Category Archives: encourage

Freedom Friday: Are Your Dreams Asleep?

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“Once upon a time there was a funny dog named Crispin’s Crispian. He was named Crispin’s Crispian because – he belonged to himself.”


This is the beginning of one of our favorite children’s stories, Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself.

My husband discovered this book at the grocery store when my oldest was just a toddler. My kids loves this book. Love it. Ideally, they would like for me to read it 15 times a day.

In the book, Crispin’s Crispian meets a little boy in his travels. They cook dinner together and the boy moves into Crispian’s little house.

The final pages of the book describe them cleaning up after dinner and heading to bed. “He [Mr. Dog] curled up in a warm little heap and went to sleep. And he dreamed his own dreams.”

I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Dog as I watched Bob Hamp’s “A Kingdom Parable” teaching this week. He tells the story of how a young man discovers who God created him to be (he’s an acrobat). At the end of the parable, Bob describes how people react to seeing this young man’s acrobatic feat.

He describes the audience as people whose hearts have gone to sleep, and are coming alive as they witness someone who is stepping into exactly who they were made to be. The people go home, and tie ropes to trees. They pick up those music lessons that have been forgotten for too long. Others simply go back to what they used to do when their dreams were still alive.

Has this ever happened to you?

Sometimes, I go to a show, I hear good music, and it inspires me to write. I’ve written some of my most honest and powerful songs this way. Other times, I hear an inspirational speaker talk about something that exhilarates me, and I go home and write a blog post.

I walked away from this Bob Hamp teaching and felt God put a question on my heart.

Are your dreams asleep? Is your heart asleep?

In the acrobat parable, the young man’s father says to him something that struck me as a profound truth. There are some things hidden in your heart that you will never discover if you don’t push yourself enough to find it.

I’ve written elsewhere on how to keep your dreams alive. I’ve also written about how God refines us and gives us the desires of our hearts. Those posts might be helpful resources.

Part of learning to walk in freedom, part of learning to become the person God created you to be is fanning those dreams that He has given you. It’s infusing hope into them when there is no visible reason to hope.

“He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.” Ephesians 1:7-8 (NLT)

Ask yourself today: are my dreams asleep? What dreams are hidden in my heart, things I’ve seen glimpses of, but have been afraid to dig deeper and discover their fullness? Have I, or the enemy, squelched and buried the dreams and hopes God had conceived in us? Is it because they seem too big, too wild, too unrealistic?

“Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.” Ephesians 3:20 (NLT)

Do I believe that God is able? Do I believe that God is not only able, but willing? Not just willing, but that He has a deep desire to bless me and love on me and see my dreams come true?

Unlike Mr. Dog, we do not belong to ourselves. We belong to God. And we find out who we are by staring into His eyes and seeing ourselves reflected in Him. We discern who He created us to be by diving into His heart and resting in Him. We discover the power to keep our dreams alive in His presence.

Wake up your dreams today. Get out your journal and remind yourself of what they are. Position yourself in a warm little heap in God’s lap and allow Him to redeposit those dreams into your heart (I envision this involving hot cocoa with marshmallows for some reason).

“Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you your heart’s desires.” Psalm 37:4 (NLT)

Two resources that might be helpful in assisting you in this exercise: The Kiss of Heaven by Darlene Zschech and Holy Discontent by Bill Hybels.

Dream your own dreams, the ones God has given you. You are dear to God, and your dreams are His gift to you. Nurture those dreams as you would care for delicate gift from a dear loved one.

Freedom Friday: Are Goals Necessary?

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Happy Freedom Friday to all my readers!

I was asked yesterday when I began Freedom Friday. October 29, 2010: What is Freedom, Part 1. We’ve been seeking God and learning to walk in freedom together for over 15 months now!

Freedom Friday is a toddler. Aw 🙂

I’m going to be doing a series of posts to encourage you as you pursue your priorities and goals based on your focus roles for 2012. Today, we’ll be examining whether or not goals are really necessary in the journey toward freedom.

This may seem like an odd question after last week’s post. Here’s why I started pondering this question.

I read something yesterday that was very anti-setting goals called How to Have the Best Year of Your Life (without Setting a Single Goal). The author implies that setting goals is setting yourself up to fail. In fact, he goes so far as to say “Resolutions are pipe dreams, and goals are a waste of time.”

