If you know that you are harboring hate towards anyone I encourage you to Repent and let go of it and allow God to heal you and deliver you from that.

It’s time to walk in the perfection of God’s Love, ask God to fill your heart with His love for people, and His compassion towards others. Your Heavenly Father requires yo to Love One Another! As a matter of fact it is not just a requirement but a Command, Yeshua (Jesus) said IF you love Me you would keep My Commandments and to love one another is one of them. So my question to us is “Do We TRULY Love God?” Because if we answer yes and we are harboring hate for even one of our brothers or sisters then we are lying. 1 John 4:20 says “If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen?” Ouch!! That verse right there should cause us all to examine our heart.

Jesus said in Matthew 5:21-22 “You have heard that the law of Moses says, ‘Do not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment. But I say, if you are angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the high council. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.” In this verse Jesus is speaking not so much about murder but of the steps that lead to it. He traces the roots of murder and war to major sources:

1. Anger
2. Hatred

I prayer that none of us would be found guilt of hating (murdering) anyone on the day of judgment before Messiah.

ABBA, I repent for holding on to any hate in my heart that I am not aware of and I ask you to please reveal it to me and remove it in Jesus name.

“Anyone who hates another Christian is really a murderer at heart. And you know that murderers don’t have eternal life within them.” 1 John 3:15 NLT

” …’Do not hate your brother in your heart.” Levticus 19:17 NLT

Abiding In His Love Prayer

ABBA, I come to You in the name of my Lord and Savior Massiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus). Abba, I am abiding in Your Word, holding fast to Your teachings and living in accordance with them. It is my desire to be Your true disciple. Heavenly Father, because You are the Vine and I am a branch living in You, I bear much fruit. Apart from You, I can do nothing. Your Son, Jesus, said “If you live in Me and My Words remain in you and continues to live in your hearts, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you” (John 15:7 AMP). When I bear much fruit, You, Father, are honored and glorified. By Your grace that I have received, I will show and prove myself to be a true follower of Your Son, Jesus. He has loved me, just as You, Father, have loved Him. I am abiding in that love. Heavenly Father, You have assured me that if I  keep Your commandments, I  will abide in Your love and live in it, just as Your Son, Jesus, obeyed Your commandments and lived in Your love. He told me these things, that Your joy and delight may be in me and that my joy and gladness may be full measure, complete and overflowing. This is Your commandment: that we love one another just as You have loved us. Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word for this truth sets me free. I am born of You and I do not deliberately, knowingly or habitually practice sin. Your nature abides in me; and I cannot practice sinning because I am born of You. I have hidden Your Word in my heart that I might not sin against You.  Heavenly Father, may Christ Jesus through my faith dwell in my heart. It is my desire to be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love, that I  may have the power and be strong to apprehend and grasp with all the saints, Your devoted people, the experience of that love) what is breadth and length and height and depth of it.  I pray in the Name of Jesus, that I may know this love that surpasses knowledge, that I may be filled to the measure of all Your fullness. Now to You Who is able to do immeasurably more than I ask or imagine, according to Your power that is at work within me, to You be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout generations, forever and ever. Amen!

Prayer taken from www.christianword.org

I recently read something in the book, The Emotionally Healthy Church on the “Gift of Limits.” 

Those three little words stopped me dead in my tracks. They sound like they don’t go together especially since the  word “gift” is often connected with a positive emotion and the word  ”limit” to a negative one.   Someone like me, who puts significant value on performance, easily  associates “limits” as weakness.

Do you?

And what of self-imposed limits? Could that be “Godly?”  If I said “no” to someone asking for me to volunteer…wouldn’t that be ”selfish?”  (gasp!) 

But what about putting others before God???  For some of us, this could be the bi-product of striving so hard to meet the needs of others. Caught up in the never-ending need to respond to task-lists, we may start to sacrifice the most important call of our lives: to abide in the love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

A gift of limits is a paradigm shift from the curse of limits.  Limits remind us that we are not God and cannot do it all. The bi-product of this revelation should be a balance between doing-and abiding, between striving and resting and between working and healing.  Limits are a gift to keep us true to resting in the love of  God because only in abiding can we truly learn to love and be loved.  Then, from the abundance of a heart full of love, we can fully move towards the destiny God has called each one of us to.

Tired? Feeling worn out and somehow empty?  It’s probably a sign that you have not received your gift of limits and have extended yourself beyond what God himself has called you to do.

Time to rest.  Pick up the Bread of Life, His Word and refresh. Limit yourself to any other activity than just sitting and surrounding yourself with beauty.  Ask God to show you His presence and refresh you.  Abide with Him= Hang out and visit a little and watch the tired and worn out feelings wash away.

Embrace your “gifts” and refresh your soul.

My interest was, however, piqued on Sunday during a sermon that had nothing to do with parenting, but rather, the verse “abide in my love.” When I heard it I couldn’t help but picture all the moms with baby slings. How that’s the very message they are trying to communicate when they hold their babies so close to their bodies that their pulses become one. Abide in my love. How that’s exactly what God is trying to tell us when He knows our every worldly instinct is to cut and run. Abide in my love. Funny how the very thing that advocates of attachment parenting are trying to model has been the model for how we are to live in relationship to God and each other from the beginning of Creation.

