Tag Archives: resolve

Let Your Cape Fly!

4 May

“Be strong and courageous, and act; do not fear nor be dismayed, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you nor forsake you until all the work for the service of the house of the Lord is finished.  1 Chronicles 28:20

 

Superhero Shadow

We kneel before the Mighty One and ask that He empower us to be Grace Warriors.  That He fill us with the courage necessary to lay hold of the holy destinies He has called the Daughters of the King to live out.  We pray for the humility of the Lamb and the power of the Lion to fall upon us in perfect unity to conquer with love the spheres of influence He has placed us in.  O Lord, let us stand firm in our Kingdom Sisterhood as our capes fly in the hurricane winds of the Spirit to fully apprehend and decisively lay hold of the width, length, and breadth of the love of Christ Jesus.  May we understand the measure to which you have equipped us and comprehend the super abundance of love, compassion, tenderness and joy that flows within, through and about us.  Open our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and our hearts to live for you. 

In the Name of our Mighty Messiah we pray. 

Amen

so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.  Ephesians 3:17-19

#grateful

 

 

 

 

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Let’s Resolve to Love Like That

30 Dec

What would the coming year bring if we looked more deeply at His resolve?  What might unfold before us if we determined to place our faith in the Who rather than the what?  What might we see if we were to truly fix our eyes on the Author and the Perfecter of our faith?

These are the same types of questions I was asking myself and sharing with you all when Glimpsed Glory posted for the very first time in 2013.  Seeking hard after Him and letting Him determine the what of my life is still my greatest desire.

I know what I’m doing.  I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you,

not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.

When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.

When you come looking for me, you’ll find me.

Yes, when you get serious about finding me

and want it more than anything else,

I’ll make sure you won’t be disappointed.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 (The Message)

I believe Him when He tells me that He will make Himself known to me.  I have no doubt that when I come to Him, looking for Him with eyes willing to see, that my heart will be filled with the Who of Him.  It may not look exactly the way I picture it or transpire the way I imagine it, but God will be true to His promise and I will not be disappointed.  How can it leave us feeling short changed when we come out of our circumstance with More of Him than we walked in with?

Yes Sweet One, the promise is for you.  Take it personally.  Your God has determined that you will find Him when you look.  He is unwavering in His commitment to show His children lavish love, immeasurable grace, and endless mercies when they seek His Face.  This is the God revealed in the Old Testament and the Messiah who walked in the New.

But from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.  Deuteronomy 4:29

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7

Both sides of the Covenant line reveal a God who desires to be seen and to be known by His children . . .

Call to Me and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things, fenced in and hidden, which you do not know (do not distinguish and recognize, have knowledge of and understand). Jeremiah 33:3

The person who has My commands and keeps them is the one who [really] loves Me; and whoever [really] loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I [too] will love him and will show (reveal, manifest) Myself to him. [I will let Myself be clearly seen by him and make Myself real to him.]  John 14:21

From the opening verse in Genesis to the announcement that will close out our chronos time in Revelation, God is revealing Himself – showing us the Who of Him– so that we will seek Him, perhaps feel our way toward Him and find Him.

actsduncanThe What of God flows from the Who of God.

God does not merely act faithfully – He is Faithful.

God does not simply love you – He is Love.

And the list could go on.  This is the declaration of the Word of God to you Beloved.  And the beauty of the Who of Him is that He will not change.  He was, is, and will be Who He declares Himself to be.

Our God has gone to great lengths to draw us near– can your prayer, can my prayer,  be anything less than to humbly ask Him to stir our souls with the enduring tenacity to seek hard after Him and bless us with an unsatisfied, discontented spirit when we do not?

Sister, this is the only hope for the transformation this time of year causes us to consider.  newcoffeeDo we really believe that the desire for the “new thing”, for the more, for the unimaginable originates with us?  Have we really convinced ourselves that the longing to change and be more than who we are today started with our own hearts?  Have we forgotten that it is God who lifts the veil and it is He who is about the business of transforming us from one degree of glory to another?

Be holy because I am holy.

Be transformed, renewed, and revived daily.

We may have usurped it, twisted it, and distorted it to serve our own purposes but being all about the “more” and the “new thing”, those are God’s specialties.  He declares that those who believe in His Son and proclaim Him to be their Savior are a new creation.  The old has gone and the new has come.  The old woman is put to death and the daughter of the King lives –that ought to change us.  We’ve been adopted by the King.  We are not who we were and the who of us must begin to flow from the Who of Him.

