Archive for the ‘Christian Living’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Letting Go of Worry

Monday, February 18th, 2013

letting-go-of-worry

“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:6-7

According to John Underhill and Jack Lewis from the Bible Study Foundation Illustration Database, an average person’s anxiety is focused on the following things:

  • 40% are things that will never happen
  • 30% are about the past, which can’t be changed
  • 12% are about criticism by others, mostly untrue
  • 10% are about health, which gets worse with stress
  • 8% are about real problems that can be solved

If you notice on this list, either you can do nothing about a situation, or you can take pro-active steps to solve it. There is absolutely no point to worrying. You can’t add a single hour to your life by stressing out about your circumstances (Matthew 6:27). Allowing your mind to dwell on something that causes you to worry is sin. We must take our thoughts captive. Our wandering minds should not rule us. God should rule us. We must put on the mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2:16).

There is a direct link between prayer and trust in God. Worry is eliminated when we trust God completely. We need to realize that God is in complete control of the universe. In Him all things live and breathe and have their being (Acts 17:28). He holds all the atoms in the universe together. Consider Job. Satan had to ask permission to do anything to him. So God has parameters on exactly what our enemy is able to do in our lives, and it is always for our spiritual growth (Romans 8:28).

So if God is in charge of the entire universe, we can pray to Him. He rules. He can strike dead and give life. He created all things. He has incredible power. Anyone who has met God has fallen on his face in fear and trembling. God rules the universe, and He is our Abba Father. We are to approach Him as His children. He knows how to give good gifts to those who ask (Matthew 7:11) But we must ask. Keep in mind that God wants our sanctification more than anything else, so go ahead and align yourself to that, and all the power in the universe is behind you. If we ask anything according to His will, He hears us, and we know that we have what we asked of Him (I John 5:14-15). It’s true. Align your will to God’s, and all your requests will be granted. God’s timing is perfect as well. Don’t rush God but wait on Him.

Fretting and worrying is when we take matters into our own hands, and we don’t want God’s will. We find ourselves fighting against God. When I stressed about money early in my marriage, I did not believe that God would provide my needs, so I functionally believed He was a liar, since He promises to take care of those things. And did I ever starve? No. I fretted and felt like I was drowning and screamed at my husband, and all that worry was sin. I finally released it to God and had peace, even though we were about to go bankrupt. I felt supernatural peace and had no stress whatsoever when we were going to lose everything. Why? Because God was my rock, and I put my trust in Him. Your circumstances don’t matter. Your circumstances are divinely placed there by God to cause you to grow closer to Him. Yield to God. Inwardly you will have the strength of God Himself as He fills you and causes you to be a rock to other people.

“Fussing always ends in sin. We imagine that a little anxiety and worry are an indication of how really wise we are; it is much more an indication of how really wicked we are. Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way. Our Lord never worried and He was never anxious, because He was not out to realize His own idea; He was out to realize God’s ideas. Fretting is wicked if you are a child of God… All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.” (Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest)

“Casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.” I Peter 5:7

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Prayer | 2 Comments »

Praying with Your Spouse

Wednesday, February 13th, 2013

praying-with-your-spouse

Praying with your spouse will deepen your marriage in incredible ways. The wife will see her husband’s spiritual heart, which will help her to honor and respect him the way that Scripture commands her to in Ephesians 5:33. All Christians desire to please God. If you don’t desire to please God, you are not saved. So if your husband is saved, you will be attracted to him spiritually when you pray. Even if you only pray for less than five minutes, the oneness you experience as you grow in your prayer life together is wonderful.

What do you do if your husband doesn’t want to pray with you? First of all, pray that God will change his heart about it. Most men do not want to be spiritually vulnerable with their wives. My own husband had someone rip his prayer to shreds one time while in college. He was praying aloud to God with all his heart, and afterwards a man criticized his prayer. He never wanted to pray aloud again.

If your husband has similar baggage, God needs to heal him. Talk about it, and let your husband know that you don’t care what he says in his prayers, that you love and accept him for who he is. What initially caused my husband to pray with me was my desperation in a particular situation where I had nowhere else to turn but to my husband.

how-to-pray-with-your-spouse

Another thing you can do is to make sure you never preach at your husband through your own prayers. I know people who do that. The person is talking to me and not to God because they are trying to convince me about something. Don’t ever do that. Men know when they’re being preached at, and they despise it because it’s pretentious.

If your husband doesn’t want to pray out loud, you can talk about a particular issue, then you can hold hands and close your eyes and pray together silently. It doesn’t have to be out loud. Just this simple act can draw you together, and eventually you can transition to praying out loud whenever you feel ready.

I’ve heard testimonies of couples who were fighting, and they decided to pray together while they were still angry. Each one asked God to forgive what they did wrong. After praying, they had already made up! That’s because all the other person wants is for you to admit whatever you did wrong. This is great for “not letting the sun go down on your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26), which means that you never go to bed angry with your spouse so that bitterness does not get a foothold (Hebrews 12:15).

One absolutely transforming way that God has used my husband to lead me as a wife spiritually is through my husband praying with me over specific sin issues in my life. Sometimes I will tell my husband I am struggling with anger or pride towards someone, and my husband will pray with me, and I feel released from the sin. One time my husband told me that I didn’t trust God, so we asked God to help me trust Him more. God answered in a huge way over the following months, just in response to that one prayer that my husband said over me that one night. God works in incredible ways when we join together as one with our spouse before the Lord in prayer.