In some ways, I agree.

As I mentioned previously, I have been setting goals for years. Years. Many of them had to do with time management, weight management, health, fitness, and Bible reading. Most years, I didn’t even accomplish half of those goals.

I had to ask myself why? What has been the difference in those years when I did accomplish my goals?

One thing I could agree on with the article was that goals really need to be about developing new disciplines. If the goal alone is what is motivating you, then you may be setting yourself up to fail.

Saying, “I want to lose 50 lbs” is likely not good enough. Why? Why do you want to lose weight? And what disciplines are you planning on developing to accomplish that goal? If this is a recurring goal in your life, what have you done in the past that has worked and what hasn’t worked?

I started running seriously because I lost a significant amount of weight and wanted to keep it off. This was only motivating for a short time. I continued running because I wanted to see how far I could go and how hard I could push myself. I now run not only for the physical exercise, but for the mental clarity I gain while running.

One of my goals for 2012 is to run through the winter (something I’ve never done), even when it’s wicked cold. I hit one level of that goal this week, when it was 8 degrees, feels like -7. I ran 8 miles.


Notice the frost covering my whole head and the icicles on my eyelashes.

Keeping the weight off is not enough of a motivator to drag myself out of bed at 5 AM and run 8 miles in the freezing cold. I do it because I’m headed toward a goal, the goal being not only to train myself to run in the wicked cold, but also to shave 30 seconds off my half-marathon pace.

I frequently discuss having SMART goals. Creating SMART goals gives you a destination to reach and a way to measure whether or not you’ve reached it.

The ironic thing is that many of my goals & priorities this year are not SMART. The ones related to running that I shared here are, but many of the rest (which I will share in a future post) are not. They are not measurable. They cannot be timed. And they really aren’t very specific. Rather, they are focused on making some small adjustments in the way I live and how I spend my time that I hope will have a great impact in refining some areas of my life.

This is where I can agree with the article above about creating new disciplines.

A 2012 goal is to read and complete 25 books. This is a means to an end. The end is not being able to say “I read 25 books”; the end is that I want to spend less time on my computer and my iPhone. I also have a pile of half-finished books I want to complete, as well as a mammoth stack of books I’ve gotten off of Paperback Swap (fantastic resource, by the way!) that I genuinely want to read but have not made the time for.

These two factors together, I have books I want to read and I want to limit my internet time, are both motivators to read those books and create a new discipline of reading regularly, something I’ve struggled with since having kids.

So, are goals necessary? Maybe not for everyone. I like to have priorities to focus on with a few specific goals mixed in. I can’t completely agree that goals are a waste of time, but I can absolutely agree that one way to shape your goals and choose them is by focusing on who you want to become. Creating good, sustainable habits as well as shaping new disciplines that you enjoy is a step in this direction.

On that note, here is a blog post about six keys to achieving big goals from one of my favorite bloggers, Michael Hyatt (I’ve mentioned him before). And here’s a post of his on How To Make New Year’s Resolutions Stick which discusses the importance of having SMART goals.

And a close-up of the partially defrosted eyelashes after they had been inside for a few minutes:

Freedom Friday: You Are Precious

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As most of you know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, I have 2 little boys under the age of 4.

I tell them regularly that they are precious, they are cherished, and they are accepted. I share with them the joy I have in being their mom, and what a privilege it is to spend all day hanging out with them. I explain that though my love runs very deep, they also have a Heavenly Father who loves them even more, so much that He gave up everything for them.

Despite my good intentions, I yell too much. I am not nearly as patient as I’d like to be. I struggle with my words and my actions toward them at times. I find myself needing to apologize more often than I wish I needed to.

My children are very forgiving. Much more forgiving than I am of myself.

I am an imperfect parent. We are all imperfect. I don’t say that to excuse my behavior. It is simply a statement about my, and everyone’s, reality. Even if I were always patient, always kind, never raising my voice or using a harsh word, I still would not communicate perfectly my, and God’s, love for them.

