Prayer: Our Time Saver..... Dr. Charles Stanley

 Prayer: Our Time Saver

Dr. Charles Stanley

Psalms 143:5-12

What do you think about when you wake up? Are your thoughts instantly focused on the day ahead, or are they centered on the Lord? Although most of us have busy lives that consume much of our time and attention, the most important and time-saving part of each day is that spent in quiet solitude with God.

Yet many believers feel so rushed that they don't think there's time for the Lord. They immediately jump onto the treadmill of life and then wonder why they're so frustrated, confused, and dissatisfied. Even if their desire is to follow God, they don't know where He's going since they haven't stopped to get directions for the day. There's also a disconnect because they've ignored their relationship with Him. No one can have intimacy with Christ without daily communication.

Perhaps the problem is our own human logic. We think spending time reading the Bible and praying each morning will result in having less time and lower productivity. However, when we seek Christ's direction and wisdom for the day and invite Him to control our lives, He'll accomplish more through us than we can do by ourselves. He'll give us wisdom for good decisions, increase our strength and energy, and free us from time-wasting anxiety.

Are you too busy for the Lord? If so, you're denying yourself the blessing of an intimate relationship with Christ. When you make time for Him, He'll fill you with peace and joy, guide your decisions, grant you wisdom, empower you to obey, make you more productive, and comfort you with His love.

His Love Pursues Us..... Craig Denison

 

His Love Pursues Us

Craig Denison

Weekly Overview:

1 Corinthians 13:13 says, “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” The greatest of all aspects of the Christian life is love. Love is to be at the foundation of all we do, all we are, and all we hold on to. If we focus on love and allow the Holy Spirit to strip everything else away, what will be left is a life of blessed simplicity rooted in face-to-face relationship with our heavenly Father. As we spend time this week looking at the simplicity of love, I pray that all the weighty, frivolous things of the world that rob you of an abundant life fall away in light of the glorious goodness of God’s unconditional and wholly available love for you.

Scripture:“We love because he first loved us.”  1 John 4:19

Devotional:           

The fact that we are pursued by the Creator of the universe is an unfathomable truth perfectly illustrating the amazing love our heavenly Father has for us. Ephesians 2:8 says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Those of us who have believed in and accepted the free gift of salvation have been lifted out of the world’s foundation of works-based living and ushered into a new standard of grace. By grace alone we have wonderful, restored relationship with the God who passionately pursues us in every season of life. And by grace alone our lives are now based on the unconditional love of our good Father.

1 John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” All that God does is love because it is his very nature. Every word of Scripture was authored because he loves us. Every good thing we have in life is only available to us because he loves us. The fact that you and I have air in our lungs is a miraculous demonstration of God’s overwhelming faithfulness. The fact that we can enter into such a depth of relationship with a perfect, holy God reveals his heart to pursue us.

Revelation 3:20 says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” This passage in Revelation is God’s word to the lukewarm church in Laodicea. God doesn’t just knock on the doors of hearts already filled with passion for him. He doesn’t just knock on the doors of the lost. He knocks on the doors of the hearts that are in desperate need of inner revival through his tangible, powerful love. He knocks on the doors of the hearts whose flame has been squelched by the cares and stresses of this world that he might come and reignite passionate communion between our spirit and the Holy Spirit.

The God of heaven and earth is passionately pursuing you right now. No matter how close you are to him, he is knocking on the door of your heart, asking to come in and meet with you once again. He’s not knocking just to fix you. He’s not knocking just to make you do something for him. He simply wants to meet with you. He simply wants to love you.

How you respond to the passionate pursuit of God is totally up to you. There is grace for you today to seek the face of your heavenly Father. There is grace to open up your heart and accept the wonderful gift of encountering God’s presence. There is grace to know and experience the depths of God’s love for you. The question before you is simply this: will you choose today to let God love you?

