“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Our new verse should get you excited! Reflect on the whole verse today, but we will focus on the opening- “THEREFORE IF ANYONE IS IN CHRIST”. Have an awesome day!
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will guide your paths.”
This is one of my favorite verses and I hope by now it is one of your’s too. Please take a few minutes and read the post below.
This is my weekend post and I have felt the Spirit prompting me to delve deeper into our verse this week – “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will guide your paths.” Please take a few moments to read this post. Yes, it’s a long one, but I pray it will speak to you.
Here is a great example of listening and waiting on the Lord to speak. If you were at Metro today, you heard Pastor Joe’s message, “Hearing God”. Now I was wrestling with what God had for me to say, and frankly, yesterday during my quite time, I wasn’t hearing anything. Then Pastor Joe gave me, and you who were there, the message I was looking for! Wow! This got me excited and I hope it gets you excited! I didn’t know that Joe was preaching today, much less that his message was about “Hearing God”. He and I didn’t script this, God used Joe to be His vessel for helping us decern how we hear from God.
So let me recap Joe’s message today:
How we should react when God speaks:
“IN ALL YOUR WAYS SUBMIT TO HIM”. I wrote about being submissive and dying to self; tough words for us to process. Both conjure up negative, maybe painful thoughts. But I want you to understand that being submissive and dying to ourselves is God’s blessing to us! Being submissive is being receptive to hearing from Him. Dying to self is leaning on His instruction and not leaning on our understanding. It’s not our nature to do these things, but our Father loves us so much He doesn’t want us to trust our own understanding because He knows it will harm us. Jesus spoke in John 10 about the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd takes care of his sheep and the sheep trust him and know his voice.
When we begin submitting ourselves to Him and dying to our own self-interests, we start to discern God’s will and purpose for our lives and we begin bearing fruit in our actions. You will create an atmosphere – you create your own atmosphere and you project the Spirit through your receptiveness to God’s word and His love and His guidance on your life.
My prayer is that we begin being receptive to hearing from God. Take a moment and listen to the words in “I surrender” by Hillsong and let God speak into you.
I thank God for His message to us today through Joe and through His Word. We love you!
Jim
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.”
Today we move on to our next part of the verse – “IN ALL YOUR WAYS SUBMIT TO HIM”. We’ve covered this already, but today let us pray about submission. By definition, submit means to accept or yield to a superior force. We don’t like to submit. Our human nature is to resist submitting. I found this definition that I thought was good – “It means to arrange oneself under the command of God’s viewpoint rather than to live according to one’s old way of life, based on a human viewpoint. It is a process of surrendering our own will to that of our Father’s.”
Being submissive means being humble. Humility is a process of dying to self. In Matthew 16:24 Jesus says to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Dying to self is at the core of our Christian walk. Dying to self means we aren’t the star, we aren’t the lead actor of the story. God is. It is His story and He’s the star and He’s the lead actor, and we are humbly blessed to be part of His supporting cast. I am not, but I know I AM.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.”
Today we shift our focus to the next part of the opening sentence – “AND LEAN NOT ON YOUR OWN UNDERSTANDING”. I’m re-posting a link to a commentary on the Desiring God website. Great read: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-insanity-of-leaning-on-our-own-understanding.
Have an awesome day!
“Trust the Lord completely, and don’t depend on your own knowledge. With every step you take, think about what he wants, and he will help you go the right way.” (This is the Easy-to-Read, or ERV version of the verse)
In order to trust in the Lord would you agree we have to hear from the Lord? Now let me give my disclaimer; hearing from the Lord, or sensing the Lord’s direction, is a very personal thing. There are volumes upon volumes of books written by theologians, pastors, and evangelists, who are much more knowledgeable than me, on this subject. But let me share my experience as a believer in hearing from the Lord.
Isaiah 6:1 -“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.” If you are waiting for a moment like Isaiah describes to hear from the Lord, you may be waiting awhile. God uses the Holy Spirit to speak into us. When we trust in the Lord, we are seeking the Lord’s voice to guide us in our decisions.
But in order to ‘hear from the Lord’ He has to ‘hear from us’. I believe God is constantly listening and open to speaking into us, but we don’t speak enough to Him. This connection is made through prayer and through His Word. For me, prayer is a continual, daily dialogue with the Lord. I have my time each day where I formally submit prayer for family, for church family, friends, etc., but I also pray throughout the day, seeking God’s direction, thanking Him for His goodness and His blessings. When I make decisions, I seek the Lord’s revelation through prayer and I wait. I wait until I feel Him guiding my decision. I wait until I feel a sense of peace in my spirit. For some decisions, I find a peace in my spirit rather quickly, but with others, it takes awhile, and in some cases, I never feel that peace, so I don’t act.
