I am sorry guys

I am sorry that I have not posted anything new in a while. I have been going through a rather difficult time in my marriage and I just haven't felt inspired to write anything! Just please keep me in your prayers. If you want to know the whole story go here. Just pray that God's Will be done in the situation!

Colossians 3:23-24 Part 1

"And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, Knowing that from the Lord you will recieve the inheritance: for you serve the Lord Christ."

Oh man, this verse has really been tested for me today. I decided that I was going to let me 4-year-old niece spend the night last night and normally we have a lot of fun while she is here. But today, NO WAY. She has been a bear all day. Then I open my Bible and read Colossians 3:23-24 and I think God just decided to smack me in the face. In this verse the Lord tells us that WHATEVER we do we are to do it HEARTILY. That means this... whatever we do we are supposed to do it:

1. In a cordial manner; with warmth and sencerity.
2. Thouroghly; completely
3. With zest or enthusiasm
4. With great appetite or enjoyment
5. with gusto and without reservation

Now let me tell you, today has been a test with watching my niece heartily. I don't think at one point durning this day have I followed God's command by watching my niece heartily.

1. I have not done it in a cordial manner. I have snapped at her mulitple times for not listening to me. I have snapped at her for lying to me. I have snapped at her for not picking up her mess. (am I sounding like a bad aunt yet?)
2. The thouroghly an dcompletely thing, well that doesn't really apply in this case because I am watching her and the only way that I can watch her is throughly and completely. The only way that I couldn't is if I left her in the house and ran off to do something else. Which, trust me, I would never do.
3. With zest or enthusiam...ummm...nope. Mark that one off the list because I have actually been a little bit grumpy with it.
4. I am not getting much enjoyment out of it because she is simply driving me nuts. So another one crossed off the list.
5. This falls under the above mentioned enthusiam. So I guess this one gets crossed off the list as well.

So from the looks of it I haven't really followed God's command of doing EVERYTHING HEARTILY. The only part of heartily that I can say that I have done right is the throughly part. But God doesn't want me to do part, He wants me to do ALL! He wants me to do it COMPLETELY! Gosh, this verse has really smacked me in the head today.

What about you? Can you say that EVERYTHING that you do you do HEARTILY. Not just part of it heartily or even doing it partially heartily. God doesn't want us to do anything halfway. It is hard to do something that we don't enjoy doing or want to do heartily. We want to complain, grip, and grumble about it. But God doesn't want us to do it that way. He wants us to do it completely and with excitement and happily. It is hard to do but, we just have to change our mindset. We need to look at it as an opprotunity to practice one of God's commands. An opprotunity to please the Lord and to maybe even spread His word.


There is another way to look at this verse and I will discuss it later. But for now we need to learn to do EVERYTHING HEARTILY. Who knows, maybe that crappy job, or that crappy meeting will look a little bit better when we start seeing it as an opprotunity to put one of God's commands into action.

I am going to have to put these verses into practice tonight as I am going to go teach AWANA's. For those of you who don't know, I teach the JV class at AWANA's along with help from my mom. Well, there is one boy in there who is a little autistic. When he doesn't get his way he has to creat a scene. For the rest of the night you will only hear about his problem. There are a couple of other kids in the class who egg him on a little, okay a lot. So some nights this can get really frustrating. Frustrating to the point that there are nights when I don't want to go. Frustrating to the point that I sometimes hope that this kid will not be at AWANA's. However, I must remember that God wants me to do everything heartily. Therefore, I need to suck it up, go to AWANA's and look at it as an opprotunity to share the Word of God to this boy. I need to pray over the situation before I get there and just realize that God has put me there for a reason. No matter how many times he might tell me he hates me and doesn't want to have anything to do with me, no matter how many times the other kids might pick on him and take his shoes and throw them across the room, no matter how frustrating the situation might get. It is all an opprotunity to share the message to these children.

So the next time you are thrown into some situation or job that you don't like, just remember Colossians 3:23-24 "And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, Knowing that from the Lord you will recieve the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ."

Say a pray and give the situation over to God. (and maybe pop a couple of Advil before you go)

Part 2 coming up later!

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Does God have control of your life?

Isaiah 55:8-9 ~"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts"

I know that many of us have read these verses many times, especially if we go to church. But for some reason these verses just seem to be hard for me to learn to "deal with", I guess you could say. I mean, I know that God has a plan for all of us and that we should just wait on Him. However, sometimes it is so difficult. I still want to think that I control my life. But the truth is, I don't really control my life at all. God controls everything that happens to me. Everything that happens to me in the next second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year and for the rest of my life, is already laid out in front of God. God has my whole life planned for me. And whether I want to accept that or not makes no difference to Him. If He wants me to do something, I will eventually do it. Whether or not I want to. Why? Because He already has is planned out.

There have been many times in my life when I planned on certain things happening and they never did. As frustrated as I was that my plans didn't work out, Isaiah 55:8-9 tells me that I shouldn't be frustrated. You see, God has a plan for our lives. They may or may not corrospond to the plans, goals, and thoughts we have for our future. However, we must remember that God's plans, goals, and thoughts are the best ones for us.