Guided Prayer:

1. Meditate on the heart of your heavenly Father to pursue you in love.

“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”  Isaiah 49:15

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  1 John 4:10

“I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”  Jeremiah 31:3

2. Open up your heart to your loving Father. Ask him to reveal his nearness and love. Ask him to reveal his presence that you might spend time truly meeting with him today.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20

“But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.”  Deuteronomy 4:29

3. Take time to simply let God love you. Open up the places of your heart that are broken, wounded, and cause you pain. Confess any sins that are holding you back from walking in the fullness of relationship available to you. Don’t move on from God’s presence until you feel he has done the work he desires to do today.

Taking time to sit in the presence of God and simply receive his love is foundational to every other aspect of Christianity. All of eternity is simply about being with our Creator. It’s all about allowing God to love us and giving him our hearts in return. May Ephesians 3:14-19 stir your heart to truly seek a revelatory knowledge of God’s love for you:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Extended Reading: John 15

The Kind of Friend I Want To Be..... MEGHAN RYAN

 The Kind of Friend I Want To Be

MEGHAN RYAN

“But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.” 1 John 2:20 (NIV) 

My thumbs flipped through my phone to start scrolling social media. Without much thought of what would pass my eyes that morning, I was stopped when I saw the picture: a group of my old friends, all smiling and looking like they were having the best time celebrating a big life event together.

We all used to be good friends. Friends who, at one time, I would have expected to call me in a moment like this. Things were different now, and when I made some hard decisions to change the way I had been living, it put distance between us. I was still in touch with a few of them, but it wasn’t the same.

No matter how much time has passed, the sting remains. It feels like rejection, and it’s hard not to take it personally. Is it me? Did I say or do something to make them not include me? Do they not like me anymore? Or am I just not a cool enough friend to be included?

I found myself wrestling with all-too-familiar feelings of:
Not being the first choice …
Not getting invited to the party …
Being the last to know someone’s big news …
Only getting called in a crisis and not getting called to celebrate …

In the middle of those emotions, I found myself remembering 1 John 2:20: “But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth.”

The word “anointed” means “to be set apart.” Meaning that, in Christ, we have the Holy Spirit and therefore are anointed. We have been given a mission to bring hope, freedom and Good News about who Jesus is to a world that desperately needs it.

What is the truth we know? The truth we know is found in the person of Jesus, who seemed to always get called. He got called when someone needed to be healed, (Mark 5:21-43) when the dead needed to be raised, (John 11:38-44) when the hungry needed to be fed (Matthew 14:13-21) and when someone’s sin needed to be called out. (John 4) Most of the stories we read about Jesus involve Him stepping into a crisis and not a celebration. And many of the people Jesus was there for eventually turned away from Him, too.

Sometimes the whole “following Jesus” thing feels like it costs being the “cool” friend.

Even knowing all of this, it’s easy to still want to be the kind of friend who is admired, included and fun. But what do I want more?

I want to be anointed more than I want to be admired.

I want to make an impact for the Kingdom more than I want to be included in earthly events.

I want my friends to experience freedom more than I want them to think I’m fun.

Can I tell you something else? Who you are is not found in what other people think of you; it’s found in the person of Jesus and who God has called you to be.

We are called to be women who speak the truth in love, (Ephesians 4:15) who spur each other on (Hebrews 10:24) and encourage one another. (Hebrews 3:13) This doesn’t mean we let people walk all over us; it means we have grace and seek friendships where both people are putting effort into the relationship.

The friendships you long for are possible.

Being set apart sets us up to be the friends who help set each other free. The friends who point each other back to our identities in Christ, who fight for each other and who stay when things get hard. The friends who try to live like Jesus.

This is the kind of friend I want to be.

God, thank You for the Truth You offer us in Jesus. Thank You that, even when rejection stings, You are there. Will You teach us how to be the type of friends You’ve called us to be? Will You provide the friends we need in this season? Show us how to live “set apart” even when it’s hard. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Where Are We Connected?..... By Lynette Kittle

 Where Are We Connected? (Proverbs 3:19)

By Lynette Kittle

Today’s Bible Verse: “By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations, by understanding He set the heavens in place” - Proverbs 3:19

Recently our landline phone and Internet were down for a few days. Having it out of commission caused our family to feel disconnected from the rest of the world and sadly in some ways, even to each other.

