Whenever I find myself feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated, and spiritually exhausted, I always ask myself this question: how much undivided, unplugged time have you been spending with the Lord lately? In this day and age, the distractions are infinite. During our prayer and study time, our phone will ding with a new email or text. The TV will be on in the background and our focus will switch on and off to that. We have a thousand things on our mind that sometimes overload us and our focus on God is clouded. Without removing distractions to really spend quality time in the presence of the Lord, our spirits become weak and famished. Much like with food, if we eat while distracted and just take a few bites, we will not be nourished or satisfied. If we sit down to eat a whole meal, we are nourished.
Jesus prioritized getting away to pray. After getting baptized, he spent forty days in the Judean desert fasting and praying and though He became weak in the flesh, He was strong in spirit and defeated every temptation of Satan. Matthew 14:23 tells us that after preaching to the five thousand and the miracle of the loaves and fish, He stepped away from everything to pray. “After sending them home, He went up into the hills by himself to pray. Night fell while He was there alone.” Before teaching the disciples how to pray, He’d just come back from His uninterrupted prayer time, “Once Jesus was in a certain place praying. As He finished, one of His disciples came to Him and said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray…’” (Luke 11:1). Prioritizing not just prayer, but uninterrupted, unplugged, undivided prayer is crucial to our spiritual well-begin and our relationship with the Lord and our ability to listen to Him. I urge you today to disconnect, even if it’s just for fifteen minutes. Get into a rhythm of setting aside time for the Lord. No phones, no TVs. Train your spirit to meditate on Him. David prayed in Psalm 86:11, “Lord give me an undivided heart…”. Paul wrote: “…we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”(2 Corinthians 10:5). The psalmists spoke so often about being still in the Lord and quieting their hearts and meditating on the Lord. These things are repeated in the Bible and modeled by Jesus Himself. The Lord knows we desperately need this time with Him in order to thrive spiritually. We cannot pour into others if our spiritual cup is empty. We cannot produce fruit if we are not abiding in Him. I challenge you today to set aside some time to turn off the TV, turn off your phone, and meditate on His word. Spend some time alone with the Lord. Give Him your undivided attention. The spiritual nourishment you gain from this will be eternal. The more often you do it, the easier it will get to tune out all the noise and focus solely on Him. You’ll end the time feeling renewed and refreshed. AW Tozer said, “If a man wants to be used by God, he cannot spend all of his time with people.”
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Luke 17:11-19 tells us of one of the miracles Jesus performed during his ministry: “On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. As He entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, ‘Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!’ When He saw them, He said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked Him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then He said to them, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’” (ESV).
I can’t imagine what this was like for the thankful leper. Luke tells us that they kept their distance. The required distance for lepers was 100 paces which would estimate to be 400 feet. In his weakened and shamed state, shouting at the top of his lungs for Jesus, who was 400 feet away from him, “Have mercy on me!” Then, Jesus shouts back, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” That’s all. The law for leprosy had been given to Moses by God in Leviticus 14. “The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: This shall be the ritual for the leprous person at the time of his cleansing: He shall be brought to the priest; the priest shall go out of the camp, and the priest shall make an examination. If the disease is healed in the leprous person, the priest shall command that two living clean birds and cedarwood and crimson yarn and hyssop be brought for the one who is to be cleansed. The priest shall command that one of the birds be slaughtered over fresh water in an earthen vessel. He shall take the living bird with the cedarwood and the crimson yarn and the hyssop, and dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was slaughtered over the fresh water. He shall sprinkle it seven times upon the one who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease; then he shall pronounce him clean, and he shall let the living bird go into the open field. The one who is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave off all his hair, and bath himself in water, and he shall be clean. After that he shall come into the camp, but shall live outside his tent seven days. On the seventh day he shall shave all his hair: of head, beard, eyebrows; he shall shave all his hair. Then he shall wash his clothes, and bathe his body in water, and he shall be clean.” Jesus did not tell them they would be