You might want to be a doctor and help the sick. Maybe God wants you to be a missonary though. You can argue and struggle with God all you want. It doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't escape God's will for your life. Sure you can go to medical school and become a doctor, but deep down inside you will feel like there is something missing. That's because when you are outside of God's Will you can never be truely happy. God knows what's best for us because His thoughts are higher then our thoughts. God see the whole picutre of our lives while we only can see what is going to make us happy now. God knows what is going to fufill us the most and we just need to loook to Him and follow His lead.

This is extremely difficult for me because when my sister joined the army I have to admit I was a little furious. Why? Well, my sister joined at a time of war. She joined right after September 11th and there was a pretty good chance that she was going to have to go to Iraq and I didn't like that one bit. But I have to remember that that was God's plan for Michelle's life. No matter what any of us did, my sister would have eventually joined the army. Whether it be durning September 11th or later. God wanted her to go to Iraq. He has a mission for her. And while I might not have realized it then, God was going to do something wonderful in her life. There is a reason she is over there and I must just learn to accept the fact that it is all a part of God's perfect Will for my sister's life. No matter what happens to her, it is happening because that is what God wants to happen. If she gets her, there is a reason behind it. If she makes it home, there is a reason behind it.

We must all learn that God's plan for our lives is much better than anything we can imagine. There is a reason He puts us in every situation. At some point in time we might be presented with an opprotunity to do something and might think that it is stupid. However, if it is part of God's Will for our lives, we can reject it all we want but one day it is going to come back to us and one day we are going to accept it. Why? Because that is the way that God intends it to be. We just need to turn ourselves over to God and let Him control the path of our life. When we do this we will be much happier and have a lot less headaches and problems. God's thoughts are better than anything we can come up with. God's plans are better than anything we can imagine. We just need to let God do His job and give Him complete control of our thoughts and our lives.

"Dear Lord, I know that you have a perfect purpose and plan for my life. I have been struggling to understand where exactly You are leading me. I just ask today that You help me give You control of my thoughts and my life. Please take this life in the direction that You would want it to go. Help me understand that all things happen because it is a part of Your perfect Will. Help me be a better servant to You. Help me follow Your ways and obey Your law. I ask that You just take control of my life and lead me in the direction that You would like me to go. Help me to distinguish between Your Will and my selfishness. Help me to understand when I am doing something because I want to and when I am doing something because You want me to. Help me to serve You. In Your holy, awesome and perfectly wonderful name I pray, AMEN!"

5 Step Prayer

I just wanted to share this with you all first before I actually post a devotional. A friend of mine shared with me the 5 steps to praying. I thought I would share them with you all.

5 Step Prayer

1. Pray that God will break you of your sin.
2. Ask God to wash you in the blood of Jesus.
3. Pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
4. Pray that God will lead you by the Holy Spirit.
5. Pray that God will use you to the glory of His Kingdom.

When I was going through a particuarly difficult time my friend gave me this simple 5 steps of prayer. It took me a while to learn how to do this but once I started praying using these five steps I noticed that the prayers weren't as hard to say. Sometimes when we pray we might not know what to say, especially when we are praying to ask God for forgiveness for something wrong we have done. However, this 5 step prayer helps us come up with the words to say. Then usually at the end I add on anything else that I feel compelled to pray for. It is amazing how once you confess your sins to God it is so much easier to pray for other people. I hope that this simple 5 step prayer will help you all in your prayer life.

Welcome

hey everyone,
welcome to my new site. The reason I am starting this site is because I have so much that I want to share about God's Word. When I was a teenager I started making my own devotional. I would read random parts of the Bible, pick out a verse that stuck out to me, and write what I thought about it. So I decided to start this new site to get some of those ideas off of paper and get some good use out of them. For those of you who have been to my other site, you have probably noticed that I do have a belief in God. Sometimes I just don't feel like I share it enough though. So I have decided to start this site to kind of get what I want to say out there.

To start I am looking through some of the old devotionals that I have written and I will post a new one each day (for those of you who know me it might not be each day but it will be close). Leave me comments and let me know what you think about what I have written or if you have anything to add to the subject.

This whole idea basically stemmed for something I was working on last night. I am teaching J.V AWANA's at my church. The kids in that class have just been unruley since day one. Not all of them, but enough of them that I decided that it was time that I wrote a lesson on respect. So as I was sitting down to work on it last night I remembered that somewhere I had a bunch of devotionals that I had written when I was a teenager. So this morning I went looking for them and i found a few of them (I think the rest are in the attic, in the barn at my parents house. I will have to look for them the next time I am over there. In fact, I should probably just take the freaking box home!) So anyways, I found some of my old notes that I had taken for the devotionals I was writting and realized that I hadn't actually done anything with them, except for write them and then when I moved, threw them into a box and put them in my parents barn attic. So I decided that it was time to crack out some of those devotionals and share them with everyone. I know that i probably won't get very many hits on this site as I do with my other one, but hey, it is all about getting it out to at least one person. If one person stops by and reads this site then that is fine with me.

So I hope you enjoy what I have written. If you do or even if you don't let me know. Just remember to be nice about any disagreement that you may have. Thank you!