Bible, love, Memorizing scripture, Steadfast love

A Precious Love

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The steadfast love of God, how great it is.  To live in the knowledge of a Savior who loves us unconditionally, with an unmoving, never-ending love is overwhelming and amazing.

You have heard of people having a word to define their season, or maybe they have a word for the year.  I am not sure which mine is or both, but the word to define my life is STEADFAST LOVE.  I guess it really is two words, but who’s counting. Steadfast love is a word I hear in my heart and mind daily. It seems to jump off the pages of the Bible when I see it.  It recalibrates me when I get lost in the pain of life or the routine of the mundane.

So for the memory verse for the month of March, here is another one on steadfast love.  Maybe it will be a year of steadfast love. Time will tell, but for now, it remains my anchor of hope in a stormy sea.

Psalm 36:7-8 says “How precious is your steadfast love O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.  They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.” Just take that first line, how precious is your steadfast love O God!  The Bible ends that sentence with an exclamation mark, but it could just as easily end with a question mark.  I ask God to show me how precious His steadfast love is.  He reminds me of Easter. Of a steadfast love that gave His life for mine.  Of how steadfast love clung to the cross, to the hope, to the redemption of my soul.

God’s love is not like man’s love.  It loves when it is inconvenient – when the one being loved does not deserve it.  It is always there through sleepless nights and sorrow-filled days.  God’s love surrounds us if we take the time to see it.

God’s steadfast love is an abundance feast in His house.  What a thought.  God’s love creates a place for us where we are the honored guest.  It quenches our dry throats with water from the river of His delight.  It refreshes and restores our broken hearts.  It reminds us that we are not alone.  There are others God graciously gathers with us to join the feast, to help us celebrate who He is in our midst.

What a love.  It knows no bounds, no limits, no hesitations.  It gives freely to all who will partake of it.  So I ask you, have you thought how precious God’s love is lately?  Have you silenced your mind and your heart long enough to really appreciate the steadfast love God offers?  If you haven’t you should.  Take a moment and think about what God’s love is to you. Maybe you have never thought about the fact that God, the creator of the universe, is passionately in love with you.  He is.  He loves you with a steadfast love that will never fade.  He loves you where you are right now in the midst of whatever your life is.  He loves you because He created you. No one knows you better, and still He will always choose to love you.  That, my friends, is a love worth daydreaming about.  It is worthy of gratitude and thankfulness.

Take time to tell God how precious His love is to you and how thankful you are for it. It will change your day.  It will make a bad attitude better.  It will remind you there is good out there and in you. It will pull you out of a funk and hold your hand if you need to cry.  It is precious and profound, and it is yours.

How precious is your steadfast love O God!(?)

Click here for the March 2018 memory verse

 

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Bible, Friendship, Uncategorized, Valentine's Day

All kinds of Love

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Ah, February, the month of love.  And since my word for the year is Steadfast love this is shaping up to be a great month!  Of course, we tend to focus February’s love on those we love, but what if we included those we simply like in our focus this month?  What if we shifted our focus to those God loves this month?

I woke up in the middle of the night with two thoughts on love running through my mind.  The first stemmed from John 15:15 “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I called you friend for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”

Jesus, the one we are supposed to serve, changes that game and says while you are serving me I will call you friend.  The word friend there has lots of meanings ranging from an acquaintance to a  trusted confidant, held dear in a close bond of personal affection.  This is where my thoughts began to run wild.  Jesus – the one who loved me before I knew Him – that Jesus calls me a friend.  I began to think of my friends.  How do I treat them?  Am I only friendly with them when it serves me?  Do I seek out time with them when I am lonely and have nothing better to do?  Do I love and honor them the way a true friend deserves to be loved?

As I lay there in the middle of the night with all these thoughts of friends – questioning if I am even a good one – my mind circled back to February, the month of love.  What if I not only focused my love toward my friends?  What if I told them how important they are to me?  To God?  What if I looked for small ways to tell my friends they are loved and valued this month?  Some of my friends are going through some really hard stuff. I bet yours are too.  What if God used me to show them his love?  I began thinking of ways to do just that, expanding this month of love to include my circle of friends.

I wrote down a few things thinking that would help me 1) remember them in the morning, and 2) give my mind the peace it needed to fall back to sleep.  It didn’t work.  My mind transitioned from God loving me as a friend and me living that out this month to God loving those I don’t.  God loves the unlovely. That is a heavy thought at 3:00 am.  John 13:35 came to mind. “By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.”

My restless mind, now almost fully awake, began to wonder, “Do I show the world around me the love of Christ?  Would a stranger in the store know I was a Christ follower because of the way I chose to interact with them?  Does giving the homeless man on the side of the road a granola bar as I drive by count as love?  Could I do more? Is God wanting me to do more?”

I wrote down a few more thoughts on my paper by my bed hoping once more that by writing it down and planning to dedicate more attention to this in the morning that I would be able to fall asleep.  It did sort of help this time.  The final thought/prayer was what if I challenge myself and others through this blog to live these two verses out this month?

