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“For just as sin, addiction, and misery typically go together, so do confession, healing, and the long process of redemption. We need redemption not just from our sins and addictions but also from their miseries - particularly those miseries that occasion more sin and deeper addiction. As all recovering sinners know, this process of healing and liberation, this ‘conversion unto life,’ this set of lessons to teach us how to dance again will prove to be as cunning, baffling, powerful, and patient as addiction itself.”

- Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be 

An email from a friend:

Let's pray that our generation wakes up to the fact that what we need isn't in the unhealthy relationships and same-sex relationships we crave or are in. That what we really need is healing from our wounds, and forgiveness and freedom from our sins, which can only be found in Jesus, and in the Father's love, which Christ has secured for us. Pray that our generation, by God's mercy and grace, will see this, that the veil will be torn away from the hardened, wounded hearts of many. And that we will respond by receiving His love for us in Christ, growing in it, and becoming true worshipers of the Living God.

--Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

Proverbs 19:22

~What a man desires is unfailing love; better to be poor than a liar ~

People who pray regularly recognize and must accept that they don't always desire God as much as they wish they did. It is an uncomfortable truth that requires a certain amount of courage before we can even admit it to ourselves. But once we do -- once we accept that weare weak in our desires for God -- a new path opens up for us. We come to recognize that it is "better to be poor than a liar." 

From such a place of honesty we are now free to choose whether agenuine desire for God is something that we really wish to have or not. If it isn't, then at least we are being true with ourselves and can now ask God to continue working in us so that this might someday become somethingwe actually desire. Perhaps this is the very "poverty of spirit" that Jesus spoke of as, paradoxically, a blessed state. If, however, a desire for God is something that we do wish for ourselves, then we simply and earnestly have to begin asking for it. 

If, in examining ourselves, we recognize that our hearts have become tepid, it is quite legitimate for us to take a step back and pray for the desire to desire. If we feel that we have lost our passion, we can simply be honest about it and ask the Holy Spirit to increase our desire for God, to restore us to our first love, or to wean us away from the things that now distract us. 

A sincere desire for God is something that can always be restored to us. But, before that can happen, it might be necessary for us to first recognize and admit to ourselves that it is absent. 

O Jesus, my desires are often weak and wayward, and I don't know what I can do about it. I wish to see them increase and to have my life directed more towards what I know I desire most -- You. 

Thank You Lord that this relationship does not wholly depend on me. For I know that I would be lost and without hope if it did. 

Thank You that You continually create for me the path that I am to follow. There is nowhere else from which to begin this path than from where I am right now. 

Thank You that, though You call me to seek You, You also reveal Yourself as the One who has already found me. In such faith, I know I am saved. Amen

Article by Rob Des Cotes 

Spiritual Fulfillment

Understand the difference between ambition and true leadership and it is this: Ministry is not a call to lead, but to die.

Every advance that I have made spiritually was preceded by an opportunity to die to self. The power in my life comes from where I have died to self and now live unto Christ.

Do you want to advance spiritually? The gateway to resurrection power is crucifixion. God will arrange opportunities for you to die to self. You must discern them. Dying to self and its ambition is the means of reaching true spiritual fulfillment. If you react to the opportunity to die with fleshly anger or resentment, you will fail to reach fulfillment. However, if you can maintain your vision even while your ambition dies, you will succeed. 

Hopeful Expectation!

“Coming events cast their shadows before them, and when God is about to bless his people his coming favour casts the shadow of prayer over the church. When he is about to favour an individual he casts the shadow of hopeful expectation over his soul. Our prayers, let men laugh at them as they will, and say there is no power in them, are the indicators of the movement of the wheels of Providence. Believing supplications are forecasts of the future, He who prayeth in faith is like the seer of old, he sees that which is to be: his holy expectancy, like a telescope, brings distant objects near to him.”

- Charles Spurgeon, The Holy Spirit’s Intercession