healed. He was asking them to be bold in their faith. To begin the journey back to the populated area to go to the priests while they were yet contagious and ill? Surely if they arrived and nothing had changed the punishment would have been severe. And yet, they set out. Their faith made them well, and what bold faith it was. And as they walked, they were made clean. The sores and scabs fell away. Their skin was restored. I cannot imagine the emotion that accompanied this. They had been separated from their families, from society in general, and now they were just a week away from being welcomed back in. The excitement must have been overwhelming, and most of them were in a hurry to begin the process to start their normal lives. And yet – the thankful leper turned back. While the other nine hurried toward the temple rejoicing, he turned back. Loud, pure, thankful praise began to pour out of him. The Bible tells us it was LOUD. It was unadulterated, beautiful praise that brings joy to the heart of the Father. He ran back toward Jesus and found himself at His feet. Up close. The Son of Man, who had just been a form he could barely make out from 400 feet away was now so close he could touch Him. He fell down in a prostrate position and thanked Him over and over. The thankful leper set his thanks and praise to the Lord above his official cleansing, above everything in his life he would soon gain back. How this must have touched Jesus’ heart. All ten lepers received a gift that day. For the nine that kept on course for the temple, they experienced a bold faith in God like never before. They experienced His restoration and healing. The thankful leper received more than that. In Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, he writes, “A sense of our spiritual leprosy should make us very humble whenever we draw near to Christ. It is enough to refer ourselves to the compassions of Christ, for they fail not. We may look for God to meet us with mercy, when we are found in the way of obedience. Only one of those who were healed returned to give thanks. It becomes us, like him, to be very humble in thanksgivings, as well as in prayers. Christ noticed the one who thus distinguished himself, he was a Samaritan. The others only got the outward cure, he alone got the spiritual blessing.” I encourage you today to give thanks. Make your praises loud. How it touches the heart of the Lord, and how beautifully it corrects our perspective by placing Him ahead of all else in our lives and giving Him the passionate worship He is so deserving of. Give thanks with every prayer, with every breath. He has done great things in our lives. My daughter Lucy is extremely perceptive. When she was two years old, I worked a very high-stress, high-stakes executive job and sometimes on the rough days despite all my attempts to maintain a laid-back and relaxed evening for her, she still noticed. One night she looked at me and said, “It’s going to be fine, Momma because you have Jesus inside you.”
My heart was so convicted that night. Paul describes his earthly troubles which included severe physical persecution, far worse troubles than my own, as “momentary light afflictions”, which was conviction to my soul all by itself. He writes of his troubles: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18). He also writes in Romans, “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (Romans 8:18). How right my tiny girl was – reminding me to look at the things unseen instead of the things seen. She was reminding me that nothing we go through in this life is worth comparing to the glory and the triumph that is to come because of the price Jesus paid for us. My perspective changed that day so very drastically. Until then, my joy depended on what happened to me. It depended on my circumstances. It depended on my momentary light afflictions. You will never have true lasting joy or contentment until you set your eyes on the things above. When I shift my focus from the temporary to the eternal, from things behind to things ahead, from this broken world around me to Christ within me, everything changes. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.” When our focus is on Christ and we are glorifying Him in all the ordinary, day-to-day things, those things do not seem so stressful anymore. Many things we once considered an affliction will now be an act of worship. When the Lord shapes and changes us, there are many times that the changes come from simply focusing on Him. The hard work on our part lies in us pulling our focus from our own discontentment and circumstances and placing them on Him instead. Daily now, I pray for a Godly perspective. We cannot in our own flesh view any of our problems, large or small, as momentary light afflictions. In the radiance of His presence, though, that is the very most a problem could ever be. When our focus is on Christ, our lives themselves will evangelize. What we speak and how we react and the choices we make will reflect Christ in us. When we keep our eyes on Him, the things of this world grow dim in His glory. I adore Psalm 42:11