So here it is – February the month of love.  I challenge you this month to look beyond those you “love” to those you like.  Find a way to make them feel important, valued, and cared for.  It could as simple as taking a friend for coffee or sending a quick text to let them know you are thinking of them.  Then don’t stop there. Take that spirit of love to those who truly need to know someone cares about them.  Do something for someone you find unlovable this month.  Become someone who is known for the love they give to others.  Share the love of God by loving on those around you, those you really do love with your whole heart.  Then share the love of Jesus with those you like: friends, co-workers and neighbours.  And then take a giant leap and share the love of the one who calls you friend with those who have no one to love them.

I have decided to make these two verses the memory verse for this month.  You can pick one or the other.

Click here for John 13:35

Click here for John 15:15

Leave me a comment to let me know how your month of love is going.

 

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Bible, family activities, family fun, Holiday, Parenting, Raising Teens, Valentine's Day

Remind them how much Jesus loves them this Valentine’s Day

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I have three teenagers and more than anything I want them to have a great relationship with Jesus; filled with the knowledge of His great love for them.  With that in mind, I am always looking for ways to remind them of just how much Jesus really does love them.  And with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I decided to use this holiday of love to focus on God’s love for us.

In the past leading up to Valentine’s Day, I have given them hearts where I have written why I love them.  But this year I wanted them to know God’s love for them.  I start on February 1st and every day for the next 14 days I hang one random heart in their room with a personalized Bible verse about God’s love. For example, I might write “For God so loved Aaron that He gave His only Son so that Aaron should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16.

A few days ahead of time, I started cutting out my hearts.  I used scrapbooking paper that I already had, but you can buy heart themed paper, or red or pink whatever you want. I cut out various size hearts using different sized cookie cutters and tracing them on the paper – one for each kid for 14 days. For me, this was a total of 42 hearts.  I also looked up all my verses ahead of time.  I have a list of several scriptures you can use Valentine’s Day Activity –God’s love Bible verses.  Just remember to personalize them!  Then every morning for the first 14 days in February I would hang a heart with a verse on it somewhere in their room.  If my children hadn’t mentioned anything about the hearts to me by dinner I would ask them if they found the one for that day.

   

Last year I even added my husband in this.  I wrote why I loved him on 14 different hearts and hung them around our room. Most of which are still hanging in the same place a year later.

It’s a small thing but I pray the impact of these hearts will be huge.  That they will remind my kids, on days when they feel like no one loves them, that even then God loves them like crazy.

If you have ways you have tried to help your kids recognize God’s love for them I’d love to hear about it. Leave your ideas in the comment section below!

Happy Valentine’s Day, and remember God loves you more than you can even comprehend.

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Bible, End times, Uncategorized

Look to walk for the days are evil

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I was doing my devotions and I read the strangest verse. Ephesians 5:12 says “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise.”  What the heck does that mean, I thought.  So I went to my trusty Biblehub.com and looked it up.  What I found was very interesting.  The word “look” means “to see something physical with spiritual results.” It carries what is seen into the unseen realm so a person can take the needed action.  And the “walk” in the verse is “how one conducts life, literally walk around or complete a circuit.”  If you add the following few verses, you have a very powerful instruction/warning from God on how to live in these evil days.

In fact, if you look at verses 15 & 16 there is a comma connecting the two into one full sentence.  Verse 16 says “making the best use of the time, because the days are evil.”

Making the best use means “to ransom, to buy up for oneself.”  In this verse, it seems to have a slightly different meaning than that. It connects the idea of ransom and buying for yourself from the store. It means to make a wise and sacred use of every opportunity for doing good so that zeal and well-doing is the purchase – money by which we make the time our own.

We are to live buying time with zeal and well-doing.  Wow, that changes how I spend my day!

If we put together both of these thoughts, it is a powerful catalyst to change how we do our day to day life.  We are to be watching; seeing things in the physical but applying the spiritual to them; being led by the spirit in how we act and react in all situations we encounter through the day.  We are to literally buy back time by living with such a zeal for the Lord that we are consumed with His well-doing.  And we are to do this because the days are evil.

I have no idea when Jesus is coming back.  And I have no desire to debate those prophecies. But I do have a rising desire to live more alert to the fact that the days are evil and the time is getting shorter to tell others of the love of Jesus.

I find myself with a stirring I can’t explain and one I never thought I would be excited to have.  End times stuff scares me if I’m being honest.  But suddenly fear is overcome with love for those who are hurting and lost.

Every day we hear of some tragic event on the news – people being killed in senseless acts of evil here in our own towns and all over the world.  But there is good news that is never told.  Yes! Indeed, the days are evil.  But God promises to pour out His spirit in these times like never before.  That zeal that we are supposed to have that comes from looking as we walk through this life is real. It is possible to hear bad, scary news, and then make the most of the time we have living full of zeal for God and His well-doing.  It is an amazing thing when you surrender your life to God and live the way He says to in scripture.

Life is amazing when you look not before you walk but as you walk.  God will open your eyes to see people to pray for, love on, and tell them the good news.

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