Moving from fear to faith!

Are the eyes of the Lord still looking back and forth across the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him? When the Son of Man comes will He find faith on the earth? My answers to both of those are a resounding YES! 

In all honesty, I have been through a lot in my tenure here on planet earth, yet I can say from the depths of my soul that It is Well!  Whatever the enemy has meant for my harm God has used it for His good.  I was sitting in my kitchen floor earlier thinking some things through and how thankful I am that along the way I have known the Lord in ways I could never have known Him apart from suffering.  We become so afraid of the unknown and the what-ifs that we can become paralyzed and waste our life here always trying to play it safe.  Some decisions we have to make are life altering and they are hard yet they have to get made.  Just like Gods chosen people.  He pulled them up by their scrawny necks (literally) and led them out of their land of slavery and they suffered from unbelief and fear and their carcasses fell in the wilderness and they never got to go into their promised land. They did not take hold of the milk and honey!  They wavered, they grumbled, they complained, and the bottom line was that they lost sight of how Great their God was and instead had their eyes on their circumstances or their enemies.  When we don’t fix our gaze on seeking first His kingdom…we too will tend to focus on circumstances and begin to despair.  Another danger as we are on pilgrimage to our heavenly Jerusalem is to put your hope in man.  Let me assure you of this: YOU WILL BE LET DOWN MISERABLY if you haven’t figured that out already.  Don’t let people trip you up because we live in a fallen world and you will have a big fat bag of excuses as to why you didn’t live full throttle for God during your time here if people are getting in the way of it.  I mean look no further than Adam and Eve…I can hear him in his best whiney voice as he points his finger toward Eve (hear me pinching my nose shut while I say this) “…but God, the woman You gave me, she made me do it!”  PLEASE!!!!!  It’s high time we quit comparing ourselves to others and blaming others for why we are the way we are and take some of the shackles that are inhibiting us from being able to run the race that has been marked out for us and let those weights fall to the flipping ground and stay.  I get the fact that so many people are living in addictive sin.  Yet when you go to your meetings and life is all about what you shouldn’t do and you get a misplaced focus…you are setting yourself up to be the one who sees the wet paint-DO NOT TOUCH sign and what do you do? You touch it!  It’s our nature. Knowing where we are weak and making a battle plan for that and being accountable to others…that’s a different story.  Letting what you did (sin) and what you shouldn’t do, define your every waking moment is not going to produce lasting change because what you have to have is a new heart and a renewed mind and you can’t get it if you are wallowing around in the mire of what you did in the past.  You won’t taste and see that the Lord is good and won’t learn to love Him with all that is within in you if your whole focus is on your addiction.  The addiction then defines you instead of God defining you and changing you with His word.  We need more then just addiction meetings while they are good.  We need to be going after THE Rabboni and learning what we can through His word.  It will change us and make us MISERABLE to be the dog returning to its vomit.  That’s what will change us!  God on the throne as we see our own sin in the mirror and His word will be our freedom as it kills our flesh.   We tend to focus on the one unmet need, the one thing we think will make us happy, and those things rob us of what all we have been so richly blessed with.  As I was going over some different turning points in my life it bolstered my faith even more because there have been times in my life where I’m talking I had no clue what I was going to do and God showed up.  Times where I would tithe my $30 and not have a clue what I was going to do to make ends meet and while there wasn’t some huge monetary prospering, there was a prospering in my soul.  Trials that have literally turned to gold!  The gold of knowing the One in Whom I believe even though I can’t see Him. I’ve learned through suffering that the next time I face this or that I want to do it with some faith because the Lord has brought me a mighty long way.  What if the Beth Moore’s, James MacDonalds, Erwin Lutzers (just to name a few of my heroes in the faith) where scared to death to do what God called them to do and didn’t do it? Well, we sure would have missed out!  That is a vast understatement for me.  They have brought me up in the Lord.  I have no clue where I’d be when there was no Titus 2 woman in sight taking me under her wing.  It was years of bible study that have taught me how to love the Lord and look to Him.  I shudder to think where I’d be without all that these men and women have poured into my soul.  So again I have learned not to live in so much fear when it comes to stepping out and believing God.  It doesn’t mean ease…but the riches you will gain from what seems the black of night aren’t worth comparing to just living at the status quo.  I’m not just making this stuff up!  If you will abandon your ideas of the peachy little cushy life you should have and just throw your hands up you will never be the same. So while I am over here in the thick of it…I look at you and say sister/brother…walk in the word!  Let the Lord strengthen your heart.  Make your ONE THING Him!  Seek Him with all that you have.  He will be found by you.  Go forward with some courage and you will be shocked that as you stay in the word by faith…the very things that you thought would kill you just might be what heals you.  He is so worthy.  His word works.  May we abandon ourselves to Him.  I guarantee you this: You are a lot stronger than you think!  The freedom that comes from making it to the other side of what you thought you could never make it through will teach alright!  Everytime I start to panic all I have to do is jog down memory lane over the rocks of rembrance that are along the ol' timeline.  Places where God showed Himself strong on my behalf.  Or things like the death of a child, I never thought I could get through that sort of thing and I did and I'm whole.  Maybe some of us need to step back a tad from being constantly torn to shreds by the fat mouth of the Lion...the accuser of the brethren.  Maybe we need to spend some time in the word gaining God's thoughts toward us and not let man or the enemy continue to be the loudest voice in our head but let His word dwell richly in us and change us so that we operate as the blessed children of God and align our lives to His word.  I know I'm miserable when I'm not right with Him.  Once you have tasted and seen that the Lord is good...all else while some may be good, is a cheap imitation.  It won't satisfy you.  Let's quit squandering anymore time meandering around in mediocrity.  If God is for us, who can be against us?