Oops...I almost forgot...

"Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you your heart's desires. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in Him, and he will act, making your righteousness like the noonday. Be silent before the Lord, and wait expectantly for Him..."

I love this passage. It lists a few things: He wil give me my heart's desires, He will act, and He will make my righteousness like the noonday. Isn't that awesome, or am I forgetting something? Oh yeah, before God can do anything, I gotta do a few things too. I must:

1.Delight in the Lord
2.Commit my way to the Lord
3.Trust in Him
4. Be silent before the Lord
5.Wait expectantly for Him

God's got the easy part. We have more work to do. How's my heart? My state of mind, my state of heart? What do I want? I may desire certain things, but in the end, it's up to God.

Look at this:
If I want something I need to delight in the Lord, and commit myself to Him. I need to trust that He will grant those desires. Do you see what is wrong here? It's all about ME! I want, I want, I want! Suddenly God is like "Be QUIET! Be silent and do not speak!" We shut our mouths and all we can do now is wait. After waiting for a while we suddenly realize, "Hey, wait a minute! What I wanted is not what God wants!"
What do we do then? We start all over from the beggining, but this time with a more humble and contrite heart. Ok, Lord, I want to delight in you, so you can show me my heart's, my soul's, my spirit's true desires. That's when God rubs His hands together and says, "Now we can do buissness." He presses hard into us, molding us shaping us. It doesn't feel nice, but the more He does it, the more we realize that we need Him to do it.
I need that right now. I need that brokeness. My heart's desire right now is to serve the Lord, let Him be my only love. Idols get in the way, and I need to cast those away, and focus on Him alone.

So what does God want for you today?

Confusion...

My mind is just reeling right now. Emotions have taken over, and I am confused.

What should I do? Is this the right thing? I feel this way about this, but I also feel this way about this, but I feel more about the first thing than the other thing. Oh wait, I think I messed up, maybe I was wrong, perhaps I shouldn't have done that, or wait, maybe I am right and nothing bad is going to happen...

Are you confused now? Well now you know how I am feeling. Decisions, decisions...

Well I know what my problem is. I am luke-warm. Sure, I lead worship at church and I teach the kids about God, but at times my walk is not as strong as it should be. I am not in tune with God, and because of that I cannot hear His voice.

Reading Romans 3, I saw that I am not alright. I think "Oh yeah, I am a Christian, I'm doing fine!"

But I am just as bad as the heathen, who obey their hearts and emotions. You see I have had idols in my life, and those idols have caused my walk to become idle. They have distracted me from doing God's will, from hearing His voice, from hearing what His will is exactly.

So I need to seek God in this situation, this is something EVERYONE (except for very special cases) goes through. I need to ask God for His help, for His Grace, for His Mercy, for His Love...

...cause that's something no one else can EVER give....

LOVE...

I need love...
I'm not saying that people don't love me enough, that's not my problem. My problem is loving others. Lately I have been loving others conditionally, this is wrong.

I realized this today in class. My very liberal New Testament class where my teacher believes that there isn't enough evidence to prove that Jesus existed. I spoke out, but I spoke out in my flesh. I was angry, frustrated that someone could be so stupid.

God's not gonna use that.

I'm looking back now and realizing that I'm not as strong as I think I am. I love God and want to defend Him, but I tend to knock others down as I do it. That's not the right way. I care more about changing people's minds, rather than letting God change their hearts.

I want to love others, but only if they LOVE God like I do. But GOD is AGAPE. And I am not.

So pray for me, but also think to yourselves, are you loving others?
Is your love based on the fact that you want other people to love you back, or do things for you? Do you LOVE God enough to want to LOVE others like He LOVES them?

As you can see I have not been updating much. I'm struggling right now with some things, I need God's LOVE more than ever. I am strong, I am not the kind of person that can just walk away from something. I am the kind of person that gets pulled into things slowly as things go wrong, and I DON'T want to go that way...

In Christ,
Man-Fish

Struggles...

Man, life is so hard. It's so hard to be a Christian. Why? Because we have to live AGAINST the flesh and its desires. Life is easy for non Christians because they are taugh to just give in. Nothing is easier than giving in to the flesh. It takes a real man or woman to resist what we want.

Let me give you an example:

We all eat, its something we all have to do. Now, I dare you to try going without food for a week, and lets see how easy it is.

I don't think many of us could do that. And if you did, you couldn't say that doing it was a breeze.

What I need in my life is a total overflow of the Holy Spirit. On my own, I am weak and I cannot resist the flesh. I need help. God's help...

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me...

