Jesus is the only outsider who truly knows the insider our skin keeps veiled.
Because showing requires going. It assumes presence. Accompaniment. I can send you somewhere and not go with you, but how can I show you something without being present?
When you begin to feel lifeless in Him, look for the tourniquet that’s cutting off the life flow. Most often we’ll find it in earthly ties that are cinched too tightly.
Nothing haunts us more than our search for, finally, a sense of place. As it turns out, true belonging is found only in the sovereign palm of God. There alone we find our place, even amid the seasons of moving, planting, uprooting, and replanting. It’s only when we find our place in Him that we find rest. David said it with beautiful simplicity: I am at rest in God alone. PSALM 62:1, CSB.
MATTHEW 5:43-46 Love God. Love one another. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. That about covers it. In Christ’s meticulous census, the community exempt from the love of Christians has a population of exactly zero.
Jesus loves us. He is not scandalized by our failures. He is not limited in what he can do with what’s left after family disasters. Nothing is beyond his redemption when he is invited in. No one with a whit of breath left is beyond the reach of his grace.
In our day and age, the Samaritan woman might have been someone we would condemn. Maybe we would point out the error of her ways rather than reach out to her in love. But what did Jesus do? He loved her enough to talk to her – and then listen. He acknowledged her as a person. Then, and only then, did He begin to instruct her.
Try to resist copying a blueprint from another person’s ministry.
We all want to feel like the most beautiful girl in the room, to be chosen and loved forever. The Cinderella story gives us hope of our impossible dreams becoming true.
Cinderella was made for more than sweeping the floor.
The world promises you so much... and leaves you empty. God’s promises are for real and forever.
If the Word of God is about anything at all, it is about God’s will rather than ours. Our liberty is paradoxically discovered through the will of God rather than our own.
I’ve spent much of my ministry apologizing to people for what appears to be a rather odd show of taste on the part of the One who called me. I have no idea why in this world God has risked His name on someone like me. I will never comprehend such grace and stubbornness of will to teach a woman with a penchant for ditches how to walk a higher path.
We’re all looking for a quick fix, but God is after lasting change – a lifestyle of Christianity.
Even of marriage, the Lord said the two shall become one flesh. He did not say we’d become one heart. He did not say we’d become one mind.
The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do it’s good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.
But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that those we need to forgive most often grasp the least how much they’ve hurt us. If they understood and took responsibility, it wouldn’t have taken the Cross to forgive them. It could have just happened over coffee.
A seed needs planting in order to grow. It needs patience. If the seed was cast from the hand of God, he will surely sprout it, in his time, in his way. If it came from good human intentions, consider it no waste. It was a mortal’s vocalized belief that you have something to offer, and while that person may prove mistaken about the precise form, that faith can act as fertilizer to the soil.
Gethsemane is all the things we fear most except one. We fear we are unheard. We’re sure of it, but it is not true. It was in that original Gethsemane that Jesus, in the words of Hebrews 5:7, “offered prayers and appeals with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard... And we are heard.