I am a Christian, a retired teacher, a mother and a grandmother. I love to read and I love the Lord Jesus Christ! Unless otherwise specified ,all visual illustrations are from the YOU VERSION APP of the Bible.
What does it mean to you that God knows your name? That He knows the number of hairs on your head? That He knows your thoughts and your dreams and desires? What does it mean to you that the God of the Universe is mindful of you?
For me, just knowing that God is always caring for me and watching over me gives me security. It also makes me feel worthy, knowing that He who controls all gave me a free will so that I can worship my Creator and establish a relationship with Him. I want to be mindful of God just as He is mindful of me. I want to wake up daily with a prayer of thanksgiving on my heart and spend my day aware of all that He is doing for me as I take each step into a new unknown. I want to go to bed at night knowing that He is alert and guarding me as I rest. God is an awesome God and He is thinks about me…and you! That is a mind-blowing thought.
I hope that you will spend some time today telling God how much your relationship with Him means to you. He reached out and touched my life and it has never been the same…I pray that you will allow Him to reach out to you today, too.
May your day be blessed with the knowledge of just how much God loves you!
We are meant to be people with community, with fellowship with one another. The early church met daily and had communion and fellowship. These days, we meet once or twice a week and in order to be with other believers. While I was in Maryland, I attended virtual services. It wasn’t the same as being in church, but it was better than missing church altogether. Churches are not perfect places because they have imperfect people in them. However, we are told to get together with one another and I think that is for our own benefit. Being with other believers and sharing about my week or upcoming events helps me to focus on how God is taking care of me through everything.
It is for our encouragement that we get together, not to judge each other or to look for faults, but to see Jesus in each other and be aware that He is returning soon for each of us.
Have a blessed day and may you find somewhere and someone with whom to fellowship this week, to share your testimony and to encourage one another.
Before the month of February gets started every year, I see boxes of heart-shaped candies, ads for low-cost roses and cards depicting Cupid everywhere. I get ads in my inbox and see them online, too. In spite of this onslaught of advertising, I am thoroughly convinced that the world that doesn’t know Jesus doesn’t know what love is either. It saddens me that many people settle for a cheap substitution and never consider the real sacrifices that true love requires.
This Scripture verse goes along with what our pastor told us almost five decades ago when my husband and I were going through pre-marital counseling. He said, “Love is always choosing the highest good for the other person regardless of what sacrifice you have to make to do that.” His pronouncement has stayed with me through the years and has meant that in spite of our many difficulties and differences, Harry and I have stayed together for almost fifty years. We have learned to see things through each other’s eyes and make a concerted effort to make choices that will be for the good of our life partner. In today’s world, marriage has become a trial and error situation. If it doesn’t work out, you can always get a divorce and move on. That is not the way we approached our commitment to each other. We saw it as a covenant before God and have spent many hours praying about situations beyond our control that tested our relationship with one another. Regardless, we did not see marriage as a “if it doesn’t work out” proposition but rather as a promise before God to love each other in the way that our pastor described, choosing the highest good of the other person.
I don’t like all of the hearts, flowers and candy that attempt to romanticize a commitment that is taken seriously by God. Sure, they are nice surface things but the flowers die, the candy gets eaten, the card gets misplaced and the love that you felt for that one day or that one month fades quickly into the daily battles of everyday life. I prefer to think of love as a lifetime commitment, not a month of hearts and flowers, no matter how pleasant the latter may seem. I want the love that lasts through the mountains and the valleys, the one that says, “In spite of everything, I choose you.” My husband and I spent many years separated due to his military deployments, but not once did I doubt his love for me. His calls, letters and the cassette tapes he sent just so I could hear his voice when I was lonely showed his desire to fulfill his commitment to me and our children. So, a month of love is not for me. I prefer the kind that lasts forever, the kind that brings candy home “just because” or the kind that plants flowers outside of my window for me to enjoy for the entire season. Yes, the temporary things are nice, but the ones that are deeply rooted in God as the foundation withstand the storms of time, life and trials that we all undergo. It’s good to have someone to go through life with. Life is hard…it takes a lifetime of love to make it. Jesus set the example with His sacrifice and showed us the way to truly love.