“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” I love that each psalm is such a beautiful and vulnerable articulation of authentic prayer and praise before the Lord. I find myself, much like the psalmists, commanding my soul to praise the Lord when I am walking through the valleys in my life. If I’m being honest, I find myself doing this on a daily basis. We were created to worship, but for our human nature – our flesh –this is not the natural response. Making praise our response in any situation is something that we work at every day. Galatians 2:20 says, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Daily we need to die to self. He must increase, I must decrease. It will not be a natural progression, but something we will continually command our soul to do with each new circumstance. Praising the Lord even when it hurts does not show indifference to our struggles like our flesh would lead us to believe, but it does show our hearts to the Lord and invites Him into every part of our lives, especially the ones in which our flesh would try to be angry with Him and ask Him why. 1. It shows Him that even in a place of lack, He is all we need (CS Lewis said, “He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only”). 2. It shows Him that He is still more valuable to us than whatever is causing us pain. 3. It shows the enemy that God is the authority over this situation and we cannot be defeated by it. 4. It denies our problems a place of influence over our lives and our souls and gives God that place of influence instead. He is still on the throne. 5. Most importantly, it glorifies the Lord and He is worthy of our praise all the time. The Lord does not change based on our feelings. He is steadfast. He is holy. He is good all the time. Praising in the storm will not feel comfortable. It won’t feel comfortable the first time or the one hundred and first time you do it. It is so much more comfortable for your flesh to remain in a place alone with your despair. Dear friends, you do not have to be alone in your despair. God will not call you prematurely out of your despair. In fact, He is the very type of Friend who will sit in the depth of the despair with you. He is the Great Comforter. He will continue to shape you and mold you in these valleys. A great triumph of our Lord is that He takes this sin and darkness and brokenness in our world and in our lives and works it together for our good every time much to the enemy’s dismay. When we think of the psalms, we think of the beautiful and poetic language that describes our Lord in all of his splendor. But many of them were written in the valley seasons. They aren’t beautiful or poetic. They are a broken and contrite heart before the Lord. They are a soul recognizing their daily and desperate need for Him. They are inviting the Lord into a very intimate and vulnerable place in their lives. In order to praise the Lord in spirit and in truth as Jesus commanded, we need to worship in every season. We need to worship from an authentic place in our hearts. Our response in the valleys is just as important as our thanksgiving on the hilltop. Prayer: Father, I ask You to help me daily to make my response prayer and praise first and foremost in all circumstances. I want to invite Your presence into every part of my life. I want to have a heart open and humbled before You at all times. Thank You for your steadfast love in all seasons. I am so grateful and in awe of Your triumph in all of the valley seasons of my life. Amen. I will never forget being called to the church I am at now. See, this church is one that my father pastored for twenty years. I served as a worship leader in this church for a couple of years before he was called elsewhere. When they left, I left not long afterward. I was the only member of my immediate family who lived in the area and I had just turned twenty and it had gotten difficult to answer questions about them at every service. Three years and three months after I left, as I was praying during the worship and prayer part of the service at the new church I’d started attending, all He said was, “Did you leave because you wanted to, or because I asked you to?”
It wrecked me. I left before He asked me to. I knew deep in my heart I was supposed to go back. “They’re going to be upset with me for leaving before. This is the most complicated situation You could call me back to,” I thought. I wondered if I was musically skilled enough. I wondered if I was bold enough to be a leader as I am typically very reserved and soft-spoken. Excuses. God is very familiar with those. Moses had five excuses when God called him to Egypt to ask Pharaoh to set the Israelites free (Exodus 4). Jonah just ran away (Jonah 1). I most definitely had some. There is an old expression, “God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called.” God calls us in our imperfection because that is the only state He can call us in. We will not be perfect until we reach Heaven but there is so much work to do until then. I’ve found that if we give God ourselves, if we give Him our ‘yes’, He takes care of the rest. There is nothing we can give God that He doesn’t already have other than ourselves. 