By Trevor Bradley

Don’t quit now… You always face big battles before great breakthroughs. Rip off every label and limitation that is not in alignment with who GOD says you are.

God is filling your heart with greater JOY (Psalm 4 vs 7). Weeping may last for a night, but Joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30 vs 11).  God doesn’t waste anything, including your pain. And out of your pain you can find your purpose.

When God calls you, he anoints you.  It doesn’t matter what other people think about you or what other people do to you.  With God on your side, nothing ( can I say that again – NOTHING) can hold you back.

Have a big vision, don’t limit God.  You cannot out-dream God, he thinks big, he thinks overflow.   Whatever you are dreaming about you must live with an expectant and faith-filled heart.  God is going to supersize it (Ephesians 3 vs 20).

Make room for GOD!

Asking God for wisdom is one of the most important things you can do as you start your day (Proverbs 4 vs 7 & 8).  When you make wisdom/discernment/understanding your priority, you will begin to see  God-inspired decisions that will lead to greater levels of success in your family, your home, your workplace.

The LORD encourage you today and may you have a Christ filled day.

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An article from Desiring God and written by Paul Maxwell

I’m spiritually stuck. We are stuck people. We get distracted, pulled down, undone. God feels distant and irrelevant. Dane Ortlund says, “You are not abnormal. So relax. We all go through this from time to time.”

Seasons of spiritual darkness are common — even when many pretend it’s an anomaly. Even when indifference pirates our most pious intentions, and we surrender ourselves to isolation in our lack of holy zeal, don’t be deceived: Gloom in the Christian’s heart is common.

It does often look and feel different for different people:

• Your daily fear of future tragedy erodes your affection for God.
• Your experience in corporate worship is empty and distracted.
• You feel unimpressed, aloof to the things of God.
• Patterns of repentance crumble and fade.
• The preached word seems boring.
• Hymns prompt only an irregular cadence of exhausted sighs.
• Spiritual advice trips over its own triteness on its way to cynical ears.
• Christian blogs induce more guilt than help.

Day after day, sermon after sermon, small group after small group, we’re discouraged and frightened by a widening gap between the desired self and the real self. We feel the torque pulling between our desired relationship with God — the desired emotions, the desired disciplines, the desired relationships — and the real.

It feels like the solution should be simple — another round of repentance, a worship song, a Paul Tripp devotion. Something. Anything. But those things either don’t feel effective or mysteriously elude us. Here are six places to start — intentions to experiment with — when you feel spiritually stuck and alone. “Intentions” are things that we easily lose. They are good, but they can be slippery. You should find yourself in one, or a few, of these intentions. They’re not all right for you. But you should discover which one might be most relevant to you now. Read through them, and search for words for your heart. Read them in sequence, and look for the helpful nutrients you need.  More…

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Sourced from the Desiring God Blog Site

If you were having a cup of tea with C. S. Lewis on Valentine’s Day, and you asked him sincerely, “Mr. Lewis, am I better not to love because it’s so risky?” — he might say something like this:

Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering.”

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that his teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities.…

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

Read more ….

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Frank Retief was pastor at St James Church Cape Town for 31 years, having planted the church in 1968 with his wife Beulah.  He became the Presiding Bishop of the Church of England in South Africa until he retired in 2010.  Frank remains active in ministry through preaching, teaching, pastoral work & writing, and has authored a number of books.

Responses:

Mark 4 vs 20 “Others like seed some on good soil, hear the word, accept it and produce a crop – thirty, sixty or even hundred times what was sown.”

In some communities across the world, the preaching of the Word of God is met with a warm welcome and a good response. In other communities the message of the bible is either not welcomed or it is ignored.  Why these different responses? Well, one of the things that the New Testament constantly sets before us is the different responses to Jesus and His Word.

In this parable about the sower, we have before us in parable form, four different responses to the Good News. Some people hear it with hard hearts and the devil soon snatched even the memory of what they heard from them. Others receive the word with an initial enthusiasm but the word has not penetrated or taken root. All is superficial. So when difficulties arise because of the Gospel they quickly fall away and abandon the truth.

There is another response to the Gospel with which we are all aware. That is an initial acceptance of the message, but their life is distracted with all the busyness of family, children, and making money – so that the truth is eventually choked out of their life. We all know someone like that. But is all lost then? Does the Gospel appeal to nobody? On the contrary Jesus told us that there is some good soil that produces up to a hundred times what was sown.  There is always somebody who hears and believes. Sometimes they are the most unexpected people, but to them is given the gift of understanding and they produce the harvest.

Perhaps you can remember your own experience. How long it seemed to take before you began to see the light. And then even if you did not see the whole Gospel picture, what you did understand excited you and began to dominate your life. And look at you now. Even though you may be a nobody in the eyes of the world, how many people have heard the Gospel from you or experienced some of Christ’s love through you and have been blessed? You are the one producing the harvest.

Prayer: “O God, thank you for opening my eyes. Please grant me more light and understanding and help me to produce more fruit to bring you glory. Amen”

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By Trevor Bradley

Sometimes we create scenarios in our minds as to how we will react if adverse, or need I say pleasant,  circumstances come upon us…  For example – “if I have a huge windfall, I will give to that person…that charity…that ministry”.  Very few of us can foresee or anticipate the sudden “storm”, “hurricane”, “tragedy”, or “collapse” in our lives.  At times we look at the misfortunes or mishaps of others and we silently believe that we are immune.

Though it may not happen (and who can tell), how will I react when does?  What is my anchor, my bulwark, my haven, my harbor?  There’s a beautiful verse tucked away in

Habakkuk 3 vs 17:  “Though/when…the fig tree does not blossom…And there be no fruit on the vine.  Though/when…the olives crops fail…and the fields produce no food.
Though/when…there be no cattle in the stalls…and there be no sheep in the pen”.

Hear the prophets heart. He is saying that there are no certainties in one’s life,save death and taxes..But he had already determined how he would handle, react to the “side-swipes” that life can dish out

If we look, we will see that what the prophet saw was a man/family who had IN HOPE, planned, planted and sowed.  And what they had reaped was disappointment… for they got nothing in return.  We see that their assets had been either sold or had been stripped away.  They were without any nest egg, it was all gone,  and what they faced was devastation and nothingness.

But listen to the prophet’s heart, “PRAISE GOD.  YET WILL I REJOICE IN THE LORD, THE GOD OF MY SALVATION, FOR HE IS MY STRENGTH”

“God I know that you know, that you see, that you are near, that you care.  And no matter what befalls me, I will not allow the devil to rob me of my joy, steal my calling and destroy my faith. I will trust you no matter what.  I will sing as Horatio Stafford wrote ” It is well, it is well, with my soul.”  Write your eternal words on our hearts Lord, and give us grace to believe that you are the God of all grace, the God who is a loving Father and our all powerful redeemer and saviour. You will never leave us nor forsake us.

Give to us new songs in our hearts , that our mouths will be full of praise and thanks to you who is our all-sufficient God, the God of more than enough.  That even though we may not be experiencing the winds of adversity nor the sea of heartbreak, when they do come we will be ready to rejoice in You our strength and the God of our salvation.

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