It was HIM that whole time? (Psalms 66)

A good friend of mine told me to read this passage. It opened up my eyes a little bit to something new. What really caught my eyes was verses 8-12. David begins it by giving thanks and blessings to God. Why? Because God had afflicted Him, had tested Him, had put Him through FIRE and water. Wait a minute! God is the one who puts affliction on us? I thought God loved us.

Well, He does. Part of His loving us is shaping us and molding us to be and to do what He has created us to do. He makes us go through trials and tribulations because He knows it is good for us. Yes, I understand that at times Satan does attack us and wants us to stumble, but who lets him do that?
We tend to complain. I’m a complainer. There have been certain afflictions I have asked God to take away, and for some reason or other, He hasn’t. I’ll find out later I suppose. But look at Jesus. He suffered immense pain on the cross for us. Remember what He said in the garden of Gethsemene? He wanted this "cup to pass before [Him.]" He knew that He was going to suffer. If God had spared Jesus from all that pain, we would be lost.

God has a plan and purpose and all this. You may be going through trials (I do EVERYDAY) but God wants to bless you in those things. Take time to thank Him. Look at a Job for a moment. After all those things he went through, don’t you think that perhaps his walk with the Lord was stronger than it already was? Our attitute with life usually reflects our walk with the Lord. Take 5 minutes today to spend time with the Lord.
He really does care.

Hurt, Pain...Blessings, Mercy (Psalms 13)

Read It

Have there been times when we feel like God isn’t answering our prayers? Times that no matter how much we cry to Him, it seems as though He doesn’t help us? I know I do. Other times I feel like Satan is attacking me, and all I can do is curl up into a pathetic little ball while he kicks me time and time again. Why does God do these things? First off, God has an awesome plan for our life. There are 2 choices. One, we aren’t walking right with Him. If we don’t hear His voice, or even know Him that well, then why do we expect Him to help us? Choice 2 is, we are walking but this whole thing is part of God molding us and teaching us to trust in Him.

Yes, I am a human. And I have been struggling with a few things. Time and time again, I have asked God to take these things away from me, but he has not. God has not told me why He hasn’t taken it away from me. But I know He has told me to trust Him. Despite everything, despite the pain and the hurt, I know God is going to make it all come to good one way or another. And yes, despite the pain and hurt in this situation, God has been blessing me.

Verses 5 and 6:

5 But I have trusted in Your mercy;

My heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.

6 I will sing to the Lord,

Because He has dealt bountifully with me.

God has dealt bountifully! Look around you, what has He blessed you with. For me, God has been giving me wonderful opportunities to serve in ministry, and I totally love it! I know for sure that God has called me to ministry, and to be able to do it at a young age like this is an honor. I look at God’s mercy. I deserve to die! But yet He saved me from my sin, from going to eternal death in hell. I need to trust in His mercies today…

You need to trust in His mercies today.



P.S. For those of you who don't have your Bible handy, I included a link to the passage (that's what the "Read It" link is)

Paul's Testimony (Acts 22:1-21)

Paul’s testimony is awesome. I’m not talking about how he met Jesus, although it would be awesome to be knocked over by Jesus and then have Him talking to you. No, I’m talking about the change and how awesome it was. Paul was one of the most religious men in the synagogue of his day. He knew the law forwards and backwards. He also hated Christians the most; he went around everywhere with special permission from the Jewish leaders that authorized him to kill Christians as he wished.
But God had different plans for him. In just one moment, a change took place. Paul realized that what he was doing was wrong, but that wrong wasn’t against Christians, but that the wrong was against God himself. And God had a special plan for him. He was appointed to "know His will, to see the righteous one, and to hear the sound of his voice." He was also to be a "witness for Him to all people what [he] had seen and heard." Paul was so excited that he wanted dot march out to the Jewish leaders and tell them what he had heard! But God was like "Hey wait a minute, not yet! They’ll kill you if you go out there, and you’re not supposed to die yet!" Paul obediently obeyed.
Look at what God appointed Paul to do. Is that not also our calling? We are called to Live for Jesus, to walk close to Him, to know his voice, to know His will. And He gave us a great commission: to tell everyone about the good news of Jesus! That’s what God wants us to do. Sure maybe, that doesn’t tell us what we’re going to be when we grow up, or who we are going to marry, but if we walk close God and know His voice, then we’ll know exactly what He wants! We’ll be able to hear him better. Isn’t that cool? God wants to talk to us, and He wants to tell us His will! God is our friend, He knows whats best for us, and He wants us to do it. It’s our responsibility to walk with Him and talk with Him. Who wouldn’t talk to their best friend?
‘Cause that’s what Jesus is.