2 Timothy 2:21 says, “Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work” (ESV). He does not ask us to be qualified, He asks us to be ready. Despite my own excuses and doubt, the very next day I contacted the new pastor and church board and found that the worship leader they’d had during that time had just announced a cross-country move and the timing was absolutely perfect. God’s timing always is. The product of living within the will of God by accepting that calling has been a peace that surpasses all understanding, and all the fears I had at first have melted away. The beautiful thing about giving God our ‘yes’ is that it has three benefits. It furthers the kingdom – the first and foremost benefit. It allows the Lord to bless, encourage, and edify His people through us. And – it builds and strengthens us, even in the hardest moments of leadership, even when we are weak. In this current season, in my role as worship leader, I have been shaped and molded so much more than I would have otherwise been.God truly does work all things together for good and I have tasted and seen this firsthand. If you are feeling unqualified today, whether it be doubts about your calling or even how to gracefully and bravely forge ahead in your calling during this trying season, allow me to remind you that the Lord has not asked you to leave yet. You are not done yet. You are here and perfectly positioned for such a time as this. In difficult times as a leader, you may be asked questions or be presented problems or struggles that you are going through yourself, but even so I encourage you today to come to your Heavenly Father with your concerns and your fears and then give God your ‘yes’ again. Let Him know you are ready for whatever He would call you to. Allow Him to quiet your heart and dismiss your fears. Billy Graham once said, “The will of God cannot take you where the grace of God cannot sustain you.” Paul writes: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” -Philippians 3:12-14 There’s a couple expressions we often use when we are going through a situation – “I’m looking for God in this situation” or “I found God”, when in reality it’s not a matter of finding Him, it’s a matter of noticing He has in fact been there the entire time. He does not hide until we seek Him; trickery is the enemy’s game. He does, however, ask us to seek Him (Jeremiah 29:13). He asks this of us not because He is hiding, not because He is absent, but because He sought us first. He created us for Divine relationship with Him. He created us to be loved by Him and gave us free will to choose to love Him in return. The beautiful thing about seeking the Lord is that the more we seek Him the more we find. There is a beautiful old song I love that sings, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus / look full in His wonderful face / and the things of earth will grow strangely dim / in the light of His glory and grace”.
I’ve learned when I am in a place of always being aware of His presence with me, when I am resting in His presence and actively seeking after Him deeper and deeper still, the day-to-day trials of this earth grow dim in His glorious light. I spend so much time seeking after answers, and when I switch my focus to seeking after Him, I find He is the answer. When I am aware of His steadfast nearness in my life, I can look back on times I was not aware of His nearness and see exactly where His light was. Zephaniah 3:17 says, “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” Deuteronomy 31:6 says, “Be strong and courageous…for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will never leave you or forsake you.” Romans 8:38-39 says, “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”Jesus took the abandonment of the Father that we so deserved on the cross. He paid our debt so we could be in constant fellowship with our Lord now and forevermore. Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who ask receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8). The Lord is not hiding from you. He is not absent from you or your situation. AW Tozer said, “You can see God from anywhere if your mind is set to love and obey Him.” Prayer: Father, we ask you to help us set our hearts and minds on you. Help us to be sensitive to your steadfast nearness. Help us to quiet our hearts to hear Your voice. We thank You for seeking us and loving us first. We want to seek after You like never before. We thank You for the gift of allowing Yourself to be found when we seek after You. We praise You for all that You are. In Jesus name, amen. There’s security in control. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I spent most of my life believing that to a fault, and the Lord is still doing work on my heart in this matter. I have a plan for everything, a plan for if that plan fails, and when things don’t work out I find myself frustrated. The Lord often has to gently remind me that He is the Great Author. He is wise and His plans for me are good, and I need to trust in Him. Often in life, we have a choice between trusting in Him or trusting ourselves. We choose ourselves many times because we believe we know what the outcome will be. We feel safe. We think God tends to pull us out of our comfort zones. However, we should strive daily to live a life without comfort zones. If we take comfort and shelter in the Lord, there is no place too far and no call too impossible. The major difference between our plans and God’s are that our plans are generally made subconsciously out of fear. Our Plan A and Plan B are created because we worry about tomorrow, as if our plans could cure our worry. Only faith can drown out fear.God’s plans are, like all else He does, made out of love.
