Porn

Fantasy is the same as pornography, it's just that the screen is in the mind instead of on paper.

Holiness--"Set Apart"

The opposite of holiness is not sinfulness, but commonness.

Joseph Prince

Can you guess what they have in common?

What do Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, the Israel nation, David and Jesus all have in common?














They were all refugees:

Abraham--Egypt, Philistia
Isaac--Philistia
Jacob-Egypt
Joseph--Egypt
Moses-Desert
Israel nation--Egypt, desert
David--Philistia
Jesus --Egypt

5 Degrees of Separation

Fear leads to an attempt to control, which leads to anger (when control doesn't work), which leads to bitterness/resentment which leads to separation.

Judgmental

Jealousy is the root of judgment.

If I could give advice to my younger self...

1) Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Strengthen relationships. Have fun. Life is more than just work. Play also. Become emotionally healthy. Time will reveal sin weakness. Don’t let sin enter in as it will bite hard and last long. Listen to your body. Listen to the Lord. Strengthen your heart.

2) Strengthen self-respect. Be your own best friend. Make your thoughts captive to love yourself because when you do, it will be foundational to loving others. Set boundaries. Say no. Then keep your boundaries. It’s Ok that people don’t like you or that they get angry with you. Don’t give in. Seasons of loneliness come and go. Setting healthy boundaries will give you healthier friends. Honor your body. Take care of it by the food you eat and the way you showcase it. You are worth investing $ into. Not just your spiritual life but your physical and emotional well-being also.

3) Let go of control and trust the Lord. He does things better than you can imagine. I realize you think you have let go of control, but when you feel helpless, unprotected, alone, oftentimes it’s because you’re scared because you’re in control and it doesn’t look good. These are warning lights to remove trust in yourself and trust in the Lord. It doesn’t mean things will turn out happy and good and like you want.

4) **Edited as some things just aren't for public knowledge.

5) Take every thought captive. Your life will go in the direction of your most dominant thought. There’s always a different way to perceive things. Perceive them in light of trusting the Lord.

6) Develop your forgiving muscle. You will need it your whole life. The stronger it is, the better life you will have.

7) Nurture hope. Take jobs that give you pleasure. You can do jobs you don’t like for a season, but eventually they will crush your heart. Find solutions not problems. Hope against hope in every situation. God loves it when we discover Him between the rock and a hard place.

8) Be devoted to prayer and the Word. Always. Be led by the Spirit. Discover the riches of the Spirit of God.

9) The great commandment came before the great commission. Learn to love. You will always hunger for the truth, but you must learn to love. God takes sons of thunder and turns them into brothers of love. Let him do that for you.

10) Life is relationships.

The Way Things Change

John Piper, in his book on fasting, Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer

We are not able in ourselves to win this battle.
We are not able to change hearts or minds.
We are not able to change worldviews and transform culture and save 1.6 million children.
We are not able to reform the judiciary or embolden the legislature or mobilize the slumbering population.
We are not able to heal the endless wounds of godless ideologies and their bloody deeds.
But, O God, you are able!
And we turn from reliance on ourselves to you.

And we cry out to you and plead that for the sake of your name, and for the sake of your glory, and for the advancement of your saving purpose in the world, and for the demonstration of your wisdom and your power and your authority over all things, and for the sway of your Truth and the relief of the poor and the helpless, act, O God.
This much we hunger for the revelation of your power.

With all our thinking and all our writing and all our doing, we pray and we fast.
Come. Manifest your glory.

I appeal to you to seek the Lord with me concerning the place of fasting and prayer in breaking through the darkened mind that engulfs the modern world, in regard to abortion and a hundred other ills.

This is not a call for a collective tantrum that screams at the bad people, “Give me back my country.”

It is a call to aliens and exiles in the earth, whose citizenship is in heaven and who await the appearance of their King, to “do business” until he comes (Luke 19:13).
And the great business of the Christian is to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31), and to pray that God’s name be hallowed and his kingdom come and his will be done in the earth (Matthew 6:9-10). And to yearn and work and pray and fast not only for the final revelation of the Son of Man, but in the meantime, for the demonstration of his Spirit and power in the reaching of every people, and the rescuing of the perishing, and the purifying of the church, and the putting right of as many wrongs as God will grant.

He is All that He says He Is

Comparison is a form of doubting God's goodness.

What God has made

We must love and respect all things that God has made, including ourselves.

The following is a repost from one of my friends, Suzanne Gowin.  She has over the years borne 9 children, 3 of her flesh and 6 of her heart through adoption.  Check out her blog at www.gowinfamily.comwww.gowinfamily.com.  She's an amazing woman of God and lives what she preaches.

 

April 2, 2015

Is God Angry With Us?

Because of an interview this past weekend, I was reflecting on my personal discovery of Isaiah, back in the spring of 2010. I remember with fondness a short season I had with all the kids in school (before the new ones came), chores caught up at home, and available time to spend hours in the Word. It was a season where I eagerly and purposefully pleaded, “Lord, please reveal to me your heart, so I can be more like you.” I will honestly admit that this is often not how I come to Scripture, but it truly was during that season.

