PART ONE

I slept with this passage...Isaiah 30... open on my chest last night. It has been speaking loudly to me all week. Please read it and I am going to put my thoughts on paper when Morgan will let me. I am super tired today and am about to leave.
Some key things the very first verse is written to the Israelites, God's chosen, His beloved. He calls them, through Isaiah, obstinate children. They carry out plans that are not His. Did you hear that? How many times do we carry out plans that are not His? I know personally that when I choose to go at it on my own it brings devastation. I looked up to the sky the other day when I had a flashback of the past and told Him I was so sorry for ever doing that thing. If I had not I would not be experiencing the gut punch to the stomach when I think about it. I prayed that He would help me to believe Him and keep me from my own foolish ways. The bottom line is that when we let a little sin in the door...if we do not repent and I mean quick...we begin to heap sin upon sin. Think about heaping one pancake upon another upon another (are southerners the only ones with pancakes) until you have one fat delicious stack. It looks so good and delicious that you can already feel the bread on your thighs and then you are done eating, you are sick, and you are imploding swollen with that bread. Yuck...your hunger turns to a state of being lethargic. You regret the pancakes...or maybe this is a bad analogy. But that has been my experience. I was listening to Dr. David Jeremiah the other day and he spoke on temptation. He said that he believes that when we are faced with temptation we have a small window of time where the Lord provides a way of escape for us to take. If we do not take it we will walk past our opportunity. For me personally this is true. I wondered why I was experiencing failure in a certain area and it was because I was putting myself in a position to fail. Looking back there was ALWAYS a door of escape...I just chose to yield to the flesh and not the Spirit and I did not take that door. Then after horrible consequences I began to see that I did not even want to walk down the same road at all and that the consequences for my disobedience would bring me so much pain that I just did not even want to go there. He spoke of three things that we are to flee from and they are in Scripture I just don't have time to link: greed, idolatry, and se+ual immorality. Anyway, Gods word is always true and He delights in our obedience far more than sacrifice. The sacrifice He desires is a broken and contrite Spirit...the one who desires to do His will. Anyway, we are to flee from those three things above. Why flee? Because WE GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY in our flesh...CAN NOT MAKE the decision in the middle of the bowing down. We can not decide to flirt with those things and stand up to the temptation we will fall every time. Sometimes our way of escape can mean a change of jobs, not driving the same route, not going to a certain place. I am saying not waiting until the heat of passion to make a decision when it is clearly outside of Gods will. I was reminded this morning of how I can do nothing on my own and that if we are God's children we have the Holy Spirit to help us. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. To the degree that we are fully yielded to Him is the degree that we will be free. My freedom in Christ or lack thereof has always been an issue of Authority. I do not want Him to look at me and say Jenny you are obstinate and you are heaping sin on top of sin. I know so many times in my past that has been the case. Verse 2 of Isaiah 30 speaks of going down to Egypt. When I think of Israels being delivered from the land of slavery I think of my own symbolic Egypt. The Lord has delivered me from much and I have turned back around in my life and believed the lie that my land of slavery was better and gone down to Egypt to find help filling my voids instead of filling them with the Spirit. I put this in generic terms so hopefully you can relate. So please don't make assumptions as to what I am talking about specifically as far as sin. Just like them we go to this world to try to fill a void and yet if we would come with our gaping souls open to Jesus He would gladly fill us and the fruit of that would far outweigh what the world and its TEMPORARY lust brings. TO BE CONTINUED