Jesus addressed this often and gently. In the Lord’s prayer, He taught us to first pray for God’s will to be done, and then instructed us to pray for provision for the day – “Give us this day our daily bread…”. He spoke about this in Matthew: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you – you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeedyour Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:25-34). Billy Graham wrote in my favorite book of his, Unto the Hills, “When our hearts are surrendered totally to the will of God, then we delight in seeing Him use us in any way He desires. Our plans and desires begin to agree with His, and we accept His direction in our lives. Our sense of joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment in life increases, no matter what the circumstances, if we are in the center of God’s will…Miss (Amy) Carmichael quoted Prebendary Webb-Peploe as having said, ‘Joy is not gush; Joy is not jolliness. Joy is simply perfect acquiescence in God’s will, because the soul delights itself in God Himself.” All of the things we try and fail to accomplish in our own flesh under the illusion that we are in full control – a steady peace and a constant joy – are things that are a natural product of surrendering to the Lord and dwelling in His presence all of our days. In Him there is peace, joy, and provision. They are not things you can find separate from Him. I arrived at this conclusion and felt the wind knocked out of me at first – could He be this good that what He needs us to do first and foremost is rest and trust in Him? His yoke is so easy and so light (Matthew 11:30). These gifts are free to us – what a good, good Father we have. Hallelujah! One of my favorite hymns says, “All to Jesus I surrender / All to Him I freely give / I will ever love and trust Him / In His presence daily live”. These lyrics are a daily prayer I pray. Daily we need to lay down our pride and take up the cross. Daily we need to die to self. Daily we need to surrender to the Lord. I encourage you today to pray this prayer of surrender. There is no greater joy than the joy of a person who dwells within the will of God. There is no greater peace than in His presence. There is no fear where there is great trust and faith in Him. My daughter is nearly four, and she’s inherited my tendency to become overwhelmed by having too much to do at once. This shines through the most when she’s tasked with picking up her toys at the end of the day. I find myself telling her often, “Lucy, you’re only able hold one thing at a time.” This calms her down and she’s able to finish picking up her toys.
We’re much like that, aren’t we? Holding onto so much that our spirits are overwhelmed. It says when Jesus called the disciples, they “dropped everything and followed Him.” You cannot cling to Christ when your hands are full. Most of the time the things we are holding onto are our sins, our failures, our shortcomings, our pain. There’s an earthly misconception that I’ve heard quoted on so many films and in so many books, that our pain and our scars make us who we are. Don’t buy into this, dear brothers and sisters. Your pain and scars and sins do not make you who you are. God created you to be who you are. (Psalm 139). Never give sin and shame and fear and scars that much authority over you. When Jesus forgives our sins, He remembers them no more and He expects the same of us. If you do recall them, may it be only to recall the beautiful grace and mercy and love of the Father through Christ Jesus. If you’re holding onto these things, you won’t experience the fullness of freedom that is offered to us in forgiveness. C.S Lewis once wrote, “I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him” (from a letter to Miss Breckenridge, April 19, 1951). Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:13-17 upon remembering His sins, “I am grateful to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He judged me faithful and appointed me to His service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the foremost. But for that very reason I received mercy, so that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience, making me an example to those who would come believe in Him for eternal life. To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (ESV) Paul humbly recalled his sins to display the glory of Christ Jesus. It was Jesus who was glorified through this recollection and Jesus who Paul was holding onto. Paul knew as we do that when Jesus left the tomb, nothing else left with Him. The sin and the fear and the pain that comes with this world stayed in the grave. It stayed defeated. We remained victorious through His great sacrifice. I want to encourage you today, dear friends, to drop everything and follow Him, cling to Him. You can only hold onto one thing at a time and the choice is yours. The freedom and the victory over these things have been yours since Resurrection Day, and they’ll be yours forever. “I pray to God - my life a prayer - and wait for what He’ll say and do.” Psalm 130:5 There is a beautiful Oswald Chambers quote that I remind myself of daily from his renowned devotional My Utmost for His Highest. “Has God trusted you with His silence - a silence that has great meaning? God’s silences are actually His answers... Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give you the very blessings you ask if you refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible— with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, then praise Him— He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes.” When Jesus taught us to pray, He was not teaching us a prayer to recite. He was teaching us something very valuable about the way the Father parents His children. He was showing us the level of pure and absolute trust we could have in a good Father who is wisdom and provision over all areas of our lives. He began His prayer with praise, “hallowed be Thy Name”. I would challenge you to begin all of your prayers in this manner. Many times in my prayer life I’ve given God a to-do list instead of engaged in conversation with Him and spent time in His presence. Please do not miss out on making the most of prayer. It’s one of the most sacred gifts we have been given - to come boldly before the throne of God. To worship and study at His feet. If I begin my prayers with praise not only is the heart of God blessed, it places Him as the first priority of my life. Not my to-do list. Not the things I want easier or better here in my life on earth. I also find that fear has no place in the presence of God and is forced to leave. The absence of fear quiets our souls making room for His perfect peace and allowing us to listen to His voice. And when there is silence, it is an answer of learning to rest. There is a special joy that cannot be taken from you in learning to rest in the Lord at the heart of all circumstances. Please do not mistake His silence as a pending response. Like a Good Shepherd, he cares for us, and in the silence we learn so much about Him. His confidence is contagious. The fact that He is not worried about our circumstance is all the reason we need not worry. The fact that He is able to sleep through the storms is all the more reason for us to trust. He also knows that in the silence we will seek Him out even harder and even deeper. And I have found in times of silence while I was waiting for my answer, I found infinitely more blessings and peace in the Divine fellowship I sought out with Him than I ever would have in the original answer I was seeking. Only He can satisfy our souls. He is the prize. He is what our hearts are yearning for. Where He is there is peace, there is fullness of joy and there is love. Your pain, your worst trials, your deepest heartache, they matter so much to the Lord. Jesus wept bitterly with His friends when Lazarus died (John 11). Make your requests known to the Lord (Philippians 4:6). Cast all your cares upon the Lord, for He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7). He will answer all of your prayers. If silence is how He has answered your prayers today, I want to challenge you to rest in the quiet and calm of Him. Keep your eyes on Him and you will not sink. We pray “thy will be done” and He is constantly working things together for our good (Romans 8:28). His past faithfulness demands our present trust - when he calls us out of our comfort zone and into the unknown, and when silence is our answer. A couple of years ago, on the cusp of the toughest year of my life, I read something that changed my perspective on things for the rest of my life. The quote was, “Instead of asking why this is happening to me, I will ask what this is trying to teach me.”
I read the words nonchalantly, not realizing how valuable they would prove to be. They’ve turned my thought process around on many occasions and force me to welcome the shaping and molding that comes with being a child of God. It reminds me to enjoy the healing process. It reminds me to embrace change. It reminds me to look for the way God is working all things together for my good instead of my anxiety over the things right in front of me. It keeps my eyes on Him instead of the wind and waves. It reminds me to try to see the bigger picture, and simultaneously reminds me of the hope I have that I will get through whatever this is. Even death is victory after what Jesus paid for us. So in this present storm, we still have reason to praise, reason for hope, and a sustainable joy and peace that surpasses all understanding. There is so much heartbreak during this time. There’s so much heartbreak in this world already. Still, we can focus on what’s being forged in this fire. For me, it’s made me rely even more heavily on the one steadfast thing in my life – the Lord. “Normal” and “routine” are not as guaranteed as we believe them to be, and especially right now we look at that through rose-colored glasses. Any moment can change anything. But the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases (Lamentations 3:22-23). He’s been there before the beginning and He will be there after the end. It’s also taught me to slow down. This is the age of instant gratification. We never stop, never slow down. Rest is crucial. It’s been a slow journey all my days learning to rest – physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. While I don’t always get it right, and while more often than not the Lord has to remind me that I need His help when I swear I can do things all by myself, I’ve made some progress on learning about and practicing rest, and it’s been delightful and humbling and beautiful.
This season has just solidified my belief that rest is holy and necessary. It’s also given us so many opportunities to spend time alone in the presence of the Lord. Take advantage of that time, and treasure it. In the middle of this storm and all of our storms that didn’t calm when this started, He is our peace. Some verses that offer encouragement during this time are: 1 Peter 5:7, Lamentations 3:22-23, Psalm 46:1-3, Proverbs 18:10, Nehemiah 8:10, Deuteronomy 33:27, Deuteronomy 31:8, Psalm 32:7-8, Isaiah 30:15, Isaiah 43:1-3, Philippians 4:6, John 14:27, Psalm 34:4, Psalm 26:1-3, Joshua 1:9 I want to encourage all of you today to find out what the Lord is teaching YOU during this time. He’s a very personal God. He’s in the waiting, and He is always working things together for our good. Keep your eyes on Him, and allow Him to shape you, forge you in the fire. Strengthen your relationship with Him and pray hard. God is still moving, He’s still on the throne, and He loves you more than you know, with a steadfast love that isn’t going to change even though everything around us is. |
AuthorKatie Rusch. Archives
January 2021
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