My journey began with Isaiah 1, where I was blown away. I had never seen language like this to describe God.

God is ANGRY with his people! He calls them “a brood of evildoers.” They have rebelled against him so much that their whole bodies are beat up, from the bottoms of their feet to the tops of their heads. They are covered in welts and nasty unbandaged open sores because foreigners have come and desolated their people and their land. If God had not saved a remnant, they would have been totally demolished like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Even more than their land and their bodies, their hearts are as far away from God as they could possibly be. So much so that God says, “What are your sacrifices to me?” When they come to their place of worship, he tells them to “Stop bringing meaningless offerings!” They are “trampling his courts.”  He “cannot bear their worthless assemblies.” Their prescribed festivals “I hate with all my being!” God is so tired and “weary of bearing them.” When they lift up their hands in prayer, he “hides his eyes” from them. He says, “I am not listening”–those hands are “full of blood!” Their incense is “detestable” to Him! He even goes on to say that the “faithful city has become a prostitute!”

My heart is racing even now as I read those words in Isaiah. Have you ever heard words like these from God??

Now, before you want to jump to conclusions like: “Well, that was the Old Testament God… He was authoritarian and domineering and far away from His creation… That was before Jesus”– look back at the beginning of the chapter.

Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth!
    For the Lord has spoken:
I reared children and brought them up,
    but they have rebelled against me.

This Old Testament God calls his people his “children” and he raised them and cared for their needs as any loving father would. But he is so sad that they have rebelled against him anyway. He says that even the donkey and ox know their master and their home, but his own children are far from him. They do not know or understand him at all.

This makes me want to cry. I think any mom or dad would want to cry after their beloved children have turned their backs on the ones who love them the most.

So here is the clincher in verses 16-17. The part that stopped me in my tracks. God tells them to clean themselves up. “Stop doing wrong, learn to do right.” This is the part where I expected to read about how God wants us to worship the right way. Change our hearts when we go to the house of worship. Pray more. Do our sacrifices better. Don’t do things for show. But this is where I was blown away.
Here is the equation. How do we “learn to do right”?

Seek justice.
    Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
    plead the case of the widow.

What?!? This doesn’t sound like worship? What about church? What about Bible studies? What about my quiet time??

What God wants from us in worship is much more practical and doesn’t just happen on Sunday morning: Take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Look after the most vulnerable, the ones who are taken advantage of by others, the ones most avoided and forgotten by the rest of the world. THIS is what “religion” is supposed to be. This is true “worship!”
Sound familiar? We have read it so many times in the New Testament it has become old news. But read the equation again:

 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1: 27)

Our New Testament God and our Old Testament God are one and the same. His love for us is the same, and the worship he expects back from us is the same. He is the same loving and intimate Father.

Similarly, in Hosea 11 (another prophet like Isaiah who is called to preach repentance to a rebellious people), God talks about his love for his children, how he “taught them to walk.”

I led them with cords of human kindness,
    with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
    a little child to the cheek,
    and I bent down to feed them.

Does that sound like a harsh, overbearing, distant father? No, this is a beautiful picture of a Daddy bending down to scoop up his beloved child and swing her around like a princess!
Many times in the Old Testament, God is shown to have an intimate relationship with his children. And he yearns for relationship with them.

I long to redeem them (Hos 7:13)

So here is the answer to my question when I asked God to show me his heart: Take care of the vulnerable, those without someone to provide for and protect them. Period.

We all can relate because that is what we all were before He adopted us into his family. We were fatherless, far from our Heavenly Father. Since we understand what it means to be redeemed, to be a part of a family, shouldn’t we do everything we can to help others have that kind of relationship, to not be alone and destitute? God even calls himself the “Father to the fatherless” in Psalms 68:5. Should we not do the same, in whatever way He has called us?

Or is God angry with us? Are we doing all the “church things,” and avoiding the mess and inconvenience of taking care of others? I want to ask myself this question every day. Is my worship selfish, for me to feel good? Or does it honor God, and in doing so sometimes not “feel good” at all? Is my life a sweet incense to the Creator, or do I just stink?

"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. (Rom 12:1)"

Source

I was continuing to get agitated at a person/situation.  Then I realized that I needed to stop looking to the source of the problem for the solution, and to the Source of the solution for the problem.  It changed everything.  Peace and joy returned. 

Cynical Roots

Hope unfulfilled.

When someone sees a problem and tries to bring about change and that change is blocked, at first there's discouragement.   Repeated efforts that don't meet fruition sour hope.  This soured hope can express itself in anger towards God, others or even at oneself causing a bitter root. It's called cynicism and it grows like a spreading cancer.

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick" says Solomon (Prov 13:12).

I have struggled with cynicism.

I have tried to make changes in organizations I've been a part of where there is glaring holes.  "If it ain't broke don't fix it" was a reply I once heard.  On the contrary I believed that the one who said this was so settled into tradition that they didn't see that it had broken long ago.

I have tried to make changes in my life.  Personal ambitions to fulfill dreams.  I have yet to see them fully fulfilled.  I was turned away as I wasn't __________ enough.  Or because I was too __________.  And I grew angry at the Lord and at myself.   A critical spirit grew.

