You cannot endure what you never enjoy!
If your not daring to believe God for the impossible, your sleeping through some of the best parts of your Christian life.
Maybe God wants to do something beyond your abilities, and he is far less intimidated by your failures and limits than you are.
God knows everything about you – including the ugly parts, the broken parts, and the dysfunctional parts – yet he still believes in you. He still has a future and a hope for you.
Also, sometimes perhaps we stand by passively, waiting for God to fix the issues that He’s called us to fight in His strength. If we’re going to overcome the thoughts that hold us back, first we have to give up the hope that they’ll ever go away. Every second you spend wishing God would take away a struggle is a forfeited opportunity to overcome.
The people who accomplish the most astounding things for God’s glory aren’t the people who feel the least fear. Often they’re the ones who deal with the most intense fear. But instead of letting that fear disable their dreams, they start increasing their capacity for faith. They act on the part of God’s direction they do understand. And they leave the rest up to him.
The more deeply we reinforce our identity in Christ, the more fortified we will be against the onslaught of opposing voices in our lives.
The Enemy can’t keep you from being who God says you are. But he can blind you from realizing who God says you are.
You can’t be afraid to stare into the pupils of the possibility of pain and see it for what it is.
When you realize that God is the only One who really has any lasting reward to give, He becomes the only One whose approval you desperately need. You can rest in the fact that you have it – in full measure – because the work of God’s perfect Son, Jesus, secured your acceptance the moment you placed your faith in Him. Before you ever win or lose, God has turned His face toward you. He has chosen you. And He is pleased.
The only opportunity the chatterbox ever has to download lies into our heads is if we have allowed it first to delete the memory of who we are in Christ.
What I struggle with is believing that God loves me, not just because He has to, but also because He wants to.
When you discover who God is, you discover who you are. And when you discover who you are, you no longer have to struggle with the insecurity and self-promotion that define much of society. You no longer have to strain to measure up, to qualify. You are free to be yourself.
By learning to distinguish between the way God speaks and the way the Enemy speaks, we move toward words of life and grow in the ways of God.
But at the bottom, you see that the same Rock that holds up your life in clear skies is supporting your future when everything around you shakes and rocks and reels.
When the devil wanted to lure Adam and Eve away from their true identity in God, he did it through the power of insinuation.
When you know who you are, you will know what to do.
But sometimes, even though the life you have is good, you’re haunted by a sense that on the other side of the fence that marks off the life you’re living is a greater place that God is preparing for you.
Our lives can be a bit like that. We can spend so much time and energy trying to be like other people that we never let the world hear the real us. What’s worse, we never hear the real us. What.
But this is the starting point, or – more likely – the starting-over point. You can’t go any further until you realize that the worth of your activity for Christ cannot rise above your understanding of your identity in Him. And there is unlimited power in the Word of God. Power to overcome the warped ways we see ourselves. And power to reassemble the image of God that we haven’t always reflected but have already received.