Voices You Hear

According to Max Lucado, there will only be 2 voices that will greatly affect our daily decisions and lifestyle. The negative and the positive!

Negatives are the one who puts in our mind, bitterness, hatred, laziness, anger, lack of hope, shyness, doubts, fears and many more. It is something that manipulates our lives and is trying to make our life full of negativity. What I'm sure of is that its not from God.

Positive are the ones that insist to us hope, strength, joy and everything that makes our lifes full of colors.

Galatians 5:22-23, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.".


To those 2 voices you hear, which one will you choose to listen?
We have our choices to make, know which is best!

God’s Encouragement in Tough Times

READ | Judges 7:8-26

Yesterday, we read about how God shrunk Gideon’s army down from 32,000 men to just 300, immediately before an important battle. Today, let’s see what happened next. Gideon was undoubtedly feeling anxious. He was about to attack an enemy camp of more than 130,000 trained soldiers, and he was going to do it with just a handful of men. In this terrifying moment, God gave Gideon what he needed most: encouragement.

God woke Gideon at night and strategically positioned him to overhear an enemy soldier recounting a frightful dream—a vision of Israelite victory! This unlikely circumstance assured Gideon that the Lord was at work in his daunting situation. God graciously used that incident to demonstrate His sensitivity to one man’s faintheartedness. And He still does so today.

Consider the power of a friend’s encouraging words. Think about how meaningful it is when an unexpected blessing seems to fall from heaven right at your darkest moment. These are not “happy accidents”; rather, they are precious confidence builders from God.

Our challenge is simply to remember times in the past when our loving heavenly Father has encouraged us. Standing on the evidence of His faithfulness, we can boldly face the future, knowing that we’re not alone.

As inhabitants of a fallen world, we will at times face heartache, intimidation, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But as children of God, saved and secure in Christ Jesus, we are never beyond reach of the Lord’s encouragement.



From: InTouch - Early Light Devotionals

Formula for Faith-Walking

Jesus said... "If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."
Matthew 16:24

You remember how to play Simon-Says, don't you? It's probably been a few years. It's the children's game where a leader gives verbal commands that are to be followed if and only if they are preceded by an explicit statement of permission bearing the warrant of mighty Simon himself. Non-"Simon-Says" commands are worthless, and following them only gets you in trouble.

Aside from being fun (for a few minutes anyway), the game also helps kids work on motor skills, coordination, listening skills, manners, and respecting authority. But shhhh... don't tell them that.

I'm not convinced the game's so popular these days, as everyone's more interested in raising leaders than followers anymore, but I digress.

Let's just look closely at the three actions in the verse above, which begins not with "Simon Says," but rather "Then Jesus said..."

1) Turn Around ("let him deny himself..."). This is what denying one's self is all about. Repentance. Seeing things God's way. Going from darkness to light. Playing the fool for God. Even the notion of playing a child's game is apropos here, as we must not use our own adult human knowledge and wisdom to accomplish this step, but instead we die to self and come willingly in faith like a child.

2) Bend Over, Stand Up ("take up his cross..."). When you pick up the cross, you have to set down other burdens, the other things that you tend to think define "you." Taking up your cross does not equal the burden of being you, your identity. You are indeed unique, but each day you should take on something new from Christ that makes you more like Him.

3) Go Forward ("...and follow Me"). Following = sacrificial living. It's advancement toward a Kingdom goal. In Matthew 8:1 we find that when Jesus "had come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed Him." He had just finished teaching them; they had received instruction from one who had no place to lay his head and was feeding thousands on mere loaves and fishes. Moving forward in the Kingdom can only involve putting others in front of self. Is it really all that foreign to us? People sacrifice all the time to climb ladders in their career and for other personal goals. Why not sacrifice without the ladders?

Intersecting Faith & Life: Is this verse, are these three instructions, hard, or easy? The answer depends on perspective. Quitting smoking looks easy to the non-smoker, but the smoker must take it one minute, one day, one step at a time. Losing weight is a manageable goal for most, but if the focus is on losing 60 pounds in the first day the dieter is fighting a losing battle. Make it your goal to Turn Around, Bend Over/Stand Up, and Go Forward one day this week and see where playing "Jesus Said" takes you.



From: CrossWalk Devotionals

Amazing Love

1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.


God is Love

Another really important attribute of God is His love. No human being can love us as much as God does. His love for us reaches to the farthest corner of the universe. We can't begin to imagine how great it is. We can understand it in only one way. We have to think about how much love it took for God to have Jesus die for our sins on the cross.

God’s love for us goes way beyond the natural love a good father has for his children. The fact is, God loves us even when we are rebelling against every one of his commands. Every person who has been born since Adam sinned has inherited a sin nature that makes sin more attractive to him or her than goodness. You can observe this fact in action next time you hang out with your friends. Are you ever called names because you won’t do something good or right? Not likely. But, friends and classmates will tease you and call you names for not joining them in an activity that is wrong or hurtful. It’s way harder to do the right thing than it is to follow the crowd into sin.

Because of our natural attraction to sin, we are not God’s friends, but his enemies. However, he loved us so much that he sacrificed, not his own life, but the life of his son. That is way harder. Paul puts it this way in Romans 5:7-8. “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to die for our sins. Every once in a while I hear a story about a father who jumps into Lake Powell to save his child who has fallen into the water. Sometimes the father is successful. Other times he's not. Sometimes, someone else in the boat rescues the child, but the father dies. I am always amazed at how much a father will sacrifice for his child.