May you each find the love that God has for you and the love that is meant to fulfill you in this life. Have a happy life filled with love!
We all want God to extend His grace to us, but when it’s time to extend that same grace to others, oftentimes we fall short. According to the dictionary, grace is unmerited or undeserved favor. Every day that I wake up, God extends grace to me. He gives me grace just to get though the day and to make good choices. He treats me like a favorite child. And then I come across a person who irritates me and I avoid them or cut them off in mid-sentence or treat them like they annoy me (because they do). I think of all of the times that I must have annoyed God yet not once did He withdraw His presence from me and turn away. I am ashamed to say that I need to practice more extending grace to others.
We need to practice the art of patience with each other. We are all works in progress, so we need to show each other love, humility and gentleness. There is a world of people out there waiting like sharks to devour us and to belittle us and our faith. We need to support each other, give each other the time needed to show encouragement, uplifting each other so that we can survive what the world and the enemy throws at us.
May you take these words to heart and be a blessing to someone today who needs a kind word.
We need God’s help every day in every way, no matter what small or large challenges we face. God is our healer, our deliverer, our comforter, our refuge and our strength. Thus we need Him and need to acknowledge our need for Him in our lives.
May you recognize and accept the help that only comes from God and may your day be blessed with the knowledge that He loves you enough to reach out to help you.
For many years I felt like an invisible person, without a lot of worth and not much to offer to others. Then, the Lord got hold of my life and showed me that I am worthy because of who He has made me to be. He reassures me daily that He sees me and notices the steps that I am taking, the direction in which I am going and the people that I encounter along the way. God sees everything I do every day! Some may say that sounds like some kind of stalker. Well, maybe, but God is the best kind of “stalker” because He sees me in order to be able to prepare the way for me and to protect me.
May you always be aware of God’s presence in your life and the blessing that it is that He is constantly seeing you.
God is worthy of all praise, so let’s focus today on just being thankful for all that He has already done and all of the plans that He has for us. He is worthy! Let us praise His Holy Name!
For many years, actually about forty, I was a classroom teacher. I taught in eleven different states and over twenty different schools. I taught in public schools, Christian schools and even a private school for the children of diplomats. I wanted to be a teacher since I was a child and I worked hard to make that dream come true. But it not come without sacrifice, just as all things worth having require some kind of sacrifice. I am grateful to my high school Spanish teacher, Señora Mary Smith, who encouraged me in pursuing my gift with language. She became my model and I became her disciple. A disciple is another word for a student. I was her student for all four years of high school and was happy to be able to tell her that I was majoring in Spanish in college in order to become a Spanish teacher. I know for sure that many of the methods that she used so successfully became part of my routine with my own students, but none more so than constant encouragement and pointing out what was right with their work first, then gently leading them to correct errors. I think that is the way that Jesus deals with me, too.
In spite of my age, I do not consider myself fully trained yet. I am not like Jesus, but I am a work in progress, becoming like Jesus. Note that “becoming” is a progressive verb and that’s what I am, a work in progress. In turn, I have tried to be a role model for others to follow so that they, too, can learn to be disciples of the Lord. One of the songs that I sang to encourage myself is “He’s Still Working on Me.” It is as true today as the first time I sang it many decades ago. In my impatience, I thought sometimes that I would arrive at the station, get off the train and continue with the rest of my life. But I’m still on the train of being made into His image, and I don’t want off until He is totally done with me. That day will come when I stand in His presence, but in the meantime, I am still a willing disciple, ready to learn the new lesson that He has for me each day. Just as I did not learn Spanish overnight, I have not learned all that God has to teach me in one or two lessons or devotionals or even years of them. There is always something new that He can teach me, some new way that I need to learn, some new path to take and something about me that needs to change to be better.