When I speak these truths to my children, that they are adored, they are loved, that God created them for a specific purpose and with unique gifts, that I am so blessed to be their mom – they are not old enough to fully understand all that this means. That’s okay. I want these truths to sink into their little hearts so deeply that by the time they are old enough to understand, these truths will be so ingrained in them that they will be their reality.

Last week, I talked about resting in God. One of the reasons we need to rest in God is to receive from Him all those things He thinks about us and wants to deposit into our hearts.

When I became a Christian, a counselor taught me to identify the lies I believed about myself. They were so deeply ingrained in me that it has taken a very long time to uproot them. I’m still weeding through some.

One way I learned to recognize the lies was by learning the truth. Take a second to do a Google search for “who I am in Christ”. Try and find a list that includes Old Testament references as well. By learning these truths and getting them deposited deep in my heart, it was much easier to recognize when I was struggling with the lies.

Here are a few of those truths.

As a believer, you have been adopted into God’s family and have become His precious child (John 1:12).

You are forgiven (Ephesians 1:8; Colossians 1:14).

You have been bought with a price; you belong to God (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

You are chosen (Ephesians 1:3-8).

You have access to the Father (Ephesians 2:18).

You are safe (1 John 5:18).

God will never forget you (Isaiah 49:15), nor will He ever leave you or forsake you (Deutoronomy 31:6, 8; Joshua 1:5).

You have been written on the palm of God’s hand (Isaiah 49:16).

You are loved with an everlasting love. God has drawn you with lovingkindness (Jeremiah 31:3).

We know what love is because God first reached out in love to us (John 3:16, 1 John 3:16, 4:19).

All these things are true for you simply because you are a child of God. There is nothing you could do, nothing you could achieve, no amount of hard work or even wandering that could make these things more or less true.

You are worth knowing, worth loving, and worth creating. Our Heavenly Father declared it so when He sent His one and only, precious, perfect, deeply loved Son to die on a cross.

I encourage you to let these truths sink into your heart. Rest in God, and allow Him to speak them directly to you. Learn to rest in the knowledge of who you are. Like with my children, it will likely soak into your heart long before you even begin to fully understand it.

“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesian 3:17b-19

A few months ago, my older son turned to me and said, “You are precious!” Just a few days ago, he told his little brother the same thing.

It is sinking in.

You are precious. You are cherished. Let it sink in.

Freedom Friday: The God of Ice Cream

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Hello, Freedom Seekers!

I hope this post finds you choosing to trust. Since writing on that topic last week, I have been doing just that.

I have faced some challenging circumstances in this week as well, in fact another just this morning. But God knew these things were coming and prepared my heart to respond with confidence in His faithfulness.

This week has been full of stones of remembrance, and I’ll share just one with you.

My older son has food sensitivities (I write out this in my other blog). We eat all of our family meals according to those limitations (no dairy, wheat or soy), and my younger son also eats this way. Because of this, it can be a challenge to find a variety of foods for my kids that are also fun & affordable.

We are part of a buying club where we get our flours, beans, seeds, and other kitchen essentials in bulk. We had a pick-up this week. The driver of the truck had to wait around for a while because he was early, so we were chatting. My younger son was playing little games with him. As he got ready to leave, he came out of his truck with some ice cream. It was a mislabeled item, and he would have had to run his truck for 12 hours in order to keep it frozen. It was green tea coconut milk ice cream, one of the only types of commercially-made ice cream my kids can eat! It generally costs $5+ per pint! I walked away with 4 pints of ice cream for my family.

That may seem like a silly story, but I felt so cared for by God! I can obviously live without ice cream, but it felt like a blessing directly from God of something we would not have gotten for ourselves.

I am someone who struggles with asking God for anything other than my most basic needs. A roof over my head, clothing on my back, food on the table, and water to drink. I even struggle with asking for those!

I, as a parent of 2 wonderful boys, don’t just want them to have food, clothing, water & shelter. I desire so much more for them than the basics!

I’m coming to understand that God not only wants to meet our needs, He often wants to meet our wants as well.

God is generous. I need that reminder. God is giving. I even wrote an article a few years back, called “God Gave His Only“.

God……spared no expense, but extravagantly gave His only; He did what needed to be done in order for us to have the opportunity to be reconciled to Him, once and for all.

