Tag: spiritual

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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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Crutches

It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man. Psalm 11:8 AKJV

Growing up I had the strange desire to have to use crutches. When my dad broke his ankle, my brothers and I took turns playing with the crutches. Strange things we want as kids…I wanted to have to wear a cast haha, I wanted glasses (overrated, as my brief experience resulted in a lost pair of glasses I paid for myself grrr), and I wanted braces (yet another experience I don’t miss but I often consider to further perfect my smile haha). But now as an adult and having had to use them myself after a foot injury and the ugly boot that ensued…crutches are a blessing and a curse all at once.

I guess I’m not meant to find that devotion I wrote…bummer. Anyway, I have had the tendency in life to seek guidance from others. As a consequence, I tend to get dependent and reliant that those people will always be a resource for me. God ALWAYS has a way of snatching the crutches back from me. You see the downside to using crutches for too long is that you become dependent on them, so much that you get comfortable and complacent where you are. You stop challenging and pushing yourself to do better, until you get into a position where you feel stuck. Ah yes, in the past, I got to that place quite often. It was like finally one day God got tired of me and told me enough was enough and started snatching the crutches away–the people I went to in order to seek Him, instead of praying and going to Him for myself. Isn’t that why Jesus died, so that we are no longer separated from the Father? There is no longer a need for sacrifices–well maybe sacrificing time here and there to truly spend that time with God.

And it would happen that either that person who had become my crutch would say something I didn’t agree with, hurt my feelings, or offend me in some way. Then I would go back to God for myself. Now I recognize it is the same thing happening again, some people had become my crutches in Charleston or over the years. Now that I have left, so have the crutches, and I am learning to walk on my own again, except this time hand in hand with God.

Maybe a valued friend or mentor has recently left their coveted position in your life and like me, it has left you confounded, confused, and in disbelief. Rest assured, God’s hand is stretched out to you in order for you to get through, but this time He wants you to come to Him for yourself, beyond the veil. I realize crutches are only supposed to support you in a time of weakness. But how do you know that your legs are strong enough until you try to walk without them?

“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”” Matthew 28:20 NLT