Month: February 2023

Revival

~ Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool

Reading about revival, before all this started at Asbury, I came across a definition that a revival was where nothing else mattered but Jesus. This was a mark in the Welsh revival where bars turned into prayer halls. In America in the early 1800s when revival was spreading, there are stories of men coming to church for a prayer meeting in the evening dressed for work for the next day with their lunch packed.

One way to think about living in a revived state is “All Jesus All the Time.” He’s your all and everything. That’s how you can (and should!) live now and always. You don’t have to wait for something to happen. You can give your life to Jesus today and let go of everything that is keeping you from living in His constant loving, full-of-joy presence.

The world today talks about living in the present. That’s not the key. It’s living in His Presence. That’s the goal, knowing Jesus is with you always, just like He said! It’s keeping your eyes on Jesus, just like the Bible says. It’s setting Him always before you, just like the Bible says. It’s abiding in His love, just like the Bible says.

You were created in God’s image. You were created to love and be loved. To enter into revival you just need to receive and give His love, let it flow in and out of you. How can you do that? First, you can let go of every other love. He needs to be your one and only. The greatest commandments are to love God and love others. All of God’s laws are summed up in those commands to love. Jesus was the fulfillment of the law because He is love. We are able to be forgiven because of Jesus’ love sacrifice to take our punishment for our sins, but we continue in that blameless state before Him as we receive that law fulfillment, the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and let Christ live that love out through us.

You can be revived by giving up all other loves so that your life is consumed with the only love that matters. Yes, there will still be work to do, but you do it with God’s love present in you and loving through you. I fellowship with Jesus when I wash the dishes. It’s a sweet time instead of a chore.

Ask the Lord to shine His light on your life and reveal where you’ve given yourself to other loves. Give them up. If you feel like you can’t or don’t want to, then ask God for help. Ask Him to change your heart so that you love Him alone. Walk in His light, as 1 John 1:7 says, and you will have love for others and He will be removing all that’s not from Him. It’s a continual state, not of perfection, but of blamelessness because you are ever giving yourself over to His purifying process, walking in the light of His love.  

Therefore He says: “Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light.” (Eph. 5:14 NKJV)

God’s Got the Plan

~ Easy Peasy All-in-One Homeschool

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 

Genesis 16:1-2

This isn’t spelled out in Scripture; I’m just speaking from my own understanding of human nature. I know the temptation to look to the right or to the left when things aren’t going as planned, as imagined. We need to be careful about day dreaming about how things could be. We need to not imagine how things could play out. We can come up with our great plan for how things should go, even if based on a true promise of God.

Abraham could have daydreamed about having tons of kids. It didn’t happen. Nothing was happening, so it seemed.

That’s when we’re in danger of trying our own thing. “Well, maybe God wants me to…” and coming up with your own plan to get the thing you wanted, that you had dreamed about. Instead, we’re to wait on God and let Him do the planning and the carrying out. We need to trust Him to move, to be able to move through us, and to speak to us if we need to hear something from Him.

We need to be careful in tribulation not to imagine how things should go. We need to let Him deliver us and not plot our way of escape.

The “mark” may be nothing like we have imagined. The antichrist may be nothing like we imagined. The persecution, the arrests, the deaths may be nothing like we imagined. It doesn’t have to. It is not our job to know exactly what will happen. Our job is to look to Jesus and walk with Him. He’s all we ever need to know.

Jesus on the March

~ mrgteachesblog

Psalms 68:7-9 (NKJV)

O God, when You went out before Your people,
When You marched through the wilderness, Selah
8 The earth shook;
The heavens also dropped rain at the presence of God;
Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel.
9 You, O God, sent a plentiful rain,
Whereby You confirmed Your inheritance,
When it was weary.

The people were in a wilderness. They weren’t producing fruit. They had a purpose and direction, but they were not settled and thriving in the land. It was a dry place and they were reliant on the Lord to meet their needs, even their basic needs. There were victories. There was forward progress. There was also struggle and failure. But the Lord went with them, He went before them. He was bringing them to the place He promised.

The Lord goes before them and the earth shakes. When the earth shakes at the Lord’s presence, the rain falls, refreshing the weary. Mountains move at God’s presence.

A plentiful rain falls and confirms His own.

Pray for revival. Pray for God’s presence to go out before His children and shake the earth, bringing the rain, moving the mountains, and confirming and refreshing His own.

We need an outpouring of the Spirit to bring conviction of sin, repentance, and new life to the church and the nations. It happens by God’s presence. Come, Lord Jesus. March before your troops. Lead us into the Promised Land.