For more prayer posts, follow my prayer page on Facebook.

Tags:,
Posted in Marriage, Prayer | 4 Comments »

True Friendship

Monday, February 4th, 2013

true-friendshipI am so grateful to God for my true friendship with Christie. I grew up with her in Guatemala, and we’ve kept in touch all these years over the phone and through letters. Recently my husband bought me a cheap ticket to go visit her. I hadn’t seen her in at least 6 years, so when the plane landed in Texas, I was overcome with emotion. This woman has a strong walk with God, and we’ve shared our painful trials with each other throughout the 40 years we’ve known each other. When Christie introduced me to her church friends and co-workers, she said, “We’ve known each other for 40 years…” and I kept looking at her, saying I don’t even look 40. She just laughed and insisted that it was impressive to be friends for four decades.

My friendship with Christie reminds me of the bond between Jonathan and David, where they made a covenant with each other because they loved each other more than their own life. When Christie went through agonizing pain in her marriage, I felt her pain as if it were my own. Sometimes I just wept with her. Other times I have been in distress, and one phone call to my friend would change everything and give me a quiet confidence in God. Yes, Christie has always drawn me closer to God, and our spiritual gifts are brought out full blast with each other because we have no secrets, we know each other’s weaknesses, and we want the best for the other person no matter what.

So what makes my friendship with Christie so deep? I know that I can trust her, and that she is for me. This is huge. She takes in what I say so that she can fully understand me. Lots of other people in my life listen to a small bit of what I say and then misjudge me and attack me, and I feel like I have to defend myself. It’s because they don’t truly know me. If they knew me, they would know that I love God with all my heart, and that anything that doesn’t fit within that is something I’m not aware of. I continuously want to grow in holiness, so I don’t mind at all when my friend says to beware lest I get prideful. I instantly take the rebuke to heart, because Christie wants my best and would never say something that would intentionally harm me.

Christie has said to me, “I don’t know what I would do if God hadn’t given you to me as a friend. You are such a gift from God.” I feel the same. My life is better for knowing her. Just this past visit I was reminded of how she treasures the Lord, as we both walked by the Spirit the whole week, prodding each other to walk holy, and to live a life more fully surrendered to the Lord. We want people to say of us, “God is with her,” like they did about David in Scripture, who was a man after God’s heart.

Many women expect their relationship with their spouse to be like this, and they don’t have the much-needed female companionship with other members in the body of Christ. Men can’t handle the way women chat on and on about something, so Christie is the valve that releases all the words that my husband is too tired to handle. On the other hand, my husband is also my best friend and knows me really well, and we are one in every way. I do not take this for granted.

How do you get to a point where you have true friendship like this with your husband? (Stay tuned for True Friendship with Your Husband….)

Tags:,
Posted in Christian Living | 2 Comments »

Giving to Missionaries Should Not Be Capricious

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

giving-to-missionaries

I don’t understand why people are capricious in their giving to missionaries. God prompts them to give to a certain missionary, and then they yank their support on a whim. A missionary would have to do something terrible for me to stop supporting him because if God prompted me to give, it would be disobedient for me to withdraw the funds. It is God whom I serve.

I hated the whole song and dance for people to throw a penny in the hat routine that I had to endure every time we went on furlough to the States. We visited one church after another, trying to prove that they should support us. My dad was an outstanding seminary professor, teaching Greek and New Testament theology to Spanish-speaking pastors all over the world. If we had to prove something, why didn’t the seminary students send recommendation letters about my dad? They could have easily done so, and I wouldn’t have felt like I was on display as a little girl, standing in front of churches.

One time while visiting a church in Canada on furlough, my dad spoke about all that was happening in Guatemala, and why the church should support us. After the service, my cousin’s daughter (who didn’t know that I was the daughter of the man who preached) said that my dad seemed like he was selling something.

Yes, that is what missionaries are reduced to: having to sell what they do. It’s stupid. Look, if God doesn’t prompt you to support a missionary, don’t support him. If God does prompt you, don’t be disobedient and bratty to pull away your support for no reason, just because you want more money in your pocket. All of our money belongs to God. It’s not ours. Many missionaries have had to leave the mission field because of capricious givers who disobey God.

On the other hand, missionaries do need to be making a difference in people’s lives. We should see God working. If God is not working at all, it seems like God wouldn’t have prompted us to give in the first place, though. In the Czech Republic, it sometimes takes 10 years of witnessing and hard work for one person to be converted. Even though God is working, there might be no conversions for years. But now, 12 years later, we see lots of soft hearts toward God that were not there a decade ago. God is definitely working.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if God initially prompts you to support a missionary every month, it is God that you are obeying. I think it would be easier if fewer churches who really know the missionaries could support with bigger amounts, so that the missionaries don’t have to drag their children on display to 30 churches that we had to visit every furlough to “peddle our wares” or prove that God wanted my dad to continue to serve at the seminary that he loved so much. Give to God and be faithful to follow through to support the missionaries that He wants you to support, and don’t forget to pray for them.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Christian Living, Growing Up as a Missionary Kid | 5 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »