Week one down five more to go of learning to be WHOLE!!! I have come to make a routine in the mornings that I absolutely love. I am at the point when I am getting ready for bed at night and can't wait to get up in the morning to read/learn/worship: spend time with the Lord. I usually wake up on my own now. My built-in alarm clock in my brain (pineal gland) seems to be working just fine because right before 6AM I am awake!
I make my coffee, read, pray, write, meditate, worship for about an hour and a half, then I do a spartacus workout routine!! By the end I feel so empowered to take on the day! It really is incredible that the more you pray and the more time you make for the Lord, the more time you actually have. Doesn't seem like it makes sense, but after just this week it is blowing my mind!
It has been a beauty not having an agenda with knowing how God will show me things or speak to me. Coming to the Lord with no expectations. There are so many things that I am learning and I am excited to be sharing some of those things with you. I will share a few different things but also don't want to overwhelm you!
This week I was able to go back to the basics where everything started. In Genesis it talks about how God created man in His own image. It all comes back to knowing how much God loves us. He loves us because He loves us because He loves us.
In the Old Testament we don't normally think of God as the most loving God. Starting in Genisis 3:20-24–After Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil He banished them from the Garden of Eden, not because He wanted to punish them, but He did it out of love and I think that is where we miss the picture. God knew that If they would have stayed and eaten from the tree of life, they would have lived ETERNITY on this new "hell on earth" which was intended to be "heaven on earth". He knew we may fall short again and not have a chance to live with Him eternally in heaven…so out of love He kicked us out and blocked it off with a flaming sword! Wow, He loves us and protected us from living for eternity in hell where we wouldn't have had another chance to choose.
God had to come into human form and be sacrificed for our sake (Jesus). He would die so we could have freedom. To think about how he was torchered, manipulated, persecuted, hated, backstabbed, and that if He wanted to He could have saved himself. But no, He had you and I in mind. I realized that when we think about how much we love Him, which is good, but when we fail in various ways it's easy to get angry with ourselves and can fall into a pitty party where I may feel a little more distant to God than before. But when I am able to sit at the cross and meditate on what He did for me, sitting in His presence and know how much He LOVES ME, that is where it will never fail. It's all truth! Know how much He Loves us and let it sink in. Even when I may feel like I don't love God as much one day or I feel far from Him, His love for me NEVER CHANGES!
Rom 8: 9 "You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ". 10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you."
Man!!!—-this excites me everytime I think about it. God created our earthly bodies. Those will one day fade, it is bound to happen and we just need to get over it. Don't worry about old age, embrace it. If someone wants to harm our earthly bodies that are only temporary, yeah it sucks, but it's not eternal anyways….NOTHING can harm the Spirit that is living inside of us! Think about how POWERFUL that is. The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead IS IN US!!! We need to know that! And believe it with confidence!
Even when we don't feel our best/sluggish/have no sense of hope, when we belong to Christ we don't even have to worry! It is not on our own strength that we be made WHOLE….but through the SPIRITs power that we are being transformed to wholeness. We need to say it with confidence: The same Spirit that conquered the grave lives inside of me!!!
Romans 8:26 "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27 And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will."
For when we are weak, He is strong! 1 Corinthians 1:25 "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."–Let's rejoice in that. Even our strength on our own doesn't measure up to His weakness. But because He lives inside of us, we have the same power that conquered the grave.
Many times we have no words to pray. Our vocabulary in comparisson to God is small and a lot of things we want to say we cannot express in words. This is where the Spirit comes in…instead of thinking with our head and babbling words to Him we can pray in the Spirit at all times. The spirit is interceding in accordance with God's will. That means it is the perfect prayer! We always pray: Lord, have your way..let your will be done..and may say some selfish things that we desire Him to do..but when we pray in the Spirit, we have no idea what we are saying..but the Spirit is fighting for His will..and He knows the heart and mind of the Spirit. So nothing can be more powerful than praying the perfect will of God in the Spirit.
These a just a few things that God has shown me this past week and that I have been meditating on. There is so much more but not enough space for it all… If you have more questions or want to know more of what God was teaching me feel free to ask =) Let's all encourage eachother in prayer and understanding more of the spirit that lives inside of us. Because it really is powerful.
