Jesus was HERE!!!

This song changed me last year.  I heard the lyrics and realized for the first time that Jesus was really here on this earth.  I don't know how I had missed this crucial understanding all the years I have claimed to be a Christian and known Jesus.   Maybe I didn't really know Him as well as I thought...This song was written by Joy Williams and edited to a clip from the movie Nativity Story that came out a few years ago.  If anything, please listen to the lyrics and let them sink into your heart.  Jesus is the reason and joy of this season of the year.  He is worthy to be praised!!  

Love love love

God continually teaches me about loving others.  I've been reflecting on love and what it really is alot this week.  Looking at 1 Corinthians 13, John 3:16, Hebrews 9 & 10, and 1 John has helped me understand God better.  (God IS love).

1 John 3:16, 17 "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.  But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth."  

John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he GAVE his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."   

1 John 2:4,5 "Whoever says, "I know him" but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him., but whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected."

1 Corinthians 13  "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gone or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.   If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.  

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on it's own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong-doing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

These verses talk about what loving others should look like because they describe the way God acts toward us.  (By sacrificing His Son, Jesus the Christ.)  But they also explain that even if we give away everything and sacrifice everything without the purpose of love, it is nothing.  God gives love and is ever-enduring to us when we don't love Him.  If he were to just forgive us and give us things without love....well, that just isn't the way God is.  You can't separate "God" and "love" and all good things.  This has been interesting for me to look into because I see great need for growth in really loving others in my life.  1 John talks about love being perfected in us.   The more I fall in love with who God is, the more I think love is displayed in my life.  There are definitely things that come to mind when I hear the word love, but there are many ways I am seeing love displayed in my life that are new to me... Just like God's mercies being new every morning. We all learn new things every day through God's grace and mercy! 

Desire for God

Early this week, I started re-reading "Passion and Purity" by Elizabeth Elliot.  I first read it during my freshman year of college.  

There's a little snippet I want to share that really challenged and encouraged me and my thinking:

"What kind of God is it who asks everything of us?  The same God who, "...did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all; and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?

He gives all.

He asks all.

I wanted to be loved. Nothing unusual about that, nothing to separate my generation from any other...  

But I wanted something deeper.  Down among all the foolishness in my diary, thoughts like chaff which the wind of the Spirit can drive away, there was some wheat.  There was an honest-to-God longing for the "fixed heart" that the collect speaks of.  (Collect: Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.)  A thousand questions cluttered my mind,...But the question to precede all others, which finally determines the course of our lives, is What do I really want??

Was it to love what God commands, in the words of the collect, and to desire what He promises?  Did I want what I wanted, or did I want what He wanted, no matter what it might cost?

Until the will and affections are brought under the authority of Christ, we have not begun to understand, let alone to accept, His Lordship.  The cross, as it enters the love life, will reveal the heart's truth.  My heart, I knew would be forever a lonely hunter unless settled "where true joys are to be found."

me: "Amen to that Liz!" 

Remembrances of the Lord's faithfulness

Last fall, I had this written on a sheet of paper hanging on the slanted ceiling above my bed:

"When the cares of my heart are many, your consolations cheer my soul."  

Psalm 94:19

I was in the middle of a trial when I came across this verse in the Psalms.  The cares of my heart were many and seemed overwhelming and too heavy for me to bear.  It was a lonely, frustrating, pushed-to-the-limit time in my life.  I kept thinking, "It's got to be better than this."  Many nites I would just try to imagine what my life would be like in a year.  I couldn't do it.  :)  I hoped beyond all hope that God would have me in a much better, easier, happier place in life.  

A year later, I still struggle with some of those same things, but it is DIFFERENT.  Last year, I didn't know the hope I already had in Jesus.  I could not see any hope beyond my present circumstances.  At the time, I had broken off an engagement and was left pretty lonely. During that relationship, my heart had grown proud and selfish and worshiped idols. As a result, I  pushed loved ones away.  I let myself be cut off from close girlfriends and sisters in Christ.  I was reaping the concequences of my sin.  I just prayed that God would provide friends for me.  Here I was in my last year of college, supposedly a happy time to celebrate the joys of finishing school and a unique time in life, and I didn't have many to celebrate with.  

It was all I could do to go to church on Sundays.  I loved to hear Pastor Flack preach Biblical truth to my heart, but going meant seeing someone that I had shared a close relationship with the past few years. I remember one Saturday nite looking at Psalms and seeing this verse: "My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me."  Psalm 63:8  That verse got me through alot of Sat. nites and Sunday mornings.  

This year, there are still struggles.  Yes there are!  :)  But as I think about last fall, I see nothing but how God lead me gently by the hand through EACH and every day.  I see one of His great characteristics of Faithfulness.  How sweet it is that God chooses to take us through certain paths for very specific purposes.  Remembering last year could be a very bitter time, but instead, all I see today is how He is using it for me to cling to.  I cling to those memories because I'm seeing more and more how much God loves me.  He loved me so dearly then and loves me dearly today.  

A dearly treasured passage that Bev first showed me last summer is Isaiah 61.  This passage speaks nothing but HOPE for those who have made a MESS of their lives.  This passage speaks of the joy that God can restore to those who are completely broken.  It talks about God taking the ugly ashes and muck of someone's life, and transforming it into a beautiful headdress for them to wear!  A garment of praise instead of a faint spirit!  Repairing the ruined cities! He takes the prostitute and the druggie and transforms them into a SAINT!  God in His love, can change us and make us new.  God loves the repentant prostitute, druggie, theif, murderer, lier, gossiper!   

I have every reason to THANK God and to worship Him for working in my life.  He truly is a God WORTH living for today and for eternity!

The Lord's Faithless Bride

"Again the word of the Lord came to me: "Son of man, make know to Jerusalem her abominations, and say, Thus says the Lord God to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.  And as for your birth, on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in swaddling cloths.  No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born.  

And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, 'Live!'  I said to you in your blood, 'Live!'  I made you flourish like a plant of the field.  And you grew up and became tall and arrived at full adornment.....I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became MINE.  Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and annointed you with oil.....You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty.  And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God.  

But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings on any passerby....How lovesick is your heart, declares the Lord God, because you did all these things...

For thus says the Lord God; I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath in breaking the covenant, yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant.  Then you will remember your ways and be ashamed when you take your sisters, both your elder and your younger, and I will give them to you as daughters...I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I atone for you all that you have done, declares the Lord God."

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God is FAITHFUL when we are FAITHLESS!!!  We all need Him to be faithful to us when we turn to evil in our lives.  Not one can be faithful like He is.  Praise God!  I am so thankful for the many blessings He has showered upon me especially in my faithless times....:)  Sisters, parents, brothers, showing me truth from His Word, reminders of His STEADFASTNESS.  The pastor of TBC shared this on Sunday morning and it was description of me.  How many times have I given myself to things that are not honoring to God.  God is so great in His mercy to us.  He really is.  We choose these things over Him over and over again...all the while, He is a FATHER, pursuing us and waiting with open arms to renew a covenant of LOVE with us!!  Praise God!! Praise God!!