Yes, I am a disciple, but I am also a teacher and so is each of you who proclaims to be a Christian. We are not saved to hold the message in our hearts and minds and be quiet about the wonderful gift we have. We are saved to tell others, to teach them the way that they should go so that they can also celebrate a new life in Christ with us. We are each a disciple and each a teacher. Each one teach one, then two, then three until the world knows the Gospel and Jesus returns.
May each of you fulfill your roles as disciple of the Lord and teacher for those who seek Him. Have a blessed and wonderfully fruitful day!
This promise was made to Moses and the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. God doesn’t say “you will rest.” He says firmly, “I will give you rest.” God says the same thing to each of us as we wander through life, sometimes aimlessly and without any notion of where the end will bring us. It is up to each of us to receive the rest that God offers us. His Holy Presence provides the security and comfort and total protection that we need no matter what we are facing, but we have to take time to just rest in Him and accept that He is there with us. This is particularly appropriate for me right now as I just returned from an extended stay in Maryland with my son and his family. I dropped a lot of balls that I have been juggling while I was there because my priority was caring for an active and mischievous toddler. Book reviews were put on hold. In fact, reading novels was mostly put on a back burner as I was usually too tired to read much when I headed to bed at the end of my long days. However, God promised me rest and I got it, in spite of illness, cold days and colder nights and general feelings of being too tired to rest well. God’s presence never left me, and I was ever aware of the strength that He was providing to help me to watch over little Nathan.
Now that I am home again, the pressure of book launches is there but it isn’t as stressful as it could be. Why not? Because God has promised me rest. I read a little when I go to bed but I don’t stay up late to do so. I turn off the light, pray and fall into a deep and restful slumber knowing that God is with me. And if He gives me a new day to serve Him and to do the work that I have committed to do, He will also be with me and help me to fulfill the commitments that I have made. His very presence gives me a calm peace and rest that can only come from Him.
Today, as you go about your busy day, I hope that you take time to acknowledge the presence of God and the peace and rest that will follow. His rest is the kind that will sustain you through all of the day’s challenges.
As Christians, we are supposed to be different from the rest of the world, not conforming to their beliefs or standards. Sometimes it is hard for me to tell who is a Christian because some proclaim to be believers in Christ, yet they live exactly the same way as those who don’t know the Lord as Savior. It can be confusing, but not to God. He knows who is truly is and who is trying not to conform.
The next part of this verse is to be transformed. I can’t help it. Each time I read this verse I think of the toys that my sons had when they were younger. The “Transformers” changed shape from a regular vehicle into a mighty super hero vehicle. I don’t think of myself being transformed into a super hero vehicle, but I would like to stand up for my faith in the face of some really strong adversarial positions these days. In a world where the norm is not God’s norm at all, dare to be different and stand up for what is right, regardless of ridicule. What is acceptable to mankind is not always right before God. A case in point is the homosexuality controversy. Current culture wants us all it accept the perversion as normal but God says it’s sin. I’m going along with God.
I think that the most important part of the verse is overlooked. After the not conforming and being transformed, there is a “then” statement. After you have chosen NOT to conform but to be transformed instead, THEN you will be able to discern the perfect will of God. It’s hard to know God’s will if you are living in the world and accepting its standards instead of God’s. So many people say that they want to know God’s will for their lives. Well, start by NOT being conformed and by being transformed. Then, you can stand before God and ask for Him to show you His perfect will for you. The whole thing is a process, but many of us try to put the cart before the horse. We want to know God’s will but we don’t want to change ourselves as He requires. First things first! God is a God of order, even concerning what He wants us to do before He reveals His will to us.
Have a blessed and glorious day! Be blessed to be a blessing.
Vickie's Book Nook and Meditation Corner 