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It All Starts When You Look Up

February 20, 2013

The truth is, feeling small may not be so bad after all, if in recognizing our smallness, we come to realize the wonder of God—a God who is beyond our ability to fully describe or imagine, yet Someone we are privileged to know, love, and embrace. Looking up from our fragile little lives, we are faced with the supremacy of a God who is fully capable of not only running the entire cosmos today—a task that doesn’t tax Him in the slightest—but of sustaining the affairs of our lives as well.

Excerpted from I Am Not But I Know I Am by Louie Giglio

Daily Reflection: How do you find comfort in our smallness?

God sword

February 19, 2013

I want to share something I discovered while crafting this book. Hidden within the combination of letters that spell “God’s word” is a “sword.” By keeping the letters constant and only altering the spacing, you discover God’s word is a God sword. Isn’t that awesome? This confirms in an unexpected way what we are told by Paul in the book of Ephesians: “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (6:17). Everything we need or will need is hidden in his Word, and we search it out like buried treasure!

Excerpted from Girls With Swords by Lisa Bevere

Daily Reflection: How do you search out God’s Word like buried treasure?

Receiving God’s Love

February 18, 2013

When my husband proposed to me so many years ago, I didn’t say, “Wait a minute, John.  Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?”  I didn’t pull out a list of reasons why he couldn’t possibly love me or a rap sheet detailing my inadequacies to prove why he shouldn’t—although there were and are many.

No way! I just threw my arms open wide and accepted his love.  I would have been a fool to turn down an offer like that.

I wonder what would happen in our lives if we stopped resisting God’s love and started receiving it.  What if we stopped trying to do the math, stopped striving to earn His favor? What if we just accepted the altogether-too-good-to-be-true news that the yardstick has been broken and the Cross has opened a door to intimacy with [ … ]

Quotes on Love

February 15, 2013

In family life, love is the oil that eases friction,
the cement that binds closer together,
and the music that brings harmony.
EVA BURROWS
…
Smile at each other, smile at your wife,
smile at your husband, smile at
your children, smile at each other.
MOTHER TERESA
…
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s
when two people have been looking at each
other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
SAM LEVENSON

Daily Reflection: What is your favorite quote on Love?

Agape

February 14, 2013

Agape is not a feeling you get when you encounter someone you find lovable; instead, it involves choosing to express love even—or perhaps especially—when you encounter someone unlovable. It is all about self-denial rather than self-fulfillment; it’s focused on giving rather than on receiving.

I don’t know about you, but I feel hopelessly incapable of that kind of love. It seems an almost impossible thing for anyone but God to love in this way, and yet He makes no small thing of calling us to do just that. Jesus said, “Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples” (John 13:35, nlt). What a high calling! Agape is the number one evidence to this world that we are His! No wonder He planted in our hearts a longing for such a love.

Excerpted from [ … ]

Quotes on Love

February 13, 2013

My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.

My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one [ … ]

Free to Love

February 12, 2013

“We would love others without first demanding that they conform to our requirements or somehow become acceptable to us. We would not be in competition with anyone else, feeling pressure to look better than we are or hurrying so we’ll be first in line to get a reward. God has plenty of blessings for all his children, and he will still have blessings left to give away whenever we get there. God’s being good to someone else doesn’t mean he will have nothing left to give us later on.

When we learn this, we can love God with everything we are; we can love ourselves and love our neighbors the way we love God. When this happens, we keep the Great Commandments. We are then living in the “yes” of Christ, and we can freely share his “yes” with everyone [ … ]

The Rope of Acceptance

February 8, 2013

“The Bible reveals strategies for keeping relational mountains small and manageable. In order to persevere and improve our relationships, we first must connect with the rope of acceptance. Rock climbers use a technique with ropes called belaying. It involves securing a climber to a rope so he doesn’t fall too far if he slips off the rock. Similarly, we can’t climb to new heights safely if we don’t connect with a rope of acceptance. “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (Romans 15:7). One of our greatest problems in relationships is that we’re always trying to change the people we’re relating to. To accept others means that we stop trying to change them and we start trying to understand them.”

Excerpted from One Month to Live by Kerry and Chris [ … ]

In Him, I Am

February 7, 2013

“The Bible has a lot to say about our identity. For example, Peter wrote, ‘You are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. ‘Once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people. Once you received no mercy; now you have received God’s mercy.’’

Peter was talking about our collective identity as Christians, but this also is a message to us as individuals. Before it dawned on us that Jesus Christ is real and is willing to live in our hearts, many of us were lost in our personal identity crises. But as we become followers of Jesus, the Bible says, we take on a new identity [ … ]

Finding Your Calling

February 6, 2013

“Some questions we have about finding our calling and vocation are what questions. What God-given gifts do I have? What can I do? What is being asked of me?

And some of them are where questions. Where is the right place for me? Do I still want to work here? Is this school the right one for me? Has the time come to move away or to move home?

There is at least one other set of questions—the who questions.”

“Our search for our calling leads us to listen deep within ourselves, hoping to hear the echo within, hoping to ungarble and understand the incarnate word spoken into us, hoping to discover how to live into and out of the echo of that word as it resounds within. But we are not meant to stay within ourselves forever. We [ … ]