Tuesday, May 30, 2017

At the Heart of the Matter

What had happened was....
I had this great revelation at God spoke to me. Oh, I have heard His voice before, loud and clear.

But what had happened was....so had my heart.

My deceitful heart.

My wicked heart.

My deceitful, wicked heart, it heard God, too. And, thinking it was noble and honorable I heard from God about something I wanted to do, only it wasn't God at all. Sounded just like Him, but it was me.

And I allowed what I thought was God to change the course of my life

Only it wasn't Him.

See, your heart can mimic the Voice of God in you. And here you will be with your great revelation that God has spoken to you and now you can and SHOULD do this great thing you had already made up in your mind to do. Only NOW GOD has also told you to do it.

Heard a story of a single mother of 6 who "heard from God" and just knew she was supposed to be a missionary to some foreign country (where someone she had met on the internet just HAPPENED to reside). She excitedly told her pastor who then told her, in no uncertain terms, she had NOT heard from GOD. His will was for her to stay here and raise her children.

I thought with clear certainty that God had given me direction, that He had outlined a course for me. Oh, others tried to tell me it wasn't so, but I wouldn't listen. How could THEY know what God had told me to do?

So, what had happened was I listened to my heart, and I was deceived. Terribly deceived. The path and the distruction that followed forever changed who I am.

I won't say it was all bad. There has been good that has come out of this season. I have learned that He loves me in spite of my iniquity. I have learned that He still speaks to me and I have learned to listen for HIS voice in my life.

Through this season I have come to trust Him more than I ever imagined. He has shown me His great love for me in ways I never thought possible. Miracles have taken place as He pulled me out of the mirey clay of my life. And they continue even now.

So when the time came again to make a life altering decision, I prayed a different prayer. I told Him I could not trust my deceitful heart, I needed a word from the man of God from HIM and I needed it now.

At service that night during the altar call the minister said he was waiting on someone. I went up and he came to me and said he had been waiting on me. That God had a word for me. And after he got my pastor he began to tell me things only my God would know. Things I asked Him to tell me, direction I needed to go.

It was God's voice that caused me to leave the familiar and head for the safety of those who love me.

Here I am. Healing and growing and full of more faith than I ever imagined.

Isaiah 6:8 is part of the blessing of God my Pastor prays over us at the close of every Sunday night service.

"Here am I, send me."

Send me, Lord to the lost and the hurting.

Send me, to the broken and the bruised.

Send me to the ones that have been cast aside.

Send me to the hopeless.

Through my life you have given me such a burden for the lost, for the backslider, for the forgotten. Help me to remember what it felt like to be so outside your will that I thought I was lost forever, that I thought I did not deserve your mercy or grace.

And send me to those with a ministry of joy that comes from being able to hear YOUR VOICE above all the other voices in our lives. Let me never forget Your great love and where it has taken me from and where it has taken me to.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?

Help me to always test Your voice in my life.

Sunday, May 14, 2017

When It Happens To You

There is not much that can prepare you for loss. I have been a "half full" kinda person my whole life, but there are times when I am staring face to face with an empty vessel and I was in no way ready to fill it back.

Life has a way of just happening.

You can be cruising along at a steady pace when suddenly you find you either need to speed up to warp speed or stop completely, usually landing with a thud.

I will be the first to say that I thought I was strong. After carrying grief on my shoulders I figured I could over come anything.

We have a tendency as fleshly creatures to get ourselves into some terrible places. We get complacent, we get forgetful, we get lazy, we get selfish, we get silly, and we get blinded by what we consider circumstances beyond our control. We place ourselves in harms way and cry when we are harmed.

I have read back over my blogs from the past and all my words of wisdom and yet it happened to me. I failed. Not God, me. I got my eyes off of God and placed them on man, off the infallible and onto the fallible. I placed myself, my family, into harm's way because I lost sight of who I was.

It was the thud that got my attention.

The long, hard fall that shook me. It was the realization that I had bound myself up, placed myself in prison and was waiting for someone else to come unlock the door that was standing wide open.

It was me that woke up in the pig pen and remembered how it was in my Father's house.

You do not wake up one day and decide to turn your back on God. It is a slow, easy stroll, sometimes, and when you finally stop to look around, you have no idea where you are.

But, He does. He has been standing, watching for your return. You are that lost coin. You are that long, lost son. You are that ONE sheep.

And, He longs for you. He longs for YOU.

Lord, I am ever so thankful today that You have never forsaken me. Help me to continue to gain ground and find my purpose again. You have never let me down, and I want to keep my eyes on you and not the storms that surround me, at times. My Hope is in YOU.

I heard this song coming home from church about a month or so ago. I almost had to pullled the car over. So thankful for the beautiful things and people in my life. https://youtu.be/_u_eGtgUxh0