Life Journeys

You are not defined by your worst day. Suffering doesn’t disqualify you from glory. Take your cues from above rather than from within the noise of your fears and failures. The same heavens that opened over Jesus have opened over you. Immersed in Him means to put your mind on what is true about you in Christ rather than what feels true about you in the flesh.

For every obscure, suffering, cave-dwelling saint who ever believed God in the dark: The cave is not a punishment. Sometimes it’s a seminary, the place where God forms what He cannot form in comfort. It can be a place of lifting, not of the symptoms or the circumstances, but of the weight of them - the crushing sense that everything depended on them changing. 

Do I have enough faith to move God. Please hear me on this — that wrong question will crush you. The right question is whether you have enough faith to move yourself. Faith is proven not in what it receives but what it surrenders. It allows love to grow through the trial rather than demanding the trial be removed.

The weight that breaks our own strength is the very weight that opens the door to a divine strength that no devil can withstand. God is not indifferent to your pain. But He is more committed to your glory than to your comfort. The fire is proof of value, not punishment. You are not disqualified by falling, only by giving up.

"Lord, still my restless soul. These afflictions and darkness are neither accident nor abandonment, but move beneath Your eternal purpose." God whispered, "Your fatigue feels like identity. Let Me set the pace." Peace isn't born from a perfectly ordered world, but in a heart that has surrendered the drive to be its own savior.

As a weary, noble sentinel guarding the Temple of God within, you recognize that you have been humbled—and humility is the very mechanism of God’s victory. God allowed the pressure to reveal the "carnal tremble" of your soul—not to condemn you, but to invite you to overcome. Stay preoccupied with who God is, instead of who you aren't.

Living by God's grace requires a living sacrifice. It includes surrendering our ego and need to be treated with respect. Instead, respect God’s mercy to all men. Draw life from above instead of from others. Weep over their sins instead of judging them. True liberty will govern your life and release God's provision.

Resurrection stood right in front of Jesus’s disciples and said, “Peace be unto you. I’ve sent you here.” We’re not to be intimidated by our world but to overcome it. Find the peace of God and you’ll find your purpose. A settled calm is released in us as God himself breathes these few simple words.

Some things on earth that make men crazy are paralleled by things in heaven that make men worship! What looks like a trial is really a trail in God's plan. Stop trusting more in your failures as a sign of defeat than you trust in Jesus's success as a sign of guaranteed victory. God can handle what you can’t.

God will take the imperfect life we give Him and weave such glory into it that at the end of life we'll be able to say, "I have arrived at just the place God planned for me all along.” God uses failing people because it's all about His grace, not our perfection. Condemnation doesn’t earn us points with Him. It attempts to take redemption out of His hands and put it in our own power.