No more lip service

You are always on their lips but far from their hearts (Jeremiah 12:2). If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me; if you utter worthy, not worthless, words, you will be my spokesman. (Jeremiah 15:19)

I am so tired of giving God my lip service. Of praising Him when I am alone but then being so distracted in the world that I forget to honor Him publicly. It's not that He isn't always on my mind throughout my day or that I am not striving to always pray, it is more so the fact that I realize I don't preach the gospel as I should. I don't speak out loud the wondrous things he has spoken to my heart. I do not share His love with others. I have a few co-workers I have the privilege of sharing Christ with and I am always talking about Jesus with my fellow Christian friends. However, I feel like I am somehow missing the point of the Great Commission. I continually wait for God to open up doors to create a forum in which I can share His word with others. While I realize that I have to allow the Holy Spirit to work and to open these doors, I also know that I have had hundreds of opportunities that He has created for me to share His love for others and I have neglected to do so.

Today I am going to try to become more active for Christ by truly sharing His word and His love with others. I realize this means not being afraid to open up my mouth and to speak the words He has put there. Just like Jeremiah I tend to feel like I am only a child and do not have the words to speak (Jeremiah 2). Then I realize that is because I keep trying to find my own words to speak rather than letting He who saves speak through me. Today I become a spokesperson for God and I refuse to just offer Him my lip service. I dedicate my entire life to the One who is Faithful. Amen

A Way out of the Wilderness

Lord, You are good and Your mercy endures forever! God never ceases to amaze me. For months now I have been feeling completely lost and have had so much pain inside and even though I was doing everything I could to stay in the word and cry out to God it seemed like the gloom and depression was never going to end. I felt as if darkness had consumed my soul. But my God is greater than any pain, any suffering, any depression, and anything else in this world.

God also has perfect timing. It is so easy for us as humans to feel as though God is at fault for not rushing in and saving us the moment we ask Him to. The reality is that if He in fact did that, then He would not be loving us the way He promises to in His word. In my opinion, our society has trained us to believe that we have some sort of entitlement in this world, some kind of privilege, and that if God was such an awesome God then He should move when we tell Him to. This is of course quite contradictory to the process of Submitting ourselves to God. Instead we often times try to control Him.

Throughout the pain and hardships I have experienced in recent months, I have learned so much more about the nature and love of God. I have truly begun to understand what He is trying to tell me when He says He loves me with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3), and that He rejoices over me with singing (Zephaniah 3:17). About a year ago I had gone quite deep in my devotional life and felt like I was truly walking side by side with God. I now realize that He provided me with this security so that I could strengthen my faith in Him. Then all of a sudden I felt like no matter how much I prayed, how many bible verses I read, no matter how loud I cried out to God, I felt as if he had forgotten me. Thankfully, I attend an amazing church (Victory Fellowship) with a Pastor (Mitch Horton) who week after week continues to preach the word of God and to emphasize the Father's love for all creation. He reminded me that even though there may be times when it feels as though God is far off in the distance, the reality is He never leaves us, nor forsakes us (Hebrews 13:5). He is always standing strong by our side.

I now realize that God used this hard season in my life to really teach me about faith, and especially about His love for ME. Not His love for Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or any other prophet for that matter. He loves Me the same way He loves Jesus. For so long these were only words to me. I wanted so badly to believe them but it just wasn't sinking in. Until now. God came and met me in my wilderness and used the opportunity to show me things that I couldn't understand until all of my distractions had been stripped away.

Even though I am still struggling (as any human being does), I now have a much more brilliant understanding of God's love for me. I praise Jesus for being so faithful to me even when I was faithless (2 Timothy 2:13).

Lord, I praise you for being so wonderful and so magnificent. There truly is none like You. You have captured my heart and I never want it back. It is Yours, I give it all to You and I lay down everything in my life for You and Your kingdom. To you be all the glory, and all the honor, and all the power. Forever, Amen.

My Deliverer

I don't normally post videos on my blog but this one does such a phenomenal job describing what I am feeling right now that I wanted to share it: This is David Olinger from Morningstar Ministries singing "My Deliverer," Enjoy!

Spend Time with Me

Do not be conformed to this world (this age), [fashioned after and adapted to its external, superficial customs], but be transformed (changed) by the [entire] renewal of your mind [by its new ideals and its new attitude], so that you may prove [for yourselves] what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God, even the thing which is good and acceptable and perfect [in His sight for you] (Romans 12:2 Amp).


God has been speaking to my heart lately about how much He desires face to face communication with me. I realize that I have gotten so busy lately, that although I still have my personal devotion time daily, the quality of that time has not been where it could or should be. I need to spend more time renewing my mind. I woke-up the other day with these lingering words that God had placed in my heart:

"Find the quiet time to speak directly to my heart, converse with me face to face. I do not desire for you to have a long distance relationship with me as though i am a distant relative living in another state. I desire intimacy that comes from the time you physically spend with me free from all distractions. I desire your undivided attention. Brief interactions are not enough. I am seeking quality time.

The only way you can get to know my heart and my desires for you is to spend time talking with me. I long to sing over you with rejiocing for I love you with an everlasting love. I am standing at the door knocking, will you let me come in and rest with you? Will you rest with me? I love you my child, let me shower you with my love. Lend me your ear and I will whisper songs of love."

God is calling me to spend time with Him that is not shared with anyone or anything in the world. He is longing for each of us to find time that is dedicated 100 percent to Him. It is important that we do certain things in our lives to help build us up spiritually but if time spent alone with Him is not at the top of our list, then we will have much harder time hearing His voice or discerning what it is He is asking us to do. Let's make a commitment to spend some alone time with our Father today, let us renew our minds in the Word of God!

Have faith in Him

The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it (1 Thessalonians 5:24).

People never negate who God is or what He is doing. So many times as humans many of us are turned off from Christianity because of other human beings. We put so much faith in people that we are continuously let down. I am guilty of having put too much faith in people before. It's not that people purposely try to be unfaithful to each other or try to let each other down, it is just an inherent flaw we have all possessed since the fall of man.

I do not use this as an excuse to shut myself off from trusting others or from placing my confidence in them, instead I just closely monitor myself to make sure that I am not putting an unrealistic amount of faith in them. I have learned to trust in God and to place ALL of my confidence in Him. This way I know that I will never be let down completely. I may mess up my circumstance or make bad decisions, but I know that if I am trusting God and have placed my faith in Him and in what He has promised me, then I know that I will never be let down. I may create disappointment in my own life, but God will NEVER let me down. He is always faithful to come through with whatever it is He has promised me. Praise the Lord!

Trust ME

In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6).

It has been a while since I last blogged. I am still living without internet at home which makes it much more difficult to spend time on the computer writing blogs. However the Lord has been doing so much in me lately that I just had the urge to write a quick update. I have spent most of this weekend being incredibly humbled. I was able to go see Jason Upton perform on Friday at Winston Salem First Church. My friend Nick and I had been planning to see him for months. There are no words to describe what I experienced while I was there. God's Presence was overwhelmingly strong the entire evening. The Lord really used Jason to speak truth into my life and I am so blessed because of it. Throughout the performance God was tenderly dealing with little things that need to change in me. Things that I had been brushing off as being minor and had justified away. This however is never a good thing to do and eventually the Lord will bring even the small things to the surface. I also felt the Lord dealing with my issue of trust, more specifically, trusting Him.

This mornig when I got up, the Holy Spirit really spoke to my spirit about striving to do things and warned me not to focus on works or my own desires but instead to just trust Him. Here is what I felt the Lord spoke over me today:

"Stop striving for the things you think you desire and start trusting Me to give me things you truely do. Fix your eyes on me and let My desires become your desires. I have placed desires deep within you which are full of abundant blessings. I have promised to direct your paths. I have reminded you that no good thing do I withold from those who trust Me. Trusting me does not mean merely saying that you do; show Me through your actions and obedience. Faith without deeds is dead. Trust Me with all your heart. Your own understanding could never comprehend nor imagine the blessings I have for you, neither will it lead you down the path that leads to my greatest blessings for you. Trust me today with all of your strength, all of your mind, and all of your heart. Cease striving and know that I am God. Trust Me."

I know I need to work on trusting God because of what he says and not because of what i think I must do. He is faithful and will complete the good work He has started in me (1 Thessalonians 5:24,Philippians 1:6).

Be who HE created YOU to be

God created each of us with a purpose. One of the things I have the hardest time with is being who HE created me to be and not what OTHERS think I should be. This even includes myself. Often times I think I am growing spiritually and becoming more like Christ and then I realize that I am striving to be what some other Christian is and I begin trying to mimic their life. God did not create us to strive to be like others. We are to strive to be like Him and only Him.

One of the greatest examples of this I got from a teaching by Jason Upton. He talks about how God uses the birds and the lillies as examples in the Bible because unlike humans, these things do not change. A redbird does not suddenly decide to act like a bluejay, just as a white lilly does not try to be a yellow daffodil. They simply are what God created them to be and what that is never changes. Though they may appear to look different in each season, their core remains the same.

I believe this is what Jesus wants us to do. He wants us to grow and to change and to become more like Him. However, He does not want us to get caught up in what He has called someone else to be. Essentially, He has called each of us to be the same, just like Him. Jesus wants our spirit to be the same over the years. In other words, while our physical appearance and mental abilities may go through changes, our spirits should remain the same. What I find so amazing is that He has already created us to be EXACTLY who He wants us to be. Unfortunately who that is has been warped and twisted by ourselves and the world. We get so caught up as humans on other people's expectations for our lives that we tend to forget what our original callings were. It is no surprise that when we reach adulthood we are usually doing something completely different than what we had dreamed about as kids. It's like to older we get, the more we give up our individuality and creativity and just settle for what the world dishes out to us. We begin to see our selvesas the world defines us versus who Jesus says we are.

It's no wonder that Jesus refers to little children so many times in the Bible to be examples for the rest of us. The faith of a child is one of the purest forms of faith there is. I agree with Jesus that we can learn a whole lot from children about what our identities truely are. Jesus used little children to demonstrate what the Kingdom of God is like.

Then they brought little children to Him, that He might touch them; but the disciples rebuked those who brought them. But when Jesus saw it, He was greatly displeased and said to them, "Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God. "Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it." And He took them up in His arms, put His hands on them, and blessed them (Mark 10:13-16).

And He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, "If anyone desires to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all." Then He took a little child and set him in the midst of them. And when He had taken him in His arms, He said to them, "Whoever receives one of these little children in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me (Mark 9:35-37)."

I guess we could all benefit from spending some time with children. I thank God everyday that He has blessed me with a job where I work with kids of all ages everyday. It has been such a learning experience to be able to watch kids everyday and to see how simplistic they make even the most complex tasks seem. Kids don't walk around in a masquerade rapped up in a facade created by others. They are who they are and they don't apologize or make any excuses for it. They remind me everyday that I need to be more like them and to be who God created ME to be. Praise God!