I wrote those words. Yet I still need to be reminded.

“Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” James 1:17

Thank You, God, for not being the God of barely enough, but for being the God of more than enough. Thank You for being the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. You are not just the God of our daily bread, but You are the God of ice cream. Expand my limited thinking and asking. Your Word says, “You have not because you ask not.” Help me to ask, and surrender the answer to You. Love You, Lord.

Freedom Friday: Seeing with God’s Eyes

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Good day, Freedom Friday readers!

We’re still on Joshua here. I know; I can’t help it! It’s just that good!

Let’s turn to Joshua 5 🙂 The Israelites have just stepped into the Jordan, crossed it, and taken up their Stones of Remembrance. Joshua circumcised the Israelites, they healed & rested, and then they celebrated the Passover.

13 Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
14 “Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?”
15 The commander of the LORD’s army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so.

Many commentators on this passage believe that the commander of the army of the LORD was Jesus Himself. Joshua worshipped Him & referred to Him as “my Lord”. Prior to this time, God had been speaking directly to Joshua, over & over. He had not bodily appeared to Joshua, nor had an angel visited him.

Why, then, did Joshua need God Himself to come speak to him face to face?

I can’t help but wonder if he was possibly discouraged.

Notice that Joshua was near his obstacle when the above happened. What he was thinking about? Was he staring at the obstacle, wondering how they could ever overcome it? Had he forgotten all the Lord has already done? I imagine him standing there, trying to remind himself of who his deliverer was. In that moment, the ESV translation says that Joshua “lifted up his eyes.”

The commander of the Lord’s army, whoever he was, reminded Joshua to consecrate Himself to the Lord and to press on.

6:1 Now the gates of Jericho were securely barred because of the Israelites. No one went out and no one came in.

2 Then the LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands.

Huh? That doesn’t even make sense. To the natural eye, Jericho was shut up, snug as a bug in a rug, with high walls and no way in. No one was even coming or going. But God said to Joshua, “Look at this with my eyes. I have already delivered this city into your hands.”

I have had a series of challenging events in my life recently. It’d be quite easy to get discouraged based on the circumstances I see around me.

The truth about life for us all is that it’d be easy to find things to be rip courage out of us, and it’s much more difficult to find things to deposit courage into us.

But the reality of following Jesus is you & I have already been set free from the laws of sin and death. In fact, you’ve already been set free from that thing that just came to mind as you doubted the truth of my last sentence. That situation you are looking at, the one that seems perfectly hopeless, God is saying, “Consecrate yourself to me. I already have a plan to be glorified. I will deliver you from that thing that has you bound. I can do the miraculous in the midst of that hopeless situation. Look at this with my eyes.”

Are you speaking truth to yourself concerning your troubling situation, the obstacles facing you? Are you placing your hope in all the ways you have possibly conjured up to fix it, or all the possible outcomes you’ve imagined? Or are you hoping in the power of God, the same God who parted the Jordan, and as we read on, brought down the mighty walls of Jericho?

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

What we see, our struggles, our circumstances, our burdens, are not only light & momentary, but they are temporary. Read that again: this is temporary.

We have a choice: stare at the walls of Jericho, or look into the eyes of our great God.

In Joshua’s moment of discouragement, he chose to look to His Creator, the Lover of his soul, His Deliverer. And in that moment, it seems as if God replied, “Because you chose to look to me, I am about to do something amazing.“

Freedom Friday Tools for the Journey: Stones of Remembrance

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This is a continuation of the last 2 Freedom Friday posts. It falls into the “Tools for the Journey” category, but it’s also a continuation of the discussion of Joshua (I recommend going back & reading this if you haven’t already).

We pick up the story in Joshua 4. The Israelites have just crossed the Jordan. They’ve seen God’s hand move powerfully and faithfully, as He continues to do what He has promised He would do.

Then God tells Joshua to have one man from each tribe go back into the middle of the river, take a stone from where the priests are standing, and carry it back out of the river.

4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had chosen—one from each of the tribes of Israel. 5 He told them, “Go into the middle of the Jordan, in front of the Ark of the Lord your God. Each of you must pick up one stone and carry it out on your shoulder—twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. 6 We will use these stones to build a memorial. In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 7 Then you can tell them, ‘They remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant went across.’ These stones will stand as a memorial among the people of Israel forever.”

