Archive for March, 2010
The Power of Desire
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Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12
Mankind was designed to live with a heart full of hope. It began in the Garden.
Adam, walking in wholeness and obedience, named the animals. Yet as he named each one, something unsettling began in his heart. In fact, maybe we could say God was setting him up. As he named each animal, this unanswered desire arose in his heart.
“None of these animals are like me!”
With each step, this powerful desire grew. A true need arose within Adam. He needed someone like him. Someone to walk alongside him as he fulfilled his destiny. He needed a woman. He needed Eve.
And God provided for Adam’s desire and the provision became a “tree of life” for Adam. Oh, you might say that that could not be true because Eve was tempted, fell, and led Adam away from a path of life, but yet, she did become a tree of life. Through her body would be birthed the Tree of Life for all of us.
How often mankind struggles with desire! We try to kill desire, avoid desire, train desire, anything but understand our desire. Perhaps a different way of looking at desire could be profitable for us.
Could we ask the following question of the desires we find in our hearts?
What is the legitimate godly expression of this desire?
Healing My Prostitute Heart
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I have just returned from Pattaya, Thailand, a city where 30,000 prostitutes live and work. I felt a strong urgency about this particular mission trip. Part of our ministry while we were there was walking down the streets lined with bars and prostitutes and listening for God’s direction as we prayed and walked.
One particular night, I felt total exhaustion, emotionally and physically. My body had not adjusted at all to the 13 hour time difference. Pushing past my exhaustion, I walked down Walking Street with Angel, my interpreter.
I pondered at my emotions. I felt a total lack of condemnation for the thousands of girls who lined the streets and for the men who were looking to buy them for the night. I questioned God about my heart.
Is my heart dead?
Has the pain in my life during the last few years numbed me to Your Spirit?
Is my spiritual thermometer broken?
What should I be feeling?
Jesus, what would you feel?
As I walked in the darkest spiritual place I’ve ever seen, a city full of oppression, I did not feel oppressed. I looked past the way the girls were dressed and their makeup and looked into their eyes and all I could see was emptiness. My heart broke for them.
Thailand Trip Video
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Wake Up!
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A busy ministry schedule has limited my time to blog, but I want to give a quick update.
This is a land of great darkness, but more than that, it is a land of great need of the light of God’s love. Our ministry here has focused on sharing the love of God to the people of Thailand and also to Jason and Sarah Ricketts, who are missionaries here.
I have walked the streets of Pattaya where there are thousands of prostitutes and hundreds of bars. Men come here from around the world for sex. Young girls and boys sell their bodies in order to make money. They are often illiterate and have no marketable skills other than their very body. The damage to their souls is beyond measure. Yet there are some here who are endeavoring to share God’s love. They teach free English classes. They teach marketable skills. They provide counseling for the trauma; most of the young girls have been raped more than once. So many have come here in order to honor their families by providing financially for them. That is important in this culture. Most families know their girls come here to work in the bars. They know their girls will become prostitutes. It is an acceptable means of employment. However, most know nothing of the horrors these young girls will experience. And once the girls experience the horrors of prostitution, instead of honor, they find intense shame and feel unable to go back to their families. Isnt’ that the enemy’s classic strategy? Empty promises and bondage in the very place you thought would bring freedom.
Off to Thailand
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I am off toThailand looking out my airplane window at an endless layer of white puffy clouds, forming a floor with no view of sky underneath. Risen and its rays glistening and dancing on the tops of the clouds, the sun gives a command performance. Purple, orange, and pink swirls and streaks paint the sky with magnificent color, speaking of my Creator for no other could christen a day with such wonder.
I look forward with anxious anticipation to the land before me. Thailand – a land of contradiction. From the beauty of the ocean to the oftentimes empty eyes of the people. What God has in store for me there I can only know in part, but I know I feel called to touch the lives of the people there. And I find that the language of the heart is universal. The language of the heart is a one size fits all and is spelled L-O-V-E, and it flows down from my heavenly Father and touches us all.
Yet the ways of God dictate that His love flows primarily through human containers. So in Thailand, I hope that love will flow through me. The river of His love is a powerful force. As it travels from God’s heart, through my heart and your heart, to the hearts of others, it cleanses, heals, restores, renews, encourages, saves, energizes, brings hope and life everywhere it goes, touching the vessels through which it flows in the same powerful ways as it touches those onto whom it rests.
