A purpose for trials

My heart has been full of these thoughts for the last few days. It’s something that we can breeze right through and never think about. What is the ultimate purpose for our trials? Why does our Lord even bother training us with difficulty in our circumstances? What’s going on? What’s at the root?

I would like to provide my own recent perspective on these things. We can sometimes way over think our God and why He does what He does.

Ultimately we are here because God desired our relationship. Ultimately Jesus came for us because He did not want to reign without us. Ultimately we are here for His pleasure, plans, and purposes.

Let me start with something we can all relate to as our relationship with Christ is an example of an earthly marriage. Who you marry by far being one of the most important decisions we will ever make. When we are in love and things are wonderful and fluffy and marriage comes to mind hopefully the different difficulties that you will experience in life such as deaths, children, moving, etc come to mind and you think– will this person love me and love me passionately through all of these things? If I lose my job? If I gain weight? If I’m having a hard year… etc. In Song of Solomon God describes this process that we go through in our relationship with Him. We choose God and begin to pursue Him and experience His awesome presence and have all of the hope in the world! We start diving into His word and into our quiet times in prayer and begin to serve at church and in our communities out of this real love that we are experiencing. This is exactly where the woman in SoS is when the Lord chooses to lead her into the desert and remove His presence from her. She has expressed a desire to be with Him and a desire to partner with Him in ministry (His work in the world) and this desert season follows an amazing time of new and fresh love. Why? — I could go on this for hours but I’ll keep my words brief so that you can meditate on this in your time with the Lord and let Him touch your heart with more specific language for your soul.

Just as we want to know that we will be desperately loved through anything. So also our God longs to be loved. Not just when we feel His awesome presence and He blesses us and things are going great but even when we cannot feel Him. Even when we are struggling through life’s difficulties and pains that come with our living in a fallen world. We have not been given over to the enemy because we are experiencing our own “time in the desert” but we are being given the chance to prove our love.

Wont you prove your love to the Beloved? Please…

This morning in my prayer time the Lord gave me a vision of myself in a thick forest walking a water worn trail through the darkness. I was blindfolded and not dressed for such a jaunt. Then the Lord allowed me to see my hand outstretched and in His– He was leading me. Then I saw my face. Blindfolded, in the dark, uncomfortable, I was smiling and crying and laughing with joy.

Hebrews 13:5 “…I will never leave you, never forsake you.”

Bless You my beautiful Lord. Thank you so much that You love me. Your love is better than all the pleasures of this earth.

God bless you and keep you always. I pray you enjoy your opportunity to prove your love. Pursue Him always. Love you all. Thank you for your support– it makes such a big difference.

Random thoughts mean a lot

I had a wonderful time in prayer and study this morning. Just talking to the Lord you know? Sometimes it’s nice just to talk.

This afternoon while I’ve been working I started talking to Him again– just playfully joking about what I am working on and what I am accomplishing (and more what I feel like I am not accomplishing or simply still unaware of). Then He gave me a thought, He’s in love. Our God… He is in love.

So here are some random thoughts to make your own. Have you ever been in love? Do you know what it feels like to love desperately and become one track minded? What it’s like when your phone lights up and it’s them. Ok… so that’s our God. Desperately, one track mindedly, excited when His phone lights up and it’s us… our God. He can’t wait to talk to us and be heard and appreciated and thanked for what He has to say. Can’t wait to have us think about Him and talk to Him. To appreciate what He does whether or not we’re aware. Thanked because He knows what He’s doing with us and He’s faithful whether or not we are.

So there He is, right now, waiting for us to call, waiting for us to think about Him or thank Him or talk to Him. Anything lights up His world.

Why? Because He created a hole in His own heart, in His own world that only we can fill. He accepts the pain of us not filling it on a regular basis because He knows that someday, sometime– we will call.

Love you all Talk to the God who adores you today…

In the night hour…

In the night hour…

Though time has entered it’s quiet early morning hours my spirit is awake. I keep hearing over and over again “the hour is late”. This alarm, this quickening, is a direct outflowing of the mercy of God as He wills that none should perish. In the night hour I cannot help but seek Him. I cannot help but to be overwhelmed with His beauty and glory and the wonderful mess that He makes of my life as the world looks on in utter confusion as I launch into a reckless abandon of everything that they hold dear to pursue the One that I love; the One who calls me His beloved.

Tonight I led worship to kick off 24 hours of prayer on the campus of Texas Christian University and though we were a seemingly small group in a random house on campus I was reminded of the ‘seemingly small’ groups with which our Lord has changed the face of the earth. It’s never taken more than earnest desire on the part of mankind mixed with the power of God to accomplish all that the He wills in the earth and lives of people who will be a part of His move in their generation. I strongly believe that my generation is meant to be the one that will sound the alarm in the earth for the return of the King of kings. We are meant to sound the wake up call, blow the trumpet in Zion! How do we even begin to conceive of what the practical faculties are for something that could seem so ambiguous? We spend our time in prayer, in fasting, in worship, in intercession, on our faces before the Lord and in His word. We stop basing our actions and decision on our emotions. Instead we call our emotions to line up with the word and will of Almighty God. We stop flooding our lives purposely with pop culture and pop Christianity and we get back to the One Thing, to the first commandment. The bottom line is, we stop. STOP! Stop what we’re doing and wait on the Lord. Being active doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is purposeful and important. When we evaluate our days at their closing or the end of the week as some are probably doing right now, did we truly accomplish all that the Lord had for our week? Sure, we accomplished things, but whose list of importance were they on? Whose “to do” list are we so concerned with keeping? Who truly governs our lives and our thoughts? Not just the gigantic decisions but all of the little ones too. Whether or not to take the extra time at the gas station to talk to the lady in line behind us to see if we can help with her hard time, or to call that relative we haven’t ever shared the Lord with boldly, or to spend our Saturday morning in prayer and in the word of God instead of going out on a beautiful day or cleaning up the house. Whose agenda are we keeping? What perspective do we live our lives with? Daily false urgency or to see the glory of God for eternity– eternity is now.

In the night hour my soul is crying out, God open the heavens over us and let us in. Let us know You more. Let Your thoughts be our thoughts and Your ways be our ways. You have clothed us in righteousness– don’t let us put You to shame; and as David proclaims several times in the Psalms, God will not let us be put to shame. 2000 years ago humanity thought that Jesus was a blasphemer and that John the Baptist was crazy. All to find out that Jesus would save us all and make us children of the Most High God and John the Baptist be called by Jesus Christ, “the greatest man ever born of a woman”. As those Saints before us have done, we are not called to live a life in which we have all that the world says we should have, living on our own in opulent comfort, but rather we are called to live a life as “bond servants of Love”. It is our pleasure to rise in the night as we are called to prayer and our privilege to wake in the morning and ask the Lord what He is up to and what He is up to in the world today– increase the gifts in us O Lord.

God I pray that we be made joyful bond servants of Love. I pray that in the night hour as I am stirred beyond sleep that you hear my prayers for all who will be reading this in the next several days, use us God; increase the gifts in us Lord. Make us the pure and spotless bride that You will have. Release us from the temptations of this earth and lock our eyes on You Lord. Come like You promised.

Ephesians 5:⁸For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light ⁹(for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) ¹⁰and find out what pleases the Lord. ¹¹Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. ¹²For it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. ¹³But everything exposed by the light becomes visible, ¹⁴for it is light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said:
“Wake up, O sleeper,
rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”