Shopping, paying bills, researching, communicating with friends and loved ones, basically everything is being funneled through technology.

Only when our communication network shut down did we realize how much our lives had become dependent on it.

Funny how we didn’t see or feel it when it's all running properly but when it failed, we started realizing how so many things in our lives are connected to it running properly and how the loss of it causes feelings of disconnection.

Where Is Our Source?

Taking a step back to reassess the situation, questions arose, asking ourselves if we are relying too much on the wisdom of the world for our sources, resources, and knowledge than looking directly to God and His Word?

Has technology taken God’s place in our lives, being our number one go-to spot when we have questions or are in need?

There’s something comforting about holding God’s Word in our hands, carrying it with us, and even in searching through the pages. Even better when we take time to memorize His Word, which cannot be shut down, turned off, torn apart, burned up, or taken away from us.

What Happens When Technology Fails Us?

Having so much of what we do on a daily basis centralized in one place causes a sense of loss when it fails us, like everything has been taken away from us and there is no place to turn.

But it shouldn’t be any surprise to us to know how anytime we put our hope in things other than God’s word, we will end up disappointed. Matthew 24:35, explains how all things will pass away except for His words because His promises will never fail.

Man-made sources like satellites, Internet wires strewn across the ocean floors, frequency waves, and more are all going to fail us and pass away.

One True Source

Rather than depending on technology to keep us going, there is Someone to whom we can turn for every need. The One who is not our last resort but has always and forever our first place to turn.

Colossians 1:17, explains how, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

Although the world wants us to believe information is holding us together, it’s God who is the source of all wisdom and understanding. Even though it may feel like it, technology is not our answer and isn’t our center or source of life.

As Colossians 1:16 describes, “For in Him all things were created: things in Heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him.

Ambition..... by Shawn McEvoy

 Ambition

by Shawn McEvoy

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands.
1 Thessalonians 4:11

Quaint, right?

Be honest; read today's verse and then try telling your children that such is all they should aspire to; that, essentially, unheralded blue-collar work should be their ambition. Aim high? Sounds more like settling for anonymity.

What could Paul be getting at? Sure there are times we all grow tired of the rat race and perhaps dream about a scenario where we forsake the city and a high-pressure job for a more pastoral setting, crafting furniture and knick-knacks, living in harmony. Is that what this verse is getting at?

Let's look deeper.

The Greek word philotim means to labor, endeavor, strive, study to become. It is used in three places in the New Testament. The first is quoted above, regarding ambition, which sounds not much like what we typically imagine when we think of things to be ambitious about.

Another place the word appears is Romans 15:20, where Paul writes, "And thus I aspired to preach the gospel..."

In 2 Corinthians 5:9 we read, "We have as our ambition... to be pleasing to Him."

Contrast these goals with the first definition under "ambition" on Dictionary.com:

1. an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment.

I thought so. The more I study, the more I philotim to know God, the more I understand how different the Word and the world really are. Perhaps folks who live in other parts of the globe are less shocked to learn such lessons. For me, born, raised, working, and raising children in these United States, the lesson is always one of dichotomy, paradox, and sadly wondering if I'm handicapped beyond repair from truly following.

One of my bosses is fond of saying that in business, it's crucial to determine early on whether a person you are dealing with is a "make me rich" or a "make me famous" person. Everyone, the story goes, is either one or the other at heart. And truly, according to the world's definition of ambition, that makes sense. We all have something we want that drives us.

Lately I've been wondering a lot at where this has gotten me. Everything I have done, accomplished, purposed, learned, studied (i.e. "philotim-ed") in life has led to... what, exactly? What goal? When I pray that the Lord would make my life useful and provide for me and let me know His will and keep me safe it's all so... what? So I can watch my TV programs every night without acid in my stomach and with an easy feeling in my chest? As opposed to having to really live by faith?

