves, we know that we can never earn God's love in and of ourselves.  We are all way too sinful for that!  This holds true for even the "best" of us.  We have all  sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, from Mother Theresa to Hitler!  All we like sheep have gond astray, every one to his own way.  I don't make this stuff up!  This is the Word of God. But in His great love for us, God sent ...