“Therefore, be imitators of God as dearly loved children and

— live in love,”(NET)

— “walk in the way of love,”(NIV)

–“walk in love.” (YLT)

just as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us,

a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.

Ephesians 5:1-2

No matter how you word it, it comes out the same – seek the Who and the what will follow.  Look on Love and step where He steps. Watch the Who and do what He does. Eugene Peterson translates Ephesians 5:1-2 like this in the Message:

Watch what God does, and then you do it,

like children who learn proper behavior from their parents.

Mostly what God does is love you.

Keep company with him and learn a life of love.

Observe how Christ loved us.

His love was not cautious but extravagant.

He didn’t love in order to get something from us

but to give everything of himself to us.

Love like that.

Girlfriend, there’s the key.  Keep company with God.  Learn.  Observe. Love.  It’s the only way to be transformed and to have the change your heart is truly yearning for.  Meet with the Messiah daily just as certainly as the disciples who walked beside Him did.  Gaze upon the face of your Father so often that you begin to walk and talk just like your Dad.

Living it out, real time, real life won’t just happen.   Purpose in your heart to make meeting with Him your priority.

I plan to “run into Him” throughout the day by setting my homepage to Bible Gateway so that every time I visit the internet the verse of the day is looking back at me. Keep company with Him Sweet One.  Seek Him– He will not disappoint you.

Be intentional.

Be purposeful.

Be resolute.

Let’s immerse ourselves in the Who of Him so that the what of us may be changed.  And perhaps, at the close of 2014, we will find that we have leaned in, learned from the Father, observed the Son, and begun to LOVE LIKE THAT.

wordcups

Happy New Year Sisters – around the world!

May God bless you as you seek His Face.

The Message:
The goal of The Message is to engage people in the reading process and help them understand what they read. This is not a study Bible, but rather “”a reading Bible.”” The verse numbers, which are not in the original documents, have been left out of the print version to facilitate easy and enjoyable reading. The original books of the Bible were not written in formal language. The Message tries to recapture the Word in the words we use today.

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The Resolve to ROAR!

13 Feb

I had two sad coffee dates this weekend.  One was with Samuel in chapters 7 and 8 of the first book bearing his name and the other was with some gal who had written an article on the power of positive thinking.  Funny thing is that the same story was being told by both people.  Both were recounting our desire to trade our limitless God for a weak replica we constrain by the limits of our finite minds.   The article on the power of positive thinking featured this quote from Unitarian, Beatrix Potter:

 “Believe in a great power silently working all things for good . . . and never mind the rest.”

Now in the most general terms, Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity nor do they accept Jesus as the Son of God.  They reject the inerrancy of the Bible as well as the doctrine of original sin.  Essentially, when you put Beatrix Potter’s words together with her beliefs, there isn’t one thing “positive” about it. To me, she’s saying you pick and choose who and what you want god to be and then place your faith in the willy nilly nature you have decided he should have.

I can’t speak for you but I know that the god I constructed prior to accepting Christ had no desire to hold me accountable for anything and always assured me that its benevolent nature would overlook any indiscretion on my part.  In fact, there could be no indiscretion because the standard for acceptable behavior was, to say the least, set up on a sliding scale.  Oh yes, I might like to have believed that the small “g” god I conjured up was silently working behind the scenes to make my life everything I wanted it to be but in all honesty, trusting something that was subject to my every whim was hard work.  I can say with certainty that any god who would be and do whoever and whatever I decided it would be and do, might be manageable but it definitely would not be trustworthy.  And while I might decide that the god of my imagination would work all things out for my good, you know me well enough by now to know that I would never have imagined it to be silent.

Now, if you were to consider the details of the gods Beatrix Potter and I had created, they might seem quite different.   She would’ve chosen what parts of the Biblical God she would contort to build her shadow ruler and I would have chosen mine.  But, it is the differences in our creations that reveal the identical nature of their cores.  Peel away the “my god would never this” and “my god is always that” and at the stripped down center you will find  . . . .SELF.  I want a god who behaves and fits into the box of the moment.  I want a god I am comfortable with and can control.    My god will serve the purposes I appoint when I appoint it to.  But most importantly, my god will serve me.  Perhaps I am wrong but I think that all of us have worshiped to some degree at that same self-constructed, self-centered altar.