Today I read this quote by the English poet Samuel Johnson: "To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition." Instantly my face fell. I knew that feeling all too well. All my aspirations only lead to the place of comfort, happiness, the path of least resistance. What's wrong with that? It quickly becomes a place that feels too far from God, too self-centered, too out of the loop, too far removed to be making a real difference.

So what then is the ambition of the Christ-follower?

• Lead a quiet life
• Attend to your own business
• Work with your hands
• Preach the gospel
• Be pleasing to Him

In other words, don't stress yourself with fame, or getting and spending, always climbing, making more more more. Don't bother with being a busy-body or a gossip. Be creative; let God work through you. Tell others about Him. And live by faith.

It's so simple, almost too simple. Ambition isn't something far out there, some unabashed worldly success beyond our dreams, though that's where God may take us. It all goes back to the very reason God made man in the first place - to have someone to know Him.

And there's just not anything quaint about that.

Intersecting Faith & Life: The bulleted points above might sound too easy, too simple. And they can be. But when was the last time you made any or all of these your ambition? Pick one and practice it today, perhaps preaching the gospel to someone, perhaps seeking God's pleasure more than your own in any decisions you make.

Further Reading

Romans 15:20
2 Corinthians 5:9-31

A Prayer for When You Covet Another’s Success..... By: Alisha Headley

 A Prayer for When You Covet Another’s Success

By: Alisha Headley

Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” - Matthew 9:37-38

Have you ever wondered if there is room for you? Maybe you feel compelled to start something new or pursue a new path, but there are already so many who have proven their success before you that space feels limited. Perhaps you have had a dream tucked in your heart from the time you were young, yet you see someone else doing something similar and it seems to diminish your large dream into a much smaller one.

I can relate. In the past few years, I left my career to pursue what I felt God was calling me to: women’s ministry. I began following other women in ministry, their blogs, reading their books, and their social media platforms. More often times than not, rather than be inspired by their work, the enemy crept in telling me lies that their ideas are better than mine. That they already were doing the work needed, so there was no more room for me. That opportunities were scarce. That their success is already proven to be far greater than mine. That the work for me is limited.

This is what Jesus reminds us is the first part of today’s scripture: “the harvest is great, but the workers are few…"

Be encouraged by this passage. The harvest is great, not small. Others' success doesn’t limit ours. We serve a God that has unlimited, abundant opportunities He has placed before us. To write. To speak. To serve. To create. To dream big. To be and become.

Don’t be entangled any longer in the enemy’s lie that everything is scarce and seeing another person’s success as better than yours. Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

The truth is: there is an abundant need in the world for YOU. The world is just waiting to hear from you, and God wants you to partner with Him in Kingdom work here on earth. He created your voice for specific people that are in need of your specific work, your gifts, and your calling.

The second part of this passage says to “pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.”

Oh friends, how assuring to know that we can pray to the one in charge of endless opportunities. He will make a way for your success and equip you and only you for the specific assignment He has for you.

Dear Lord,

We thank you for the reminder in Scripture that there is plenty of work; that the harvest is plentiful. Thank you for creating us with only our unique voice and purpose. We don’t have to feel left behind by the success of others. Instead, help us to cheer others on.

Thank you for choosing to partner with us to help advance your Kingdom here on earth. Today, I’m asking you to continue to bless the women around me in similar assignments as mine. Change my heart to have one of love and encouragement, rather than doubt and covetousness. Forgive me for believing the lies the enemy has discouraged me with telling me that opportunities are scarce.

Thank you that we can pray to you, the one in charge of the harvest and ask you to send us into the field. Father, keep us focused on you and continue to stir in our hearts a passion to make your name known. Please infuse our hearts with the truth that this world needs our exact voice and the exact skills you have blessed us with. We love you so much.

In Jesus’ Name,

Amen.