I also have instances where the Holy Spirit prompts me to do something. Often it is a direction to go speak with someone, maybe you. Other times it is a prompting to pray over a situation or for someone. I have also had a few experiences where that prompting was almost overwhelming! I distinctly recall the moment when the Lord spoke to me about starting the Vida Nueva (VN) ministry in Birmingham. That was over thirteen years ago, and I was driving south on GA 400 headed back to Atlanta on my way home to Birmingham. I felt God speak clearly to me that He wanted me to start a ministry, and I clearly remember thinking that God had the wrong person. I had no ministry experience and I hadn’t served in any church capacity with teens or a youth group. It was my “Moses moment” (read Exodus 3 and 4). Moses tells God multiple times that he was not the man for the job. I did the same for several weeks until I finally realized God was not going to give me peace until I yielded myself to His will and started the VN ministry. God didn’t “need” me, He “chose” me. And He is going to choose you too, by speaking into you what He wants you to do.
I know this is a long post, but if you are still tracking with me, let me leave you with this; in order for you and I to trust in the Lord, we must submit to His will and give up our will. This is another transformational process (remember Romans 12:2) that we must go through to submit our requests to Him, have trust that He cares for us, have patience for an answer, and let Him speak to us and guide us in our decisions.
I hope this is helpful to you! Jim
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.”
“TRUST IN THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR HEART”. TRUST. Trust is another one of those big words and concepts in our society. Trust is a concept that holds the pieces of our society and culture together. We trust that our bank is holding the money we have deposited and that we can withdraw part or all of our money at any time. We trust that our doctor is evaluating our health properly and that when we are sick he or she is prescribing the proper medication to make us better. We trust that when we drive through a traffic light that the drivers will stop at either side of the red light as we drive through. We value trust so much that it is printed on our currency – “In God we trust”.
Yet we see signs in our society where trust is being fractured. Our elected officials, our court system, and our banking and financial services have all been brought into question regarding trust. Even our schools have been brought into question regarding trust. I believe our founding fathers were prophetic in putting their trust in the Lord. They knew that putting trust in anything other than the Lord was a fool’s errand.
The problem with putting trust in ourselves and in others is that we make bad decisions because we lack access to perfect information. We have our own perception of a situation, but God has a perfect perception of our situation. We put trust in others and sometimes they are flawed in their understanding or fall short of our expectations. Below is a link from the DesiringGod website with a commentary on Proverbs 3:5-6. I encourage you to take a few minutes to read: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-insanity-of-leaning-on-our-own-understanding.
Let’s keep working on these words. I believe God has a lot to say to us, so I don’t want us to be guilty of leaning on our own understanding, I want us to hear from Him! Tomorrow we are going to focus on what trusting in the Lord looks like.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.”
This week we study a new verse, Proverbs 3:5-6, that many of you have probably heard or possibly know. This is another foundational verse to our Christian walk and the favorite and most meaningful verse for many Christians. Trusting the Lord is core to our faith. We hear these words, but what do they mean? As we study this verse over the next few days, I want us to delve deep into the meaning of “trusting the Lord”.
Today we begin with “TRUST IN THE LORD WITH ALL YOUR HEART”. These words are so important to our Christian faith that we may spend a few days reflecting on these words. I want your input. Add a comment and let’s start a discussion. These words are simply too important not to take time to reflect on.
Hope you are have a relaxing weekend and catching up on some well-needed rest. My weekend post today is a further summarization of where we have traveled together thus far. Since some of you have recently joined the group, I hope this brief summary is helpful. (For a more detailed summary, scroll down to the posts on Sept. 25th and 26th.)
First, let me clarify something. All of the verses we have studied were not verses I scrolled through the Bible searching for. To the contrary, they were all verses that the Holy Spirit placed on me. I thought I was at the end of the path we’ve been going down last weekend until Sunday night when the Holy Spirit placed 2 Corinthians 4:18 on me via a testimony by a lady who had just attended her Tres Dias retreat. Her testimony was powerful and centered around the context of 2 Corinthians 4:18 sharing that she has come to a place where she is changing her focus and fixing her eyes on things eternal, not temporary.
So to summarize, the verses we’ve studied thus far clearly point to the eternity of the Word, the fact that the Word (Jesus) came to earth to make his dwelling among us and that our power and our total dependence rest upon Him. I hope you are seeing the progression and connection of these verses as I am.
Next week will journey down a new path. My hope is that we have laid a foundation centered around Christ that we will build from as we move forward in the weeks ahead.
Have a great weekend and I will text you Monday!
Jim
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Time is a big deal. Our daily lives are driven by a schedule of activities that start at a certain time, last a certain amount of time and have us rushing to make it to each. We spend time. We waste time. Occasionally, we manage to find a little time. We value time in our society. It is a precious commodity that is expended each day that we can never get back.
Because time is so interwoven into our lives we can’t comprehend eternity. Some of you have heard me say, “God doesn’t wear a watch.” It’s my simplistic way of saying that God is not confined by time. So as we focus on the last portion of 2 Corinthians 4:18 – “BUT WHAT IS UNSEEN IS ETERNAL”, I want us to think and to pray about eternity. What is eternal? Can you comprehend the importance of things that are eternal?
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