“That he who began a good work in you [me] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”  - Philippians 1:6

I did not always believe this.  Funny how we can secretly call God a liar.  But now I believe in Him and he has restored my hope. I am strong!

Thank you to all who have sacrificed and given of themselves to help me, who listen to me and who tell me the truth.

Are you strong?  Have you been set free or are you being set free by the power of God in Christ?  What is your story?

I am second.  Lord Jesus, You are first in my life.

Sing it Mandisa!

I am second Lord.  Jesus, You are first in my life.

How are you being second today?

“Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders

Let me walk upon the waters wherever You would call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander

And my faith would be made stronger in the presence of my Savior”

I have been silent on here because I need to be a little more silent right now.  I know the danger in saying this prayer, but I cannot stop.  No matter how many times I hear this portion of “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)” I cannot stop because my feet have failed, and miserably.  I am in an unknown area of my life–a place I have never been.  So I choose to accept it and I choose to say, “Though He slay me…” still I will trust You Lord Jesus.  Teach me, discipline me, make me stronger than I have ever been so that I may be about the business of Your Kingdom.

Take me farther than I can go.

Amen.

Isaiah 1:11-20

I have work to do.

“Somebody observed about Christopher Columbus, ‘Columbus went out not knowing where he was going; and when he got there he did not know where he was; and when he got back he did not know where he had been, and he did it all on other people’s money.’

This is the way of religion today. People do not know where they are, they do not know where they have been, they do not know why they are here, they do not know where they are going; and they do the whole thing on borrowed time, borrowed money, borrowed thinking, and then die. Science may be able to help keep you, but it cannot help you here. Science can keep you alive so that you have longer to think it over, but it will never give you any answer for the purpose of your life.”

“Through the call of Jesus men become individuals.  Willy-nilly, they are compelled to decide, and that decision can only be made by themselves.  It is no choice of their own that makes them individuals; it is Christ who makes them individuals by calling them.  Every man is called separately, and must follow along.  But men are frightened of solitude, and they try to protect themselves from it by merging themselves in the society of their fellow-men and in their material environment.  They become suddenly aware of their responsibilities and duties, and are loath to part with them.  But all this is only a cloak to protect them from having to make a decision.  They are unwilling to stand alone before Jesus and to be compelled to decide with their eyes fixed on him alone.  Yet neither father norm other, neither wife nor child, neither nationality nor tradition, can protect a man at the moment of his call.  It is Christ’s will that he should be thus isolated, and that he should fix his eyes solely upon him.

At the very moment of their call, men find that they have already broken with all the natural ties of life.  This is not their own doing, but his who calls them.  For Christ has delivered them from immediacy with the world, and brought them into immediacy with himself.  We cannot follow Christ unless we are prepared to accept and affirm that break as a fait accompli.  It is no arbitrary choice on the disciple’s part, but Christ himself, who compels him thus to break with his past.”

“I am at this moment contemplating a new festoon.  Tell me if you think it a vain subtlety.  I am beginning to feel that we need a preliminary act of submission not only towards possible future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings.  I know it sounds fantastic; but think it over.  It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment we expected some other good.  Do you know what I mean?  On every level of our life–in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience–we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison.  But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own other blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it.  God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one.  And of course we don’t get that.  You can’t, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time.  But what you do get can be in its own way as good.  This applies especially to the devotional life.  Many religious people lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away.  They think–sometimes rightly, but not, I believe, always–that their sins account for this.  They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive what now seem to have been the golden days.  But were those fervours–the operative word is those–ever intended to last?”

There is an imperative written into all creation, and there is a time and purpose to everything under the sun. Love and heart alone cannot tell one who is the right person. Truth, mind, and heart. It’s an easy sequence to understand, the heart tends to screw it all up.

Heart, shutup!

Update:  Truth, mind, and heart.  It’s an easy sequence to understand, the heart tends to screw it all up.  The sequence should be maintained as well as balanced.  Truth is the Word of God, the application of that word with the mind, and the natural response that God elicits in our hearts and from our hearts with our words and actions.  Having said all this, with God human relationships have a solid framework within which perpetual novelty and renewal can take place.  Apart from God, one will likely go through a series of lovers who will come and go, each with ever increasing pain, further mistrust, detachment, numbness to the spirit, moral decay, promiscuity and self-destruction.

Ravi Zacharias put it this way in his book, Why Jesus?  Redisocvering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality, stating the following:

“Worship is a relationship from which all inspiration flows and the relationship through which all of our needs are met.  It is knowing even partly the One who knows us fully.

Worship of the Supreme Being is what makes it possible to find unity in diversity in the world around me by enabling me to find unity and diversity within myself, first.  Worship is the starting point.

Once you understand essence, existence, and reverence in the context of a relationship [with God] expressed in stewardship and worship, life’s purpose becomes clear.  From that come beneficence and imperatives.  The love can be legitimately defined; otherwise, it is nothing more than a word that is open to each person’s own interpretation and context.  Then legitimate pleasure can be defined; otherwise, all pleasure is up for grabs.

The purpose of life given by my Creator is both general and specific.  It is general in that we all are designed to have the sacred as a starting point in everything.  This even means that the notion of truth is a sacred trust.  It is specific in that love has its boundaries.  … God is not jealous because he wants us to himself as a private possession,  he is jealous because he wants us to have the supreme experience of love, which, contrary to the implications of the pluralistic religions, is exclusive.  It is the nature of love to bind itself.  Love is not free.  Someone who truly loves another cannot be other than jealous for the object of their love.”  (Emphases mine)

Really think about this people.