Are you impatient to wait for God’s guidance? Sometimes it seems to take forever. But I’ve learned it does not pay off to go before God. So I wait. Even when I don’t feel like it. I’ve been thinking and praying about this a lot. And learned a couple of things along the way and I will be writing about these this week. Matthew Henry has written “To wait on God is to live a life of desire towards him,…
Do you know that God has plans for you? Do you know what’s God’s dream for you? Do you know what God has planned for you to do? Because God has a plan for you. For all of his children. First of all, God wishes all men to be saved and [increasingly] to perceive and recognize and discern and know precisely and correctly the [divine] Truth (2 Tim. 2:4, AMP). God wants all to be saved but that’s not all…
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…
One of the most famous Bible verses is Psalm 119:105 (AMP): Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. There are songs about it and almost everybody – it seems like it – knows it by heart. I’ve always loved it too but today I read it in the Message paraphrase and saw it very differently afterwards. By your words I can see where I’m going; they throw a beam of light on my dark path….
Have you ever wondered what it means to bless the Lord? Many, many times in the Psalms we are told to bless the Lord. What are we supposed to do? The Amplified Bible gives us an eye-opening answer: Bless (affectionately, gratefully praise) the Lord, O my soul; and all that is [deepest] within me, bless His holy name! Bless (affectionately, gratefully praise) the Lord, O my soul, and forget not [one of] all His benefits. (Psalm 103:1-2, AMP, emphasis added,*)…
How do you obtain wisdom for Christian living? Do you bank on your own reason or do you somehow rely on God? I think we all would like to think we are trusting God and not ourselves, right? But are you really seeking God’s wisdom? Or do you end up accidentally relying on your own reasoning day after day? Too often what really happens is far from the ideal. We intend to pray but we forget. We want to read…
Do you try to gain the esteem of the world? Are you concerned what others think of you? Would you like to please crowds? I think we all would like to be well liked. But how far are you willing to go to gain acceptance? These questions rose as I combined two very different writing prompts I received today: ‘remember’ and ‘crowd’. Not a very likely pair. But they got me thinking. What do we need to remember? Crowd pleasing…
Do you avoid choosing? Do you push decision-making as far as possible? Or do you like everything settled, clear and precise? I guess that depends on your personality (Whether you are P or J in the Myers-Briggs type indicator). I’ve learned of myself that I would like to keep my options open until I am 100% sure that my decision is the right one. But rarely do we have that kind of certainty in life, do we? We have to…
Have you ever envied the wise men? I have. Sometimes discerning God’s will is not that easy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a huge sign on the sky declaring heavenly guidance “This Way!” Having your own star would be helpful, don’t you think? Then the star appeared again, the same star they had seen in the eastern skies. It led them on until it hovered over the place of the child. They could hardly contain themselves: They were in…
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…