Of course, this new “trend” in parenting is not in the least bit religiously motivated—in fact, I suspect many of its biggest fans would be somewhat horrified to hear there is any corollary at all.  At the same time, many of the people who are the most vocal about their faith are likely disgusted by what they see as the indulgent, bohemian methods of attachment parenting. (Aren’t the culture wars fun?) Still, there it is, the first word on attachment: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you: abide in my love.” (John 15:9) 

 According to the non-profit group Attachment Parenting International, their goal is helping parents raise “secure, joyful and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world.” Compassion, therefore, is the end game, and kids who know they are loved, that their needs will be met, that their cries will be heard, will grow to be more compassionate people. In Hebrew, the word for compassion is rahhum, which means “a deep, belly-rooted connection.” It comes from the word rahamin—literally, “a mother’s womb.”  It is used all throughout Scripture, perhaps most notably in the passage from Exodus 34:6 when God describes his very nature as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” In a perfect world—to which attachment parenting advocates may be trying to help us return—every child would have the perpetual security of knowing that they are loved and attended to in the same way that God loves and attends to their parents, pulling them close, keeping them secure. 

At least that was the plan. But, human nature being what it is, we tend not to like any plan but our own, certainly not some dusty, old, pre-iWorld plan. And so new parents, particularly those who were not raised with any connection to the original “playbook,” or who were—but badly—seek out a new one. A list of tips, of guidelines—a new, cooler bible—that will help them make sure that their lives, and their children’s, will all turn out beautifully. So William Sears offers up the Eight Principles of Attachment Parenting. And Miguel Angel Ruiz provides The Four Agreements. And educated, urban parents—often leading proponents of attachment parenting— look for serenity in The Four Noble Truths, dressing their closely-slung progeny in Buddha-themed onesies, somehow overlooking the irony that in that lovely, Eastern philosophy, attachment is the origin of suffering.

Therein lies the rub: that love is equal parts attachment and suffering, and so one needs to search for a source of truth and grace big enough to embrace them both. For all the beauty of the attachment parenting movement, those Eight Principles simply do not address the reality that one day those well-loved children will climb out of their parent’s bed and into their own grown up lives, and they will face challenges and sorrows, no matter how well-adjusted they are. They will, at times, be lonely or afraid or unsure of what value their wonderfulness has to the world. For all their exceptionalism, people will still manage to hurt them. And when that day comes, those grown children will cry out in the night, just as people have since the beginning of time (if you doubt that, read the Psalms), and they will expect someone to answer. But mom and dad will no longer be standing on the other side of the door.  

And so it might be useful to add a 9^th principle: one that lets kids know that, in addition to their earthly parents, they have a heavenly father. One who knows them better than they know themselves. One who asks only that we stay close enough that He might hear our cries.

The cover photo looks like this: a baby is held in the arms of his parents who are nuzzled in a sling against the breast of God. Think it’ll sell?

(This is also running now on HuffingtonPost.com)

Anyway, the senior pastor at my church gave a sermon on Sunday, very simply entitled ‘Love,’ using the text from John 15:9-17 as the Gospel text. A beautiful message to us from Jesus: The Father loves you, I love you, abide in my love and love one another like this.

As a congregation, at the end of his sermon, we read together the verses from 1 Corinthians 13 and I heard them differently yesterday than I ever have. Normally, as I alluded to above, I unintentionally dismiss the meaning from this text because of it’s wide usage when describing love. I shouldn’t do this, and reading the more common verses (4-8a) in the context of the rest of the passage brought me to this realization. The love that Jesus talks about in John and this love we encounter here in 1 Corinthians is a love that changes everything. It’s a love that’s so pure we don’t often have the ability to understand its power.

And I think about this love in the context of my post last week when I read, “If I speak in the tongues of morals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3)

It’s a good reminder that when we think we have it all figured out, when we think what we believe is right and others are wrong, when our judgment of others supersedes the love that we show, when we think our actions somehow make us worthy of Christ’s love, that we must not forget that that love that God gives to us first, freely, without warrant and is lived out in the life, death and resurrection of Christ is that same love that we should live out in our love for others.

I just hope that we can take that love that we are given and let that be what leads us, let that be where we abide. It’s much better there, I think.

The joy of the LORD is my strength.  Nehemiah 10:10

Joy is a celebration, a time of gladness based on gratitude to the One providing the strength.  Leviticus 23 gives us a description of the Feast of the Booths.  It is a time to rejoice and celebrate the abundance the LORD has provided during the year.  The people of the Old Testament time understood the necessity of showing gratitude to their LORD for giving them everything they needed to sustain life during the year.  They did not come with sad faces to celebrate, but with joy and gladness.

I asked the Holy Spirit to give me His perspective on joy.  Here is His answer:

   Joy is the deep-seated assurance and satisfaction of knowing who you are in Christ, that you can never be snatched out of My hand, that you are sealed into Christ for all eternity.  Joy comes as a result of obedience to Me, just as contentment does.  Only My children experience joy, just as they only experience the fullness of the other fruit of the Spirit-led life.  The presence of true joy in a believer’s life is a unique testimony to My glory and a manifestation of My life in you.

   Just as love cannot be manufactured in the heart of a person, so joy cannot either.  It is a by-product of a relationship produced and maintained by My unconditional love for you.  Without the foundation of My love, joy cannot be produced.  Remember, it is an assurance and satisfaction of the spirit.  Apart from Me there is no Spirit, no fruit, no love, no joy.  Trying to be joyful without living in My love is a futile exercise of human will.  It cannot be done.

   Therefore, seek Me.  Seek My face, drown yourself in My Word, obey My voice and you will have joy.  The more you do this, the more joy you will have.  The more joy you experience, the more strength of spirit you will enjoy.  Joy is a marker of your spiritual journey.  Desire more of it, for it will draw you to Me.  Abide in My love, my child, and know true joy.  Amen!