Today’s writing prompt at Five Minute Friday is ‘door’. And my immediate association was guidance. You see, I very often pray that God would close the wrong doors and open the right ones. That’s my plea for guidance. That’s my way to submit to Jesus. That’s my way to trust in God’s plan for me. Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or…
Have you ever read a novel with a protagonist who just doesn’t get what s/he needs to learn in order to succeed/find happiness or balance in his or her life? You as a reader just can’t understand why s/he does not get it. The protagonist struggles with the same thing over and over again until finally s/he gets a break through and things start looking better. It is so easy to know what’s good for the protagonist while you’re reading…
I have been in love of Psalm 19 a few days now. I am going to share it with you and explain why it feels so precious to me right now. Read it and let the Holy Spirit read you while you are at it. This is how the Living Word of God works! The revelation of God is whole and pulls our lives together. The signposts of God are clear and point out the right road. The life-maps of…
I love how God talks to us through daily occurrences and divine coincidences. I usually read some chapters from both the Old and the New Testament but I am not right now using any specific reading plan (other than reading the Old Testament chronologically). Today I was reading from Ezekiel and Romans. You would think they have nothing to do with each other. But they both talked about people “who have eyes to see but do not see, who have…
Sometimes our path of life seems so desert-like. Stone after stone after stone. We might feel that God has abandoned us in the middle of nowhere. We would like that our pathway of life would be something else than it is. Or at least we would like to see where we are going. The picture above reminds me of the fact that, even though, our path seems not to have consistency or any other quality we think a happy path…
Impatience seems to be the beginning of anxiety, right? Waiting for God’s guidance and timing is not easy, especially when we have all kinds of wild thoughts racing through our mind. What are the next steps God wants me to take? Should I wait or proceed? How can I be sure I am not missing God’s guidance? This morning I stumbled upon this Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote: “Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break…
One of the most exciting things in a life of a Christian is to search for God’s guidance. Sometimes it can also be very frustrating. Human beings can make plans but God will decide whether and when something will happen. Like Thomas à Kempis (c.1380-1471) has said “For man proposes, but God disposes; neither is the way of man in his own hands.” But because we desire God’s will and guidance for ourselves, we would not want it any other…
Today our quest for what it means to “Live well, Live wisely, live humbly” (James 3:13, MSG) continues. We started our quest yesterday. Today we talk about how ‘living well’ can help us on our quest for God’s will. And, yes, you guessed it, tomorrow we tackle ‘live wisely’ and the day after tomorrow ‘live humbly’. In essence, following God, being a disciple of Jesus Christ and living in the Holy Spirit, is what leads us to find God’s will….
How does Christian living look like? How are we supposed to spend the rest of our lives when Christ lives in our hearts? The Bible gives us some guidance: As a result, they don’t live the rest of their human lives in ways determined by human desires but in ways determined by God’s will. (1 Peter 4: 2, CEB, emphasis mine) Aha. We should look for God’s will for our lives. How do we do that? Don’t be conformed to…
Don’t you ever wish you’d receive every morning a fax from heaven telling you what you need to accomplish that particular day? That thought is a bit tempting when life is chaotic. But if we think of it a bit further we realize that would be terribly boring. Even if we feel that life is out of control, we can rest assured on these facts: A) God has promised to guide us. I will instruct you and teach you about…