I can’t help but wonder why God doesn’t tell them to get the stones on their way through the river. Is this again another little faith test, like when He commanded them to step into the Jordan, and only then would the waters part? While crossing the river, the Israelites were specifically instructed to stay a half mile away from the Ark of the Covenant, whereas now they are told to gather rocks from where the priests are standing. The stones needed to be from that very spot where the Ark of the Covenant, a sign of God’s presence and His promises, was held. God also instructed Joshua to make another pile of 12 stones in that very spot in the middle of the Jordan.

Notice they weren’t celebratory stones. It would have been a fine time to celebrate, but no. The “Stones of Remembrance” served as a memorial. A reminder of God’s faithfulness. That His promises were, and still are, true. The end of an era (slavery and wilderness wanderings), and a new beginning in the Promised Land.

The reality of life is that we all get discouraged. “Discouraged” is likely too weak of a word – “disheartened” is better. Proverbs says “Hope deferred makes the heart sick”. Our focus gets sidetracked by the wait. We forget all that God is, and all He has done in us & through us.

We get hyper-focused on our vision of how things should be. We even have a picture of how, when and why God will show up and come through.

The Israelites certainly had a preconceived idea of how God’s deliverance should look. Imagine the Israelites, enslaved for 400 years. For all those generations, they spent their days, while subject to the whims of Pharaoh, dreaming of how God would show up. In my article “Craving Egypt“, I wrote about how quickly the Israelites lost sight of all that God had done to deliver them from slavery in Egypt. The following words were spoken by the Israelites soon after the parting of the Red Sea.

“If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Exodus 16:3

Even the Pharisees and Jewish leaders had an idea of what the Messiah, their deliverer, would look like. They had built in their minds an image of Him so inaccurate that when Jesus came, they didn’t even recognize Him.

The Stones of Remembrance after the crossing of the Jordan served not just as a reminder, but also as a warning. You will forget. You will lose sight. You will get off kilter, lose focus, sink into despair. You will even come up with your own ideas of what freedom looks like and how it should arrive.

It’s as if God is saying: I’ve carried you this far. Trust me. I’m not going to stop caring for you now. It may not look like you think it will. but I’m still here and I’m still working.

The Stones of Remembrance encourage us to focus on the “who” rather than the “how”. We love the “how”! We love imagining and conjuring up the grand scheme of how God is going to work in a particular situation. We’re not so enthusiastic about simply resting in the knowledge of who God is. We get too caught up in the details of the “how” to remember to fix our eyes on the eternal: Jesus.

This tool is different from the encouragement file in that the encouragement file is a place to keep reminders of thoughtful notes, affirmations, and thanks from people from over the years. Stones of Remembrance are times God came through, often in surprising ways.

So start writing it down. Look back through your journals, your emails, your Facebook status updates, and start a new journal. Write the date, and the way in which God came through. The manner in which He reminded you that He is good. The person through whom He spoke truth. The Scripture you heard three times in the same day, through three different means.

Write it down. You will forget. You will lose sight. We all do.

The Stones of Remembrance are what we reach for when we are disheartened, weighed down by the burden of the problems we were never meant to carry.

In the words of Sara Groves in her song by the same name, “He’s always been faithful; He will be again”.

That’s why we need Stones of Remembrance.

21 Then Joshua said to the Israelites, “In the future your children will ask, ‘What do these stones mean?’ 22 Then you can tell them, ‘This is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ 23 For the Lord your God dried up the river right before your eyes, and he kept it dry until you were all across, just as he did at the Red Sea when he dried it up until we had all crossed over. 24 He did this so all the nations of the earth might know that the Lord’s hand is powerful, and so you might fear the Lord your God forever.”

Freedom Friday, Tools for the Journey: Keep an Encouragement File

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Today, I went to go back to a series that I originally called “Keeping It Simple”. I’ve retitled it “Tools for the Journey”. Today’s entry will indeed be simple.

I was a campus missionary for a number of years, and during that time, a ministry associate recommended keeping an encouragement file. It’s an actual file that I keep in my filing cabinet with notes of encouragement or thanks that people have sent me over the years.

