Tag: God

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You Can’t Expect Full-Time Blessings Having a Part-Time Faith

These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold–though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.
1 Peter 1:7 NLT

I am guilty of a part-time faith. I have believed God for things in compartments of my life and I have not trusted Him in other areas. But where did it get me? I was left at the same place, asking God for the same things, again and again.

We are in a season where we must be all or nothing with God. We cannot waste time wavering back and forth. James 1:6 says "But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind." (NLT) Either you are going to believe all the way, or not.

God recently worked on me with this. Growing up, I was raised to pay tithes. It was just something I had to do; when I got some money, I gave God His 10%. In most churches, it is taught as a fire and brimstone principle. If you don’t tithe, you will be cursed. Being a believer in Christ, I could not rest easy with this teaching because I believed that as a believer in Christ I was freed from all curses because He became a curse for me and thus took on my sufferings and punishments. (Gal 3:13, 1 Peter 2:24). I would pay my tithes almost begrudgingly, for fear of repercussions if I did not pay them.

It was the very first day of my detox, my full day of juicing, that God had this issue settled in my heart. I was talking to a friend in the ministry about my concerns. Almost instantaneously, his response was the age old response I have heard my entire Christian life. As he was talking and I found things contrary to his explanation, God spoke to me clear as day: "Marquita, it is an expression of your faith in Me, to trust Me with everything, even your money." Immediately I stopped arguing with him, and kept saying, everything is faith. Faith is everything, I have to trust God with everything. I vowed from that point forward that I would trust God with everything.

Yes, God will continue to bless you, for He rains down blessings on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45) But if you want to see God really move in your life…honey! You HAVE to trust God with everything: with your relationships, with your business, with your finances, with your growth, with your family and friends, but with EVERYTHING!!!!

Stop wavering, stop believing in Him part-time…be all or nothing…and watch God work full-time for you! Have faith and believe!!

Then Jesus told them, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you can do things like this and much more. You can even say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen. Matthew 21:21 NLT

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Can’t Hold You Back

So we can confidently say, “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?” Hebrews 13:6 ESV

God sure has a way of doing things. I promise you, this morning I was trying to sleep an extra hour, but He wasn’t having my laziness today lol. He wanted to talk to me. So here’s what I took from that…

I teach bible study online tonight (leave a comment for details if you’re interested) and after a few texts from friends, I remembered I needed to prepare. So I’ve been doing this series called “Effectual Prayer”. Over the course of the last 2-2.5 months, we have been exploring the various types of prayer. Long story short, the prayers I have selected for tonight are Deliver Us, prayed by Hezekiah in 2 Kings 19, and Help Us, prayed by Asa in 2 Chronicles 14. In both of these situations, from the outside looking in, the circumstances these kings faced were bigger than them, and to a faithless person, bigger than any God. But in both cases, they prevailed.

I have a tendency to ratchetness at times, haha. Several songs that I need to take several seats for came to mind. First, Rick Ross…I love how I can take a poem or lyric and it remind me of where I have been and where God has brought me. Anyway, Can’t Hold Me Back has several choice words, but this part is key–enemies and ‘the enemy’ do not have the power to hold you back. No one can keep you from your God-appointed destiny but YOU. Yes weapons will form (Isaiah 54:17) but they cannot prosper unless you allow them to defeat you. You see, what you are fighting for is power and control over your mind, because that’s where the battles are lost. But the beauty of God is that He can deliver us and help us in the midst of these situations, physically, mentally, and spiritually. That’s what He did for me…fought the battle over my mind, so that I could start winning the battles that were physically challenging me.

I love how I now ‘self-police’ my thoughts. The minute I allow a foul word to exit my lips, I immediately say something to change it. Why? Because we speak our realities into existence. Sure, a child didn’t speak abuse into existence, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s that ‘woe is me’, ‘agony, agony’ victim complex that can plague our minds and keep us stagnant, not growing and not progressing. Back to our references, had either Hezekiah or Asa decided in their humanness to attempt to fight either of these armies in their own strength, their defeats were eminent and almost certainly there would be very few descendants to speak of it. But they chose to call on God, who in all His splendor and greatness, was more than well-equipped to to handle the battles. In Hezekiah’s case, the angel of the Lord came
over the 400000+ army of Sennacherib and the next morning more than 185000 lay dead, scaring them so bad that they ran home. And with Asa, the Ethiopian army that came against them were over a million men strong.  Asa, who was a man of peace, did the only thing he knew how to do and sought God for help. Of course this ended terribly for the Ethiopians.

As these words filled my thoughts this morning, I was reminded of my tattoo (yes I have a tattoo). I got it after having survived what at the time to me was the most difficult experience to remind me of exactly this thing. Psalm 27:1 says “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” It says exactly this; why fear, when you can call on God for deliverance, like I did? Why be afraid of what men, women, and the enemy say or try to do when God is your helper and deliverer? They can’t hold you back, they can’t hold you down, because God goes before you! Trust in that today!

“I praise God for what he has promised. I trust in God, so why should I be afraid? What can mere mortals do to me?” Psalm 56:4 NLT