God's slowness is really God's goodness in action

The Lord is not being slow in doing what he promised—the way some people understand slowness. But God is being patient with you. He doesn’t want anyone to be lost. He wants everyone to change their ways and stop sinning. (2 Peter 3:9)

Is anyone else grateful for God's patience? I know I am! If he held every sin against me, even those committed AFTER I said yes to him, I'd be in a totally miserable place! How about you? Just because you said 'yes' to Jesus doesn't mean you stopped dealing with sin's desires and pulls in your life. In fact, like me, you probably have given in to some of those temptations on occasion. Just like me, you need God's patience and I sure hope you are as grateful for it as I am!

On another note, when God delays his answer to us, how do we take that delay? If you are anything like me, you sometimes question if God even heard your cry for help, or request for something to be done in your life. Maybe you went ahead and did whatever it was you asked God to bless, only to find you were ahead of his plan or out of it totally. A 'change in our way' of dealing with life's challenges, our needs, and even our hopes are called for once we come to Jesus. We might not realize how much we are limiting his ability to act in our life until we stop 'taking action'.

God doesn't welcome us into his family just to leave us to our own devices. He doesn't call for us to repent of our sins to have us return to them time and time again. He isn't afraid to bring conviction if that happens, though! When he does, do we see how intense his love for us really is, or do we justify our actions because of 'his delays' or 'lack of intervention' as we wanted him to intervene? Even if we justify our misguided actions, his love won't let us justify them for very long. He will bring about another set of circumstances aimed at revealing our lack of trust in his timing, methodology, or faithfulness in our lives.

God isn't slow - he is patient! This is something we must learn as it applies to our 'sanctification' - getting our actions to line up with our new heart. It is also something we must learn about his timing and purposes. God has great plans, his timing may not always be evident to us, but we need to trust when he calls us into his family, he has prepared a place for us, as well as a purpose for us. Be grateful for his slowness - it is likely what we need in order to step fully into our place and to begin to fulfill that purpose fully! Just sayin!

Shepherded much?

The Lord is my shepherd; I have all that I need. He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams. He renews my strength. He guides me along right paths, bringing honor to his name. (Psalm 23:1-3)

We might equate this psalm with funerals, but I tend to equate it with normal, everyday life. Why? Read it again and you will see it speaks of provision, protection, and passages - something 'dead people' no longer require! As the Lord 'shepherds' our lives, we have all that we need - nothing is outside of his provision - all good things come from his hand.

All that we need - nothing that is needed lacking, but maybe not every 'want' met. I know I have said this before, but there is a huge difference sometimes between what I need and what I want. I want the chocolate bar - I need the piece of fruit. I want the shiny new truck - I need reliable, practical transportation. Need and want are sometimes a bit hard for us to differentiate, but when God is trusted to be our provider, giving us all we need, it becomes a bit easier to separate the two.

Led into rest - nothing is more frustrating to us than to be in dire need of rest than to find we are unable to shut things off in our minds or emotions. There have been times when I have gone to bed so 'keyed up' that I found it hard to shut it all down. Emotions were running high, thoughts were whirling every which way in my mind, and there I was, tossing and turning, trying to rest, but unable to do so. Why? I wasn't letting him 'lead' me into rest. There are more than times when we need his leading in this area than we might imagine. Ask for his rest, trust him with the unsettled emotions, and let his Word invade your mind instead of all that other stuff and see how quickly rest comes.

Renewed strength and right paths - we don't need strength for the new day if we don't plan on walking down the path he lays out before us, do we? There are times when we all are bewildered about where he is leading, but I know this for sure - no path that he directed me down has ever been the 'wrong one'. The strength to walk down it wasn't even my own - it was his within me. How about you? Needing a bit of 'leading' today? Feeling like you are about to go down a path that will require 'supernatural' strength? Then just lean into him - he has already prepared the path, scouted out the best course to get us from here to there, and even gives us the strength to take each new step. Just sayin!

Not ours, but his

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Are you challenged in the area of your thoughts? Things you'd like to forget just keep resurfacing. Things you need desperately to remember keep slipping away. Things you never thought you'd ever be mulling over plaguing you time and time again. This is a very real battle - our thought life can be a bit of a muddle at times, especially in times of stress, fatigue, or boredom. If your thoughts were to be displayed on a big screen, what would people see? Anxiety, depression, hurt feelings, or fear of the unknown? Maybe a lability of faith - trusting God fully one day, then venturing into the areas of taking things on yourself the next? God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Rather than struggling repeatedly with our thought life, it would be wiser to ask God to help us to clear away the junk in our thought life, cement our focus, and assure the 'cleanliness' of our thoughts?

God's thoughts are higher... That means when our thoughts drift into doubt, we can ask him for assurance. Does that mean we get an instant infusion of 'super-faith'? Sometimes God takes us to scripture and builds our faith through the reading and hearing of the Word of God. At others, he speaks assurance into our spirit and we just know all will be well. Regardless of how God 'changes' our thought pattern, he is always faithful to help us see things in a fresh light - perhaps a little bit closer to how he sees them. If we don't ask for the help we need, we will always see things 'far below' how God sees them.

God's ways are beyond our imagining... Perhaps we 'limit' God by the way we interpret what we see and feel. If we were to begin to ask God to expand our vision, might we see things a bit differently? Circumstances might seem a bit overwhelming until we ask God to show us how he sees the bigger picture. We may not get all the 'details' we would like, but he begins to help us see things 'in perspective' - not human perspective, but divine. We still won't have all the details, but we will certainly begin to trust him with the ones we don't see! Just sayin!

