Last Friday I shared about my lowest point in my life and how God has wondrously healed me. But for a long time I carried around regrets. If I only could have seen it coming. If I only had not married him in the first place. If I only…. you get the picture. But then God taught me that he can use everything for his glory. Like Mary DeMuth writes in her Everything book “Jesus wastes none of our stories,…
Have you ever been so severely crushed that you thought you’re never going to recover? Have you been in such a storm that you thought you’re never going to make it? I’ve been there. But because of God’s mighty grace I made it. Most people don’t even guess I’d ever experienced anything so publicly humiliating and personally devastating. I’ve experienced God’s healing grace like Mary DeMuth writes in her new book Everything: “He [God] wants us to heal so fully…
Are you well equipped for your faith journey? Do you have enough tools to tend your faith along the way? Is your spiritual arsenal big enough to fight the good fight of faith? Believe or not these are important questions. If you don’t have adequate faith skills, you are in great danger to wander away when storms rage. We need to build a spiritual arsenal in order to have a healthy spiritual life and stand firm no matter what happens…
“Don’t just do something, sit there”. A very wise piece of advice. But so is this one: “Don’t just sit there, do something!” What? Yes, we need them both. There is time to sit still and there’s time to work. The tricky part is to find the right balance between these two. Every time I write a blog post about grace, I feel I’ve left out that we are also called to do something. And every time I blog about…
Are you taking short cuts in your faith? Do you choose what you like and what you don’t like in God’s message? Has something become more important than Jesus in your life? You were running superbly! Who cut in on you, deflecting you from the true course of obedience? This detour doesn’t come from the One who called you into the race in the first place. And please don’t toss this off as insignificant. It only takes a minute amount…
Are you in need of a cup of kindness? Congratulations! It’s available! Come and taste God’s goodness and kindness. It lasts from everlasting to everlasting. For the LORD is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting And His faithfulness to all generations. (Psalm 100:5, NASB) God has been working behind the scenes for long time to get us out of dead-end, empty-headed lives. Now everything is ready in Jesus. By grace through faith in Jesus we are transformed into new life, real…
Do you feel God’s nearness? Is your faith flowing? Or are you wondering how on earth did you end up with this penalty loop once more? Faith journey does not have to resemble the Israelites’ journey through the desert. That’s not Biblical living. The journey to the Promised Land could have lasted just a few weeks but it lasted 40 years because all the penalty loops they took. Because they did not obey God. They grumbled instead. They took idols…
Today I want to share a miracle in the Bible that I have too often hurried past without stopping to appreciate God and his powerful message. Yes, there may be more exciting stories right before and after it. Yes, there are even bigger feeding miracles in the Bible. But this feeding miracle of the Old testament has a strong and encouraging message for all of us. One day a man arrived from Baal Shalishah. He brought the man of God…
Do you have a positive identity?Do you know that you are beloved? One of life’s most amazing experiences is finding yourself in God. If you don’t yet know that you are God’s beloved or if you keep forgetting that you are God’s treasure, this message is especially for you. This post was inspired by Jason Gray‘s fabulous song called “Remind Me Who I Am”. It’s about the struggle we face when we forget whose we are, what is our true…
Too often we downgrade the importance of prayer. “We can’t do anything but pray”, you hear people saying. What? When we pray, we invite God to step into our problems, into our lives. When God gets into the equation, anything is possible. Like Oswald Chambers has said “Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.” Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you…
