a better word

I’m looking outside the window of our study this morning. Through the film of our homeade curtain, our next door neighbor’s house looks like a lot like a child’s watercolor painting. I see the tan outline of the house, the blue sky, and the green grass, but that’s about all I can make out.

God loves us so much. Though we stubbornly hold onto our own ways of doing things, and our own worldviews, God loves us. His love is pure. As i pray, I pray for your physical ailments and physical pains: bones and joints; I pray for organs in the body: kidneys and circulatory systems. I ask for needs: for financial provision and balance; for nutritional needs, for deep abiding emotional needs. I pray for spiritual rain to come down and drench, smelling like clean, washing the soul… I pray over long standing habits, marriages, and life-long needs for fulfillment, strength, security and peace. I pray for each of you, and lay down my life in intercession, reminding God of His healing of my body and His faithfulness to me. Out of what He has done for me, I pray for you. May our Loving, Faithful Lord send spiritual rain down into your lives as you read these words.

Thanks be to God! He gives us His Word to guide us each day. Life can be so full of idleness stacked right next to meaningless activity. Days can so easily get lost in ‘the grind’ of routine: banal tasks, boring, un-glorious work so far removed from witnessing healing and soul-saving love.

But thanks always be to God! I’m so glad that this morning, my spirit is lifted to look at this world anew today. I am reminded that the kind of Life that I am called to live is pure, painted with clear, holy colors. I really don’t need to elaborately, mentally prepare my spirit every day either, because my spirit doesn’t work that way. What if God never intended for our spirits be crippled by continually contemplating complexities or jumping through mental hoops in order to get to some mysterious place of freedom? What if freedom of the Spirit has never been that difficult? What if we’re the ones making it hard?

God’s design is to fill our spirits with His. He desires us to freely embrace our lives with open mouths of joy. i have this vision of all of us, as His people, looking up, eyes filled with light, faces fresh, waiting for his spiritual raindrops. There is this ache in my heart, there is a fragile emptiness about me right now…

Father in Heaven, I pray to you this morning, mysteriously blessed by your Love. May I receive your blessings completely and let go of my self completely too. Help me to listen to you, forgetting the past’s mistakes, sins, hurts, anger… forgetting the past altogether. Let me pick up the paintbrush of my life with freedom! Bless your children with Light that Burns deeply, illuminating the darkness of what we see with our eyes. Oh, God!

“To him who is able to keep you from failing and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy- to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore!” Jude 24,25

“For you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and to a blazing fire, and to darkness and gloom and whirlwind, and to the blast of a trumpet and the sound of words which sound was such that those who heard begged that no further word be spoken to them. For they could not bear the command, ‘If even a beast touches the mountain, it will be stoned.’ And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, ‘I am full of fear and trembling.’

BUT YOU have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly of the church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covanent, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better word than the blood of Abel.” Hebrews 12

We were designed, not for despondency, but for sweeping, thundering, amazing, epic Love! We are called to look up to Him in every circumstance and continue to be filled every day with this Light that sets us free. So, I just give these words this morning as an encouragement. Our faith is not an attempt to manipulate others, it is not mental effort, it is not dependent on how good we are or whether we appear to be “in God’s will.” No! Our faith comes from the precious Lord Jesus, whose intimate Love for us is holy and secure, whose sprinkled blood speaks a better word. May each of us face His Love for us fully, facing each moment as it comes, boldly ‘painting’ each task empowered by the Holy Spirit’s light.