I recently had a chance to chat on fb with a friend and we ended up messaging back and forth about this very thing.  It isn’t what we started out chatting about, but eventually the conversation turned in that direction and once it did, it didn’t seem as if I could leave it just hanging there.  I don’t usually talk about things that might be perceived as controversial through fb, texts, or even letters because you can’t hear the person’s tone of voice or see their body language so it’s too easy to misinterpret things.  But since a face-to-face or even phone-to-phone chat was not likely to take place in the near future, I plunged ahead, typed the question and clicked the send button.

  • “Do you believe Jesus when He says I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life or have you begun embracing the idea that there are many ways to God?”
  • Message Seen 11:48 a.m.  The answer:
    • “I do believe in God (their use of a capital “g” not mine) but I do not believe in religion or Christianity.  So to be honest I don’t really know how to answer your question.”

My heart was beating hard at this point.  I love my friend.  So I rephrased the question hoping that the response I received would assure me that they simply hadn’t understood and, beyond that, they would clearly tell me that of course they believed in Jesus.  I tentatively typed and pressed send again.

  • “Maybe you have answered my question in saying that you do not believe in Christianity—which means follower of Christ.  Have you decided that you no longer believe that Jesus is the Son of God, willingly died for your sins on the cross, and was raised to life so that you could be reconciled to and live in the Presence of God the Father?”

I sat holding my breath and staring at the computer.

  • Message Seen 11:57 a.m.  And the response hit the screen like a hard right cross to the chin.
    • “Correct. I do not believe that.”

I’m not sure how you indicate long, heart sinking, wish it hadn’t happened silence in this genre.  I’m new at the whole blogging thing.  But after a very definite pause I  finally found my fingers, typed the question and hit the send button again.

  • “Who is the god you believe in?”

The reply that came:

  • “Idk.  I just know that there is someone greater than me that created me.  I believe God accepts everyone for who they are.  And I believe if you are a good person you will be rewarded.  The Christian God will let a rapist or a pedophile into heaven as long as they repent and believe in Jesus.  That is not right in my eyes.”

That response makes my heart ache and my eyes sting with tears.  And yet, the general description sounds all too familiar.  If you think back to your bC (before Christ) days, wouldn’t you agree that we have all worshiped the “idk” god?  The one we made up.   That we were comfortable with.  Perhaps we said, like my friend, that “my god” is accepting of everyone—implying that the One, True, Living God is not.  And then, in our next breath, we accuse the same God we just implied was too judgmental, of being too soft on those we have decided do not deserve forgiveness.    We say that “our god” will reward good people but we have reserved the right to define who is or who is not good.  And if we’re honest, our definition of good used ourselves as the gold standard.   We created a god who would not challenge us to be anything more than our sin nature desired to be.  The god we constructed in our minds behaved himself.  He loved who we wanted him to love, forgave who we wanted him to forgive, and threw lightning bolts at those we decided deserved them.  The god we were serving was small.  It fit inside our finite notions of who and what God should be.  If we want a god that manageable, that limited, that controllable, we will never be able to accept the truth of the God who gave His One and Only Son to save us.  Because He is none of those things.  He is God, there is no other.

I am the Lord, and there is no other;
apart from me there is no God.
I will strengthen you,
though you have not acknowledged me,
  so that from the rising of the sun
to the place of its setting
men may know there is none besides me.
I am the Lord, and there is no other.

Isaiah 45:5-6

GOD is enormous.  He is limitless.  He is LOVE and He knows no bounds.  His beauty, His majesty, and His splendor are so fierce that they cannot be contained.  His majesty erupts and the heavens spring into existence.  His beauty explodes and the stars find their places.  His splendor bursts forth and the seas are hemmed in.   He is unending love and fearsome holiness. He is beyond what we can conceive or imagine and He has chosen to summon us by name and claim us as His own.  In the words C.S. Lewis used in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to describe Aslan,  “He’s good, but He’s not tame.”  Sister, your God is anything but tame.  From my perspective, He who called forth the Lion of Judah is absolutely WILD!  We simply do not have the capacity to comprehend His limitless love, perfect passion, or uncompromising holiness.  And still . . . and still . . .  He says to you, “You are the apple of my eye!”  Beloved,  . . . you’re His favorite!  The Wild One is wild about you!

And unlike Beatrix Potter’s god, He is not quiet about it.  Her silent god who works behind the scenes disintegrates in the presence of the Holy One who announces for all to hear that He works for the good of all those who love Him.  No, God is not silent concerning His love for you.  He confirmed it from the manger and shouted it from the Cross.   Girlfriend, do NOT limit God to what you can imagine.  Give Him permission to show you more, to push you to be more, to call you nearer.  Beloved, the Wild One is calling you to raise your eyes, open your heart and hear the roar!

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