The Bible talks about the importance of encouragement over & over. In this blog post, I talked about how words have the power to deposit courage into you (encourage) or rip courage out of you (discourage). Too often, life, circumstances, and people rip courage out of us.

When that happens, it’s time to get out the encouragement file.

I thought of this yesterday, as a ministry participant sent me a kind & encouraging email about some things I’ve said & done in our support group. I actually haven’t added anything to my file for some time, but a few recent emails reminded me of its value.

Here’s a picture from inside my neglected encouragement file.

Some of these notes are 10+ years old. Many of them are from the 3 years I worked in student life.

The first image shows a scribbled-on envelope, where I quickly wrote down 10 things a friend was learning through Habakkuk from God. There are cards, post-it notes, printed emails. A few drawings from a dear friend. There are many ways to receive encouragement.

I’m adding 3 recent emails to my file today.

Remember also to be an encourager. Students I worked with at leadership conferences would fill out form letter encouragement notes, to develop their encouragement skills.

Encouragement is a learned skill. Encourage your friends, family, loved ones, and your spiritual leaders. Strengthen them with your words. Think about people who have impacted your life positively. Take some time to write those people a short note of thanks and appreciation.

Be an encourager of others, and start an encouragement file for yourself today. That’s today’s Freedom Friday Tool for the Journey.

Freedom Fridays: Think Like a Free Person, Part 2

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Last week’s Think Like a Free Person, Part 1

Thinking like a free person isn’t just about addressing the lies we’ve chosen to believe. It’s also about fully embracing all God has for us, and more importantly, all God has already done for us.

This took me years to get. In fact, I’m still getting it.

For so long I relied on my feelings as my understanding of “truth”. If I felt something, it was “true”. If I didn’t feel it, it wasn’t “true”.

That is such a dangerous way to live.

I remember some very painful and tear-filled prayer times in my early walk with God. I’d cry out to God, “I can’t feel you, God! Please be here with me.” Satan tried to use that against me. “See, you can’t feel God! He doesn’t like you anymore! Nah-nah-na-boo-boo!” Of course if he had actually said, “Nah-nah-na-boo-boo!” maybe I would have realized where these thoughts were from.

I thought it was “true” because that’s how I felt.

Satan is the father of all lies! Not some lies, but every single one. In the Amplified Bible, the end of John 8:44 says “When he speaks a falsehood, he speaks what is natural to him, for he is a liar [himself] and the father of lies and of all that is false.”

I now know it doesn’t matter how I feel; I’m always in God’s presence. In fact, Psalm 139 says there’s nowhere I can go and not be in God’s presence. Absolutely nowhere.

Another thing I’d cry out to God is “God, why don’t You speak to me? You must not like me or I must have some unconfessed sin in my heart. So, God, I’m going to sit here until You show me what that sin is or until You speak to me.”

I was telling myself a half-truth because the Bible does say in Psalm 66:18 “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” I used that verse to beat myself up as proof that I was a pile of sin and piece of crud, and that I couldn’t hear from God because I had some cherished sin in my heart. But the truth of the matter is I didn’t have unconfessed sin in my heart; I was truly open to God’s conviction.

If you are honestly open to hearing from the Lord about any areas of sin in your life, He will show them to you. Just like I don’t need to constantly ask my intimate friends if I’ve done something to somehow offend or upset them, I don’t need to go on a constant fishing expedition to figure out if I’ve somehow offended God or upset Him. I’m not saying that there isn’t wisdom in praying, as David prayed in Psalm 139, “Search me, O God, and see if there is any offensive way in me.” What I am saying is that we don’t have to constantly pick through our day with a fine-toothed comb in hopes that we can find whatever cherished sin is keeping God from hearing our prayers.

Jesus said in John 10:27 (NASB) “My sheep hear My voice”. Not “they might hear my voice” or “they could maybe one day hear my voice” or “if they try hard enough”, but “My sheep hear My voice”. Period. The Bible is full of these types of promises, of what God has already done for us and everything that is available to us simply because Jesus died on the cross and we, in turn, repented of our sin and accepted His sacrifice as our Savior.

