Love Christ

  “Admire someone else’s beauty without questioning your own.” How often do we compare ourselves to other people, to their accomplishments and their appearance?  Comparison will kill every relationship you have, if you let it. It tears apart people every single day. We think that by comparing, we can become a better version of ourselves, but really we are becoming a lesser version of someone else. With that, we also become a lesser version of ourselves. We can spend our whole lives trying to be like someone, but we never will be because we were not made to be.  I was listening to this sermon and it was focusing on the creation story. How God created the ocean and said that it was good, He created the sun and said that it was good, and He created mankind and said that it was good. Nothing was made lesser than, all was made good. When the God of the universe says that it is good, we can believe it.  For me, the most convicting part of the sermon was when she was talkin...

              When a situation in life doesn’t end the way that we had hoped, we lose faith. We begin to think that we weren’t good enough. We begin to question God because we don’t think it should have ended that way. I am very much a person who likes to know what is going to happen in life. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but sometimes it can become an obsession. It's easy to daydream when we think ahead of what we want our lives to look like. The thing about daydreaming is that most of the time, it’s unrealistic. We think of the best possible outcome. We don’t think about all of the things that could and will go differently than we had planned. By doing this, we put unrealistic expectations on our lives.                                                      ...

     There’s several different types of people. Some people like for things to be silent, it gives them the chance to think, the chance to breathe. Other people like for things to be loud because the silence is awkward to them. When it comes to God being silent, that’s something that none of us like. Our minds immediately let the devil in. We let him take control and cause us to doubt. Why would God ever want to answer someone like me?  We don’t only dislike God being silent, we also dislike how loud we allow the other voices to speak in our minds. I was with a small group and we were talking about prayer. One of the girls said, “do you ever just have that voice in the back of your mind that says, ‘who are you talking to?’” All of us said yes!  But, is God really ever silent? I think that we can block out God’s response because we are listening for the answer that we want. God could answer us, but because we aren’t open to His response, we don’t hear Him...

Sometimes it can feel like the world is just knocking you down, that everything you have known over the past couple of years has suddenly gone away. But what if that can lead to growth? Flowers are something that I picture when I think about growth. The cool thing about flowers is that they can’t grow unless another flower falls apart and drops its seeds. Only then, can the flower take root and grow. It may seem like God is taking away certain things in our lives.  Sometimes God forces us to let go of the things that we wouldn't part with ourselves. But what if they were being taken away so that we could take our root, so that we could grow?           Flowers can’t grow unless they have the nutrients they need. Just the same, we cannot grow if we do not spend time with the Lord. Just like a flower needs nutrients for food, we need to feed ourselves with the Word. And just like a flower needs to be in the right environment, we need to surround ourselves...

God has been putting words on my heart recently. At first I was confused because they were words that are common. I was like okay God, I know what these mean. But, He really challenged me to go further into what it could mean in our relationship. There are several words that He has put on my heart so this is the first part of a new series all about words! I woke up a couple of nights ago with the word love on my mind. I said, “Yes God, I know You love me.” But, that’s not what He was trying to tell me. The next day when I was doing my quiet time, I came across Psalm 5:4-5 which says,   “You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with you.” Then I questioned God, how could you love the sinner if you hate sin?  He pushed me to go deeper into how this could show His love. When I think about God and I think of love, I think about His ultimate sacrifice. It makes sense that He hates sin because it is the opposite of who He is. Even though He hates s...

The world just doesn’t happen the way that we want it to. We can picture what our day is going to look like, and it may be pretty close, but there’s always something that we didn’t plan for, maybe even that we didn’t ask for.      It’s really easy to give up on God without realizing it. We slowly stop praying for something because we stop believing that it’s going to happen. We slowly stop putting our trust in God, and then we lose trust in his plan. Hearing this challenge was profound for me because I know that I have "given up" in the past.          We begin to tell ourselves that something just wasn't meant to be. That it was never going to happen. That it was never possible. We believe the lies of the devil that God just can’t do it or won't do.  We can buy into the lie that we aren't good enough or that God doesn't love us enough.                     Maybe we...

     Thinking back on times in our life, it’s always easy to appreciate how good it was after the fact, instead of right when we were in it. Sometimes I’ll look at a situation in my life and not see how good it really is, until I pass it. I don’t realize how good something is until it gets hard, until it goes away. I don’t know about you, but I am not too good at keeping New Year's Resolutions. If we’re being completely honest, it’s about a week into the new year that I’m like, “Why did I make this resolution?”  Something that I am going to do this new year is focus on one word. I don’t always acknowledge God, I’m not always grateful for the things that He does in my life. It’s hard for me to see Him working unless I sit down and think about all of my prayers, and the ones that He has answered. I want to live in the moment. It’s so easy to live life waiting for the weekend. It’s so easy to live life waiting for a vacation. It’s so easy to live life waiting.  ...