Journal Thoughts

 Some more "gold" from my prayer journal.....

"We don't have to worry about being misguided when our greatest passion is knowing Jesus." Chris Tiegreen So many of us stumble about terrified that we're going to somehow make a choice that causes us to miss His will. This is a bondage we don't need to live in. The Bible tells us that we're to love Him "with all our strength, mind, and will." When He is the object of our passions, we become ultra-sensitive to His Holy Spirit. We can depend upon His checks of our spirit. Jack Hayford wrote a wonderful book on knowing His will that blessed me deeply. He said that when our heart is set to follow Him, to have His will in our lives, we can rest in Him. He is always looking at our heart and its motives. When He sees that within us, even if we should mistake where He's leading, He doesn't allow the mistake to alter His leading. He alerts us to the wrong choice and leads us back to where He wants us to be. We don't fall victim to a mistake when our motive was to seek His will. We're human. We will "miss" Him sometimes, but it will not be out of willful rebellion or insistence upon our own way. He will always redeem our honest but mistaken choices. He sees our heart and is blessed by our devotion. He will keep us on His path.

"The Christian faith begins not with a big DO, but a big DONE!" Watchman Nee.....Jesus' three final words on the cross may be His best known. "It is finished!" So few of us seem to understand just what those words entail and how they affect our lives and our walk of faith. Jesus said that He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. His death and resurrection broke the power of sin and death and opened the door to living in victory. Yet so many of us continue to live as if we have to "work" our way into living in that victory. Instead of receiving the fruit of His death and resurrection, we continue, by our own efforts and works, to strive to enter into it. Jamie Buckingham said that the Holy Spirit is a spring of flowing, living water. He is not like a cistern, that is hewn and then filled with water by our hands. Neither is He a well which we must dig in order to reach the water deep in the ground. He is a spring, which flows naturally from a source that we can't reach on our own, but which He is always sending to us. We spend our lives trying to secure what He already gave us on the cross and in His resurrection. Our faith walk is not a matter of "doing." It is a matter of receiving by faith, and following His voice and will, and so living in the riches of our inheritance in Him. Everything begins with His DONE. May we cease striving to get into the "room" that in Him, we've already gained entrance to.

"It is finished! Christianity begins from a place of rest." Watchman Nee.....Tying this into what is written above, if we truly believe that in Christ, "it is done," why do we experience so little of His rest in our lives? Why do we live, not from a place of rest, but from a place of anxiety, stress, and worry. We live in a fallen world. We will experience trouble. Jesus promised it would be so. Jesus also said that we're to take courage, because He has "overcome the world." Because He has, our lives in Him can and have as well. Too many live overwhelmed by their circumstances and needs. They are always focused on the lack and not the Source. They are always looking for answers rather than focusing on the One who is the Answer. Jesus lived in the peace of His Father. In His life, death, and resurrection, He has given His peace to you and me. It is not peace as a result of the absence of outer troubles and conflict. It is His peace prevailing even in the midst of them. It is the peace He lived in all the way to the cross and beyond it. It is the peace He gives us. It is where He wills that we begin and end our walk here in Him. The place of rest. Are you living in and from His place of rest right now? If not, isn't time that you did. Freely He has given it to you. Now freely receive it.

Just a few more journal thoughts......

Blessings,

Pastor O