"If You Don't Stand For Something, You Will Fall for Anything"

"If You Don't Stand For Something, You Will Fall for Anything, " this is a saying that I remember hearing all though life from many different places.

As a Christian, this has taken on a greater meaning to me and not more so in my life than during this time of starting this ministry. When God spoke to me concerning starting this ministry, I was presented with a checklist things to do and the last on the list was, " Do not fear, for I am with you; Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, Surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand."

This was the last on that particular checklist because that was what I would need the most. The enemy of faith, you see is fear. Fear of people, what they would say, what they would do, whether they would believe in you, whether they will come alongside you, anything you can possibly think of. In the face of these fears is my Lord and Savior saying,..."I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, Surely I will uphold you with my righteous hand".  These assurances may mean nothing to you but to me it means everything; for you see God was the one who died for me, the one who saved my life, the one who laid down His life for me. No One else has ever done that for me.

So as I, and others who have joined me in this ministry, to bring glory to God's name, we stand. We stand for the Sanctity of life for every person, every life because they are all precious in His sight. I know that the time will come for persecution, for condemnation, for ridicule but He says that I am to take up my cross daily and follow Him. I don't just want to sit back and admire my brothers and sisters who are dying for their faith; I want to join my Lord in the fields and harvest the crops that He desires.

This stand is for life and death; a spiritual war; a fight for the very lives of our people. The government can't fight this fight only the church. God's People!!  These are some verses that I keep in front of me.

And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Matthew 28:19

'When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' "The King will answer and say to them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me."Then He will also say to those on His left, 'Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels;…Matt 25:40

Open Door

"And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key
of David, he that open and none shall shut, and that shut and none open: I know thy works behold, I have set before thee a door opened, which none can shut, that thou has a little power, and did keep my word, and did keep my word, and didst not deny my name." Revelation 3:7-8

 

 

A door is a representation of so many things, a safe place, a place to call home, an opportunity, fear, uncertainty, it could also be a place of fear, a prison but my focus today is the 'OPEN' door that only God can open or close.

 

Have you ever experienced that, a door that only God could open?  I am not talking about an ordinary opportunity but an actual OPEN door.  I have, on a number of occasions and it is a time that you have to decide whether you trust God or not. You see He opens the door but we have to decide to go through it. We have to make a decision.

 

You see these types of doors are opened only:   BY GOD

We have to enter this door:                                 WITH GOD

Because you see the door is opened:                   FOR GOD

 

In the book of Genesis, God provided an open door to Abraham and told  him to leave his home, his family,  everything he knew and to go a place that God would tell. Abraham took that leap and entered the door and went through, with God and we all know that through his faith, the land of Israel was birth and we who are God's were also grafted into this family; all for God's glory.

 

My husband and I are on the cusp of walking through a door that God has opened. We are in the process of beginning a new ministry in our country that has never been here and we are starting it out of nothing. Trusting that God will provide though his people all that we need; a building, an ultrasound machine, volunteers and funding for everyday work. We trust God because He is faithful.  This Crisis Pregnancy and Youth Center is all His work and all for his glory.  The harvest is plentiful, the bible tells us and the laborers are few; the Father has sought to send us into the harvest and we are saying, Yes, we will Go!

 

For some of you, this is also an opportunity for an open door, you have the building that will change lives, you can provide the machine, you are ready to volunteer, you have the funds.  This is the Great Commission in action and the harvest is ripe. Evil can only prevail when the righteous do nothing!

 

To walk through the open door we have to be unhindered by uncertainty; we have to embrace the challenge, and go because He says so.  David would not have taken down Goliath if he had looked at the odds.

 

Faith is trusting God not our sight! and not our own limited strength and knowledge. Pray as to how God will use you in His work. Look for the open doors that He has prepared for you. Then walk through them knowing that it is all for His glory!

 



Hoshiya Na - Hosanna

As He enter Jerusalem, the people cried Hosanna, Hosanna!

Jesus Saves!

I am excited, awed, hope that yes! Jesus Saves.....

There is hope for you that do not know this glorious hope. Jesus is the way the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through Him.

The bible says that we all have come short of the glory of Glory of God and that by one man sin entered the world.

We all have sinned but there is hope.
Hosanna!
The bible also states that if we confess out sins He is faithful and just to forgive of all our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness...

One day all those of us who have accepted him will reside with him in heaven. Oh, what a glorious day.

Accept him while there is still time, my friends.

Introspection! Stinking Thinking

Ok!, here we go!
Boy, last night it hit me....you know when you work hard to try and do things right and then you take a look and see that you have been doing some things wrong, boy what a whammy!.

I am a big believer in introspection because I love people and love relationships.  And so I try and to examine myself regularly, daily, I pray to my Father asking him to cleanse me and search me, to purge me and of course He does. By His manifold graces He reveals to us our true selves and we come up short.

I have always had a fight with my self esteem; always fought fear and it has not stopped. The thread of those feelings always seem to creep into my life when I don't want them to.  The Apostle Paul speaks of, "For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want."
That's how it is with my thinking.....and so I realise that the things or people I cherish most are pushed away because of my fear and low self esteem.

So I had been praying for others and and a myriad  of things and last night I had a conversation with someone. My husband, Jeff and I, had been talking about this situation with this person and analyzing it and kept missing it. We could not understand that we love this person so much and was doing everything in our power to help them and to try and put them first and it seemed as if they were out to take us down.

