Archive for Change
Why You Must Go Back
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God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.
This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:
1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.
Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.
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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?
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Doing Life Differently
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are in the wrong place in your life, there is only one way to get back to the right place and that is through repentance.
Two years ago, my husband and I found ourselves in the wrong place and have since experienced many life changes brought about through repentance. One of the things we have committed to in order to continue these changes is annually setting aside a week for self-evaluation and input from a Christian counselor. Last week, we spent four days in Denver, Colorado, with Michael Cusick, founder and president of Restoring the Soul Ministries, a ministry dedicated to providing life-changing soul care for Christian leaders.
While I was spending some moments evaluating my relationship with God, others, and my own heart, Michael shared his definition of repentance with me – doing life differently. Although the definition contained the essence of other ways that I had defined repentance throughout the years, it struck a chord of new understanding inside my heart. For me, the definition provided a way for me to evaluate my life in relation to repentance. At that moment and for the days following, I have been looking at my life and asking myself, “Where are the ways that I can say I am doing my life differently? Where is there evidence that I have changed?”
Many times I have “repented”. I have asked for God’s forgiveness for my actions, attitudes, and words. But how many times have I continued in the same patterns? How often has there been no tangible evidence of change in my life?
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Truth Brings Freedom
Posted by: | CommentsTomorrow I will continue on the temptations of Jesus. Today I want to talk about how the truth brings freedom.
Jesus said, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free."
There is such warfare over knowing truth. We are often not willing to know truth. We sense that we are wrong about a matter or we have an inner knowing that we are denying truth by not acknowledging it, but we are not willing to experience the discomfort and/or pain that comes by stepping fully into the realm of truth.
Truth is costly. Knowing truth and then acting on truth will cost us. It will cost us convenience and our comfortable paradigms. It will cost us because it requires change.
We all have areas where we need more freedom. Truth is the catalyst which births the freedom. Freedom comes in many ways. Sometimes it is instantaneous. Sometimes it comes like peeling the layers of an onion. Usually both processes are working at the same time.
Even though truth is costly, it carries the fragrance of Christ because Christ is the truth.
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Getting Rid of Spiritual Cellulite
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One thing I know about fasting is this: our fasting must be directed at our own hearts.
Isaiah wrote these words in Isaiah 58:6.
Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry; and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; When you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then your light shall break forth like the morning, Your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you; The glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; You shall cry; and He will say, ‘Here I am.‘
I want you to realize that these instructions follow a rebuke that God speaks about fasting for wrong purposes. God instructed the people that they were not to fast for strife and debate (to prove their own points); they were not to fast in order to afflict their own souls so that God would notice them.
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