If God loves us so much that he gave his only son to save us, he will absolutely care for us in every possible way. He will make sure we have what we need to grow and mature, both physically and spiritually. He will keep us safe. He will never let anything come into our lives that would hurt us in our relationship with him.

The fact of God’s love makes it possible for us to have peace even when things aren’t going like we want them to. God is all-powerful and he loves us perfectly and without any expectations. He never allows us to suffer unless it fulfills a part of His great plan for our lives. He uses both the good and bad things of our lives to make us mature and spiritually beautiful. What a treasure we have in the promise God gave us in John 3:16! “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”


Today’s Prayer:
Loving Father God, I surely am glad that I don’t have to earn your love by being good. I’d never make it. Thank you for loving me just the way I am. Thank you, too, for using everything in my life to make me more like Jesus. Most of all, thank you for giving Jesus to die for me so I could know you and live with you forever.



From: New Wine Skin - Written by Martha E Menne

LOVE IS NOT BOASTFUL…IS NOT PROUD

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.” 1 Corinthians 13:4


Have you ever pondered the various attitudes that relate to pride? Look at them…boastful, vain, self-praising, conceited, arrogant, self-centered, inconsiderate, over-bearing, haughty, self-important, rash, puffed-up, insidious…WOW! What a terrible thing to have pride characterize our life. How destructive, abusive, and vicious it is to anyone’s life, but even more in the life of a believer! No wonder these tentacles of pride have such devastating effects.

Pride is taken passively by the world, excusable, easily forgotten, and simply as a matter of course. But how do you think God looks at pride? Solomon said, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:16). Pride is the deceiving cloak that hides its deathly tentacles. God abhors the proud…“they are an abomination to Him” (Proverbs 3:34). He scorns them and “knows them afar off as objects whom He disdains to look upon” (Psalm 138:6).

Oswald Chambers wrote so graphically regarding pride in the believer: “Pride is the deification of self, and this today in some of us is not the order of the Pharisee, but of the publican. To say, ‘Oh, I’m no saint,’ is acceptable to human pride, but it is unconscious blasphemy against God. It literally means that you defy God to make you a saint, ‘I am much too weak and hopeless.’ Humility before men may be unconscious blasphemy before God. Why are you not a saint? It is either that you do not want to be a saint, or that you do not believe God can make you one.”

Pride has but one objective…our defeat and destruction empowered by Satan himself. We must recognize that in ourselves we are no match for the enemy of our soul. Weakness and dependence upon God will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest Himself in our lives. Satan is stronger, wiser, and more cunning than we are. God will not impose Himself on us when we have a proud, boastful, independent attitude that has no time for HIM.

To guard against these destructive elements of pride let us...

Remember what we once were…“Look to the rock whence you were hewn, and to the hole of the pit, whence you were digged” (Isaiah 51:1). When we recall what we were, there can only be humiliation before God, who made us a “new creation” in Him.

Consider what we still are. We still have our “old nature” that ever seeks to gratify the fleshly lusts. We have to daily mortify the "old nature" and appropriate all God has given to us.

Be aware of the deceitfulness of our own hearts. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Guard against the tendency to sin. “Watch and pray, that you enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

See the hand of God in it all. Acknowledge your own unworthiness. Adorn your life with a contrite heart and a pure spirit. Recognize your dependence upon God. Be thankful for the grace that has made you what you are. Let your life be a faithful, consistent, and an effective testimony in every phase of your life.

The prosperity of the soul is that which alone is of any eternal value. Keep your eyes fixed on our Lord Jesus Christ, responsive to all HE wants to do in your life!



From: Literature International Ministry - Ed Powell

The Nature of Reconciliation

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him — 2 Corinthians 5:21


Sin is a fundamental relationship— it is not wrong doing, but wrong being— it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins— the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.

The revealed truth of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch. God made His own Son "to be sin" that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us. . ." and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the cross.

A man cannot redeem himself — redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its application to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or response to it. A distinction must always be made between the revealed truth of redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.



From: RBC - Utmost For His Highest

Growing in Adversity

RECENTLY I SPENT some vacation time in the mountains of Colorado. During my time away, I was thinking about two friends who have gone through a lot during the year since my last vacation. In the past year, both of them have been diagnosed with lymphoma, gone through intense chemotherapy treatments, lost their fathers in death, and, having completed their treatments, become lymphoma survivors. In addition, both of them have become blessings to others who were struggling in the face of adversity.

I thought about Lynne and Sally as I hiked and relaxed in the beauty of the mountains. I found that my eyes were drawn over and over again to plants growing in cracks of rocks, blooming in crevices, thriving in the little bit of soil created by erosion. These plants symbolized for me the strength of my friends and others who continued to live, grow, and thrive, even when the forces of death attempt to drag them down.

We all face these forces from time to time -- especially now, in a time of world crisis over money, climate, fuel, and food. We are fragile creations trying to hold on to life in adverse circumstances.

I believe God created us to grow, to thrive, in the face of adversity. God gives us the extra grounding and nourishment that we need to hang on in the face of harsh circumstances. I see it in my friends who have conquered cancer, in people facing flooding and hurricanes, in our communities trying to weather the storms of global upheaval. And I remember the scriptures which promise that God is with us in the face of crisis and adversity. Thank you, God, for your presence with us, no matter what we face.

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you; and through the rivers,
they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

- Isaiah 43:1b-3a (NRSV)



From: UpperRoom Devotionals - Beth A. Richardson