I trust you to carry me

I’ll make a list of God’s gracious dealings, all the things God has done that need praising, All the generous bounties of God, his great goodness to the family of Israel— Compassion lavished, love extravagant. He said, “Without question these are my people, children who would never betray me.” So he became their Savior. In all their troubles, he was troubled, too. He didn’t send someone else to help them. He did it himself, in person. Out of his own love and pity he redeemed them. He rescued them and carried them along for a long, long time. (Isaiah 63:7-9)

And carried them...

Those words speak volumes about the love of God - his grace and goodness going far and beyond what any of us deserve or even imagine we have need of in our lives. I have made a mental list of God's gracious dealings in my life, and I now have lost track of where he started and where he ended. Those gracious dealings are too innumerable for my finite memory to hold onto, but I can recall many and am so grateful for his blessed presence with me through each of those seasons. How about you? Can you make a mental list of his gracious and good dealings in your life? Are there many you might have even forgotten in that list? Likely so, for his 'dealings' really have no end and there are many that were 'behind the scenes' so that we don't even know he was setting all those things in motion. We see the end, but we don't know about all the steps it took to bring about that blessing.

Carried by Jesus - what exactly does that thought conjure up in your mind? Rescued first, then carried along - brought out of what to be taken where? Grace is made up of God's tremendous compassion - lavished upon us even when we are far from perfect and lacking in 'goodness' ourselves. When someone lavishes something upon another, it is in great measure and without end. That describes God's compassion so well - coming in greater measure than we might ever dream possible and then continuing to pour out time and time again without measure at all! The compassion of God expressed through is Son Jesus is given - rescuing us from a life of sin and death. His compassion lavished time and time again - until we realize how much we are loved and accepted.

Some struggle with 'feeling' accepted, but when we begin to realize we are being 'carried' by Jesus, no longer having to struggle in our own self-righteousness, we might just begin to realize we are held, then we begin to 'feel'. In all our filth, he draws us to his heart and holds us there. In all our doubt, he strokes our lives over and over again with his compassionate grace and extravagant love. We can actually 'feel' his acceptance, but we don't have to always 'feel' to know we are 'okay' in his arms. We lean into that trusting relationship - for being carried requires that we trust the one carrying us to be sure-footed, able, and strong in all the right ways. God doesn't just carry us for a bit - he carries us 'through all our years'. Now that should begin to give your heart a reason to utter resounding praise indeed! Just sayin!

From head to toe

O my soul, bless God. From head to toe, I’ll bless his holy name! O my soul, bless God, don’t forget a single blessing! These are the opening words to Psalm 103 - a song of celebration and remembrance. I recall a trip my BFF and I took where we parked in a large parking structure. Painted on the walls was the simple word "Remember" - a reminder to remember your parking space location! Now, that is ingenious in my estimation. How many of us park in those large structures and remember we are somewhere down one of those aisles on the third floor, but is it the level going up, or the one going down? In this day of cell phones and instant photos, I snap a quick picture of the car space number (if it has one) and the pillar identifier. This gives me a reference point to actually find my way back again. There are a lot of things to 'remember' in life, but there are just some things we should spend a little more time 'remembering' and 'celebrating' a little more frequently than we do.

He forgives your sins—every one. He heals your diseases—every one. He redeems you from hell—saves your life! He crowns you with love and mercy—a paradise crown. He wraps you in goodness—beauty eternal. He renews your youth—you’re always young in his presence. (Psalm 103:3-5)

The forgiveness of sins - every one of them, big and small - is pretty much a miracle in my book. I don't know how a holy God, in all of his grace and love decided to make a way for a fallen world to find restoration in relationship with him, but I am so glad he prepared the way! Jesus is the way, just in case you didn't know, and there is no other way. We try to find a whole lot of ways to 'atone' for our sins, thinking some are too small for God to be bothered with, so we create some method of absolution that we hope will work. What we need to hear loud and clear is that ALL sin needs his forgiveness, not just the big stuff. All sin is forgiven through the sacrifice of his Son, Jesus. When we ask Jesus to take control of our lives, we are also asking him to forgive us for sins past, present, and even those we will commit in the future. What? Christians sin? Yup, and we will still need his forgiveness until we breathe our last.

Disease holds no rule over our lives, but we get sick, don't we? If God heals us from your diseases, every one, then how come some people don't seem to get well from their disease? You know this is an age-old question, don't you? I don't understand why God heals someone here on this earth, and others as they enter into heaven. I do believe he heals ALL our diseases - in his way, in his timing, and in his power. I cannot second-guess what he says - I can simply believe it as truth. He redeems us from hell, not because we didn't deserve hell, but because his love redeems. His love reaches out - he doesn't give up on us. He is our Savior - healer and redeemer - not once, but over and over again. God is always looking over our lives with an eye on eternity - knowing full-well what he has prepared for us as we enter into our final rest in him. Trust him with what happens today as much as you plan to trust him with what happens into eternity!

A crown awaits - a paradise crown. Garbs of goodness to adorn our weary bodies. No need for that 'super-enhanced' beauty cream any longer - for his life within creates a youth that is never able to be stolen from us. Adornment is outward, but deep within there is the presence of God and that 'crowns' us with an inward adornment that we could never accomplish on our own. If you have ever seen a person so comfortable in themselves, just free to be themselves and able to allow Christ to shine through in all the beauty that comes from the depth of that relationship they celebrate with him, you likely have seen a little bit of that inner and outer adornment only God is capable of producing. God doesn't leave his kids naked and shamed. He covers us with a much more majestic adornment than we'd ever be able to find or make on our own. From head to toe - we are adorned, made whole, completely at peace and rest in him. Just sayin!