If you’re still allowing your old ways of thinking about yourself and about God to dictate your worth and your actions, you are basically telling Jesus that He’s not allowed to be Lord of your life. You are accepting the salvation He is giving, but rejecting the transformation He is offering.

We need to allow Him to take His proper place in our lives – not only as the Savior of your soul, but also as Transformer of our lives & Redeemer and Renewer of your mind.

Read the following verse as you think about the negative things you have said to yourself: “Men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken” (Matthew 12:36). You may have never thought to apply that verse the words you say to yourself, but you are God’s precious creation. If you are a believer in and follower of Jesus Christ, you have been adopted as God’s child. Think of how God’s heart breaks when we speak cruelly to ourselves.

I’m not a subscriber to “name it & claim it”, nor do I think we can speak anything we want into being. But there is something to be learned from those theologies. They may be taking a truth of God to an extreme – but there is still some truth there.

Think back to the last big mistake you made. How many times did you call yourself an idiot? Did you curse yourself for taking a risk? Did you berate yourself for for doing something so stupid?

I made a big snafu this week. I was going through the chest freezer to defrost some stuff and left a bag of steaks on the floor when I put stuff back in the freezer. I didn’t notice for like 15+ hours. And these were no ordinary steaks

The book of Proverbs says “reckless words pierce like a sword”. A pastor friend of mine used to say that words have the power to deposit courage into you (encourage) or rip courage out of you (discourage). How have your words to yourself been today? Are you depositing courage into yourself by replacing the lies with truth or are you ripping courage out of yourself by mistaking the lies for truth?

In Matthew 4, we read the account of Jesus being tempted after forty days of fasting. It was clear that Satan was lying to and trying to trick Jesus. Jesus could have just said, “Satan, you’re ridiculous. Go away.” Or worse, He could have given in to Satan’s demands. But instead, Jesus responded to Satan’s lies and even the Scripture he half-quoted with Scripture. Even in his tired, hungry state, Jesus had the Word so deep in His soul that it just flowed right out of Him.

We need that. As I said at the beginning of this series, we need to immerse ourselves in God’s Word. Looking at Jesus’s example, we can easily recognize the lies when we have been soaked in God’s truth.

Today, you have a choice. You can choose to trust that God is who He says He is. You can choose to believe all the promises the Word has for God’s children. You can choose to attack the lies with truths from God’s Word.

That’s how free people think.

Freedom Fridays: Think Like a Free Person, Part 1

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Quick Overview of this Learning To Walk in Freedom series:

What have we covered so far in Freedom Fridays? (I’m only included the posts that are actually in this “Learning to Walk in Freedom” series).

Intro: What is Freedom? Part 1 & Part 2

1. Spend Time with the Freedom Giver: Part 1 & Part 2

2. Spend Time with Freedom Seekers

3. Act Like a Free Person, part 1 & part 2

4. Understand Grace, part 1,part 2 & part 3

And now, today: Think like a free person.

Romans 12:2 says “Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

Proverbs 23:7 says “For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” Isaiah 55:8 says that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. God is speaking of how we are naturally without the Holy Spirit. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8

Even with the Holy Spirit, guiding us and directing us, we still need to fight against our natural ways of thinking that are often deeply ingrained in us.

“Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

Read that again. Soak it in. And now think about some of the thoughts you’ve had in the recent past. Were they encouraging? Life-giving? Or soul-crushing?

Could you use some transforming of your thoughts?

Satan is the father of lies. Lies are his native language (John 8:44). As we begin to change the way we think, we need to recognize where the lies come from. The lies we’ve chosen to believe, that we’ve allowed to sink in & attach to us, whether they were spoken by our parents, someone we love, or even spoken by ourselves to ourselves, really originated from the enemy.

We’ve bought into so many lies about who we are and who God is, and we need to take up the shield of faith (Eph. 6:16) and declare war on those lies. We need to trust in God’s truth, and we literally need to take up that truth and use it as a shield against the lies of the enemy.

It’s a battle; it really is. It’s a struggle to undo the years of lies that we chose to believe. 2 Corinthians 10: 4 says: “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.” We often think of strongholds as only the big stuff: addictions, etc. But isn’t anything that keeps us from God a stronghold? Aren’t these lies a stronghold? They keep us from knowing God and believing the truth about ourselves. In Christ, we have the power to let go of strongholds.