Did you get it the problem? "OUR"... it was our power, OUR thoughts....sometimes in OUR doing; we miss the mark...actually can I say always in OUR doing we miss the mark.

So finally as we are wont to do, when we fail; we then decide to bring God in on it. I take it to prayer and God in His infinite grace and faithfulness allows me to see that it was me and my "STINKING THINKING" that was putting a barrier in the way.  I prayed about everything that I was concerned about with this person and then God allowed me the opportunity to speak with them and they during the course of that conversation shared that they loved us, saw what we were doing, thought the best of us, but because of the issues they were dealing with personally it came across a certain way.

WOW!

I was so thankful for God for revealing this and seeing that I have to think less of myself and more like him and try to see others more with His eyes than my own. This is hard because I want to protect myself from being hurt also. Boy, so my prayer is that in my doing, that I bring it all to Jesus Christ, who knows all things and sees all things..

Pray for me as I strive to be more like Christ and less like Rhonda. Pray that I don't allow my insecurities and fear control my actions.


"Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" Philippians 2: 4-5

Broken!

Have you ever been broken, you felt like you can not go on, there was no reason to walk this walk anymore; you have been so hurt that you believe that no one could truly understand........You are not ALONE!

So many of us have felt this way and we have the scars to prove it.

How many of us cover our scars with any manner of things to disguise the evidence of the once painful times, that sometimes come crashing in?

Most of us do!

Do we realize that we share something so tangible with Jesus Christ; my Savior, My Father.....He was broken, he was bruise, he has scars.....Many of our scars come from our own sinful choices and his did not come from sin only because of a choice. A choice born of out love for us. To provide a path for our hurts to be healed, for us to desire to live in Him, for us to have peace.

Many times we believe that no one can understand what we are going through or have gone through and so we hide; in our own ways we hide.

God is saying to us; "Come"....my child come...I desire broken and contrite vessels. Let me mold you into my image. Taste and see that, the Lord is good.



I have found comfort in this verse and so many others in the scriptures that let me know that I do not have to walk this alone. That Christ is there, asking me to come near.  He is asking the same thing of you. He is offering mercy and grace. I know because I received this from him. I was lost and now I am found. I was broken, shattered, in despair and He gave me peace, joy, redemption.
This too can be yours!

The Cooling Embers

This morning the analogy of a cooling ember was used by Pastor Rob. I love this analogy because I love heat and I love fires.  Growing in the Bahamas, there was not much need to build a fire unless it was for a grill or something like that. But, nothing compares to building a fire in the winter to get warm.

I remember my first time building a fire in our fireplace at home; it was one of the coolest things ever and my husband, and child made it a competition as to who could build the biggest and quickest fire.  We won't say who the winner was... The other fire that brings back memories is a campfire. Our friends Charles and Mary would invite every one over right around October/November and we would have hayrides and the biggest bonfire you could imagine.  We would all have have sticks with hot dogs, marshmallows, you name it.

Our sticks got so hot; but the ones actually sitting in the fire were red hot; they burned with an intensity that was truly evident.  This is just like a new christian or one living close to the source. They burn with an intensity that is truly evident.

The sticks that we pull away from the fire, of course cooled and some burned out or other just had a flicker of the preexisting fire. This is just how it is when we have experience the source, Christ and the power of His word in our lives. But, we stop! We stop reading our Bible, we stop praying, we stop seeking his face, we stop going to church and being with other believers.

Have we lost our salvation? No!...but we have no power.  There is a sphere of influence around you; that God has allowed and those people need the saving grace that you know, but have moved away from. You are the God that they need. Don't let them tell you, "why should I be saved, it has not done anything for you" 

Tomorrow is not promised to any of us...nor the people around us. You, I have a responsibility to burn with an intensity that they desire to know Christ. Today's challenge is to, "Look how far you have fallen from your first love! Turn back to me again and work as you did at first." —Revelation 2:5

Return to the things that bring life to you and to others.

God Bless!

The Red Sea

How many times to get to a place that seems as if nothing is possible. The cards are stacked against you, the odds are insurmountable, you have the world on your shoulders and the weight is too much, the bills are plying up like a tidal wave, seeking to swallow you in its wake, I believe that this is just what the

children of Israel felt when they were trying to escape the Egyptians and they came among this wall of water blocking their path.

Can you imagine the defeat, the exhaustion, the fear, the despair they felt! I can, maybe not to that magnitude because I have never been in a situation where my life and my freedom were at stake. But, I can take the my times of fear and despair and multiply it by thousands I get the idea. Do you?

This morning during my time of prayer with my Heavenly Father and my time of devotions; I was reminded that He will not withhold any good thing from me. So when I get to a place of seeming defeat I begin to pray and put out my hypothetical staff over that "red sea" and I know with faith that my Father who is in heaven will part it. You see, if it is according to His will, he says to "Ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be open, seek and you will find"

Did you hear it? Was there any ambiguity in those words, NO!; none at all...those words speak of certainty and they are present participle being they re happening and will happen. So, maybe you are like me and about to begin a project that is bigger than you, to take on things and thinkings that have existed for more than fifty years, naysayers, sin, the world and the devil; be encourage our Heavenly Father will path the "Red Sea".  Pray, believe, trust, put out your staff and stand firm watch him work.....because He Will!