I've tried to suggest changes to people that I am in constant contact with and met only with fierce stubbornness.  Cynicism birthed evil children.

But thankfully I'm in process of being delivered.  Because what I've discovered is that cynicism has another root--idolatry.  Focusing on  anything other than God himself to bring about change is idolatry.  When I look to an organization or a group or a person to change my situation, I'm setting them up as an idol.  It is an idol that I repeatedly bang my head against and then wonder why I am  bloodied.  I can definitely voice my concerns and suggest changes, but if those changes aren't received, my spirit does not sour if my hope is in the Lord.  Hope, even if what I hope for doesn't go my way, does not go bad.  It's because I trust His wisdom.

The fruit in casting my cares upon Him is that I pray more.   I am seeking Him and His wisdom, seeking change through prayer (and maybe it's me that gets changed).  I'm less in control and that's uncomfortable but I am more submitted.  It also means that I release the person from the sights of my angry gun because I'm not looking to them.  I'm looking to the Lord.  And when I trust the Lord, I get peace.  It's a much better place for my spirit to reside. 

The well

The prayers prayed in secret are what give us wisdom when in the light.

To Stare is to Become

Several centuries ago I attended driver’s Ed where we were taught to avoid looking too intently at oncoming headlights. Apparently if you stare at something long enough you unconsciously go that direction. This little tidbit of advice grabbed my attention. As I continued to mature I noticed this strange phenomenon occurred in many spheres. It explained to me why some friends, who desperately hated certain characteristics of their parents, tended to grow up and produce the same fruit. They put so much energy into staring at what they hated that they collided with it. I find it can take enormous amounts of effort to avoid those tempting headlights; they seem to irresistibly beckon us to stare and mindlessly drive their direction. Anger, fear, perfectionism, unbelief, pride- these are semi trucks I care not to meet fender to fender on a highway. 

Today I was wondering if I could apply this truth the other direction. Currently the GPS in my car has been high jacked by Jesus. It’s a high-speed chase of trust these days and I don’t exactly know where I am going. But I know who I want to follow. And He seems to enjoy testing my ability to track Him. Instead of panicking that I can’t name the roads we are zooming past or even recognize the scenery, I will just keep staring at Jesus. Some sweet day at the end of this race we’re going to have an amazing collision!!


Lalena Leigh

Today is an Answered Prayer

What seemed impossible 6 months ago is today a reality.  God honors and hears the prayers of his people.  Thank you Lord.  Just one week in and already a gift is given.

God hears

I believe God answers ALL prayer.  Just because his answer may be 'no' or 'not yet,' does that mean he didn't answer?  NO!  It just means we didn't get our way.

The Gift of Answers to Prayer not Visible

It is sometimes a gift when we don't see the Lord's answer to prayer.  The reason is because it reveals what is in our hearts.  Do we get angry?  Do we try to manipulate?  Do we go to the place of rejection believing that 'God answers others' prayers but not really mine'?  Do we have an idol?  Do we trust the Lord even if we don't get what we're praying for?



 

Word to the Body

For about 5 years it seemed like the Word of the Lord to the body of Christ was to get out of debt.  It seemed like every message was preached on this, multiple people were working towards this goal, and as God was speaking his people were responding.

But now I am sensing a new move of the body of Christ.  It seems like everywhere I go people are talking about how the Lord is asking them to get healthy.  It's a gentle word from the Father but one I think we all need to hear.

As some of you know my health was compromised at the beginning of this year and I'm still working to get out of it.  But in some ways it is a good as I need to be more serious about my health.  So this year I have spent untold hours researching.  Not that it isn't rocket science but I needed to find something that was beneficial for where I was at.  There are two things that I implemented that when I look back, that's when I can say I began to round a corner (passing second base right now).

The one thing that has made a big difference for me and my family is oddly enough, green smoothies.  It was a pretty painful beginning as I spit out more than one smoothie.  Also it was a discipline of will until I found out a way to make it palatable.  But the final result has been improved stamina and the biggest difference for me, improved recovery.  Before smoothies when I pushed it too hard for a day, my health problems would take me out for a week.  It was annoying/frustrating/angering.  But now a hard day doesn't take me out the next day.  For my family it has been increased energy and stamina.  Each person is being helped but in different ways.

Anyway the long and short of it is that mom kept asking me to write down what I was learning.  In the end that began to look like an e-book. 

So hopefully it can help others, maybe even you to get healthier.  Sorry for the cheesy titles and subtitles but I want to help others and these are the only buzz words that sell.  What you doesn't sell doesn't help people.

And if you want to help, right now this e-book is lost in the Amazon.com jungle.  The only way it is ever found is if you have people review your book.  If you are able to afford the $.99 book, I would so appreciate some reviews.   And even some who take the challenge.

Green Smoothies 101 by Shannon O'Shea

In the meantime, let's all work towards greater health.  We will need our strength for whatever the Lord has for in the days to come.

Relationships

Invest.

Core Values

I love the core values of Iris Ministries:

1)  Communion with the Father
2)  Expectancy of Miraculous help
3)  Minister to the Poor
4)  Value Suffering
5)  Lifestyle of Joy