Read the following verse: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” It’s a battle that mainly takes place in our minds. We are commanded to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ – to make our thoughts agree with what God says about us and how God views us. And anything that doesn’t meet that strict criteria needs to be demolished.

Think of a lie that you’ve struggled with lately. Maybe you’re struggling with believing that God is going to provide for you in some way. When that lie comes up, if you have nothing to replace it with, it will just stay stuck in your head. Not only that, but I find often we reinforce the lie. “Yeah, God isn’t going to provide for me in this situation, at least not in a timely manner. I always have to do everything myself. He could make this easier, and He isn’t!”

Sound familiar?

What do you think would happen if instead, you said this:
“Wow, God, this is a really tough situation I’m in. But I know that You will meet all my needs according to the riches of Your glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). I also know that the lions may grow weak and hungry, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing (Ps. 34:10). I am worth more than many small birds (Lk 12:7) and You are a good father who doesn’t give His kids stones when they ask for bread (Mt. 7:9). Lord, I believe; help my unbelief (Mk 9:24).”

And next week, in part 2, I’ll share how learning this above truth has played out in my life.

A couple things to leave you with: read this story of mine where I share the power that labels had on me (it’s 2 parts). Also, read this article about the meditations of our hearts.

Freedom Friday: A New & Glorious Morn

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Today I’m going to share with you the One Thing that is the key to learning to walk in freedom!

This is not a continuation of last week, but a separate teaching due to the holidays 🙂 When I say “due to the holidays”, what I mean is “due to the fact that I am out of town and left my notes for today’s entry at home.” Then again, I thought it’d be kind of silly to ignore the fact that much of the world is celebrating Christmas tomorrow!

Last year at this time, I published an article entitled “God Gave His Only“. You should read it.

God knew before He created you and me that we’d inherit from our ancestors in the Garden of Eden a propensity to make bad choices, with the complete inability to throw off the chains of struggle.

Before the foundation of time, God devised a master rescue mission. Jesus was not God’s Plan B or C, as my pastor pointed out last week. He was God’s plan A.

My 3 year old son thinks Christmas is all about presents and for the past few weeks has daily presented me with things he cannot live without and must get for Christmas. I realized, quite pitifully, that he had no idea why we even celebrate Christmas in the first place.

Mommy FAIL.

Anyway, we started reading about the birth of Jesus in his kid’s Bible. For the first time, I noticed that little manger packed with straw and it really struck me: Jesus was a baby.

Mary pushed that baby out the old-fashioned way with no epidural or fetal monitoring in a barn with animals and their poo hanging out everywhere.

I’m sure this struck me as especially interesting because I had a c-section with my 3 year-old and a homebirth with my youngest. I had people ask me if having a baby at home is sanitary. More sanitary than a barn!

Anyway, Jesus was a baby. He cried when He needed His mom (contrary to what “Away in a Manger” says), He was breastfed, He had poopy diapers. For years, He needed adults to meet His every need.

Jesus could have easily come as a full-grown man. He was God, after all. He could have floated down from the clouds and made quite an entrance for Himself!

Instead, as my acquaintance Alicia Britt Chole says, Jesus had 30 hidden years (get the book with your Christmas money) during which He knew His call & His purpose, yet He lived a life that looked pretty normal from the outside – and did not sin.

Jesus was God’s plan A for learning to walk in freedom.

God saw that people He loved were drowning in their sin. Because of His great love for His creation, because of His compassionate heart for His children. He knew that it would be painful for both God the Father and Jesus His Son, but He did it anyway. He spared no expense, but extravagantly gave His only; He did what needed to be done in order for us to have the opportunity to be reconciled to Him, the chance to live in freedom, once and for all.

As The Message says, “Christ has set us free to live a free life.”

As we meditate on the birth of the Freedom Giver, let us reflect on the words of this song that are heavy on my heart:

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Til He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Jesus, in His birth, His life, in His death and in His resurrection, gives us the opportunity to become recreated into the person He designed us to be. Because of Him, we can walk into “a new and glorious morn”: an abundant life of true freedom.

“Let all within us praise His holy name.”