Look Up

Disclaimer: Obviously I am not an actual angel. However, I feel like God speaks to my heart and I would love to share it with you. Please enjoy.

If you enjoy my blog but are not currently receiving my email notifications, you can send your first and last name, and your email address to austinlass1948@gmail.com and I will notify you each time I post something new. I promise I will never give your information out to anyone or use it for anything other than my notifications to you. Please share my blog with your friends and family to help me spread the words from my heart with others. Also, if you have any family or friends who you believe might enjoy my blog posts and live in another country, I would especially love to have you share it with them. I am trying to reach more countries around the world. Your help would be greatly appreciated. 

Comments are greatly appreciated. If you leave a comment please include your name. Otherwise I won't know who you are.

Thank you. Janice Austin Bates

How many times have you been going through a rough time in your life and have prayed to God to just fix the problem? Sometimes you receive a miracle, but other times it feels like your prayers are falling on deaf ears.

Why is it that sometimes God takes the problem away, and yet other times He just doesn’t seem to care? He is God, our Heavenly Father. Aren’t father’s supposed to fix their children’s problems for them?

The answer is no. Fixing the problem is a gift, not the everyday answer.

When the children of Israel were fleeing for their lives from the Egyptians, they suddenly found themselves standing at the edge of the Red Sea. They were trapped. The Red Sea was in front of them and an army ready to drag them back into captivity, or kill them, was right behind them. Where was God when they needed Him? Why had He allowed this to happen?

The Israelites were scared and angry and blaming God for everything. They were ready and willing to go back to Egypt and live as slaves. After everything God had done and shown them to get them free, they were mad at Him, and did not trust Him.

God could have just picked them all up and set them down on the other side of the sea. Problem solved. So why didn’t He?

If you are a parent you know that if you do everything for your child they will not learn. If you always carry them they will never walk, much less run. Your job is to show them how to do things, help them when they need it, and do it for them when they cannot do it for themselves.

As they grow you should see them becoming more and more self-sufficient and independent. When they are strong, loving, God fearing adults, you can look at them and know you did your job well.

If the children of Israel had been paying attention like the should have, they would have realized the cloud above them by day, and the fire above them by night was proof God was with them.

So why didn’t God miraculously transport them to the far side of the sea where the army couldn’t reach them? Because God parted the water and had them walk across. As they walked on dry land they saw the water walled up on each side of them. They could not help but know that God was doing this. There was no other explanation. Neither did they have to walk through the mud to get to the other side. God provided them with dry land, but they had to do the walking.

As they looked back they saw Pharoah’s army had followed them into the sea. That frightened them also, but then they watched as God allowed the water to rush back in. The entire army drowned. God was in control the whole time. If they had been looking up more, they would have realized the cloud and fire were always there. God never left them or forsook them. Walking through the Red Sea was simply a time of growth and learning to trust God.

So what kind of troubles are you going through? Whether it is physical, financial, a relationship or whatever it is, are you asking God to take the problem away? That might not be what is best for you. When it feels like God doesn’t hear you, or care about you, maybe He is having you walk through the sea. When you do, you will come out on the other side a stronger Christian.

In your darkest hours don’t ask God to take it all away. That is the prayer that seems natural to us. Instead, ask God to help you through it. Let Him decide when to carry you or walk by your side holding your hand. He knows what you need. When your heart is heavy and your life is hard look up. You will see a cloud above you in the day, and a fire above you in the night.

You will never find God by looking down. Look up. The cloud and the fire are there. They are always there. You just have to look up to see them.

Think about it.

Make The Decison

 

Disclaimer: Obviously I am not an actual angel. However, I feel like God speaks to my heart and I would love to share it with you. Please enjoy.

If you enjoy my blog but are not currently receiving my email notifications, you can send your first and last name, and your email address to austinlass1948@gmail.com and I will notify you each time I post something new. I promise I will never give your information out to anyone or use it for anything other than my notifications to you. Please share my blog with your friends and family to help me spread the words from my heart with others. Also, if you have any family or friends who you believe might enjoy my blog posts and live in another country, I would especially love to have you share it with them. I am trying to reach more countries around the world. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Janice Austin Bates

A few nights ago I was talking with my brother. He said something I had never really thought about before, but realized he was describing not only something about himself, but about me also.

He said he had always thought that when you gave your heart to the Lord and became a Christian, God instantly took away all desire to do anything that wasn’t exactly what a Christian would do. You would want to go to church every time there was a service. Reading your Bible and praying would automatically become part of your daily life. In other words, you would instantly be changed into the model Christian. It wouldn’t take any effort on your part. I don’t know where either one of us got that idea, but we both grew up thinking that.

Every time he gave his heart to God that miraculous change just didn’t seem to happen for him and he didn’t know why. I felt the same way. I couldn’t understand why everyone else stayed true to God and I always drifted away.

When my father died I was thinking about him one day and the Lord spoke to me. One of the things He told me was that it was time for me to do what I had always heard about but had never done. I needed to “make the decision for Christ.” That hit me very hard and I said, “Okay, I am making the decision right now. I will never turn back again.” I knew right then that I was making a choice for the rest of my life. I did feel a change that time. I couldn’t have told you exactly what it was, but I felt different. I thought that God had finally given me that miraculous change I had always expected every time before. I was going to make it this time.

When my brother talked to me about it he said he now realizes that he not only had to give his heart to God, but he had to commit himself to that decision. It wasn’t going to happen without any effort. He had to purpose in his heart that he would do whatever it took. He was not going to turn back in any way.

He is serving God faithfully. He never misses church. He applies every sermon to himself, and he reads his Bible and prays every day. I had never seen the Christian strength in him that I see now. Watching him and talking to him I see and hear things that amaze me. I have gotten a new perspective on many things during our long talks.

He is the one who really made me understand that when I told God I was making the decision for Christ and felt a change in myself, it wasn’t that God had finally done His part and given me the miracle I had always expected to receive. It was that I had finally done my part and decided I was going to do whatever it took to make it happen. The commitment to God that I chose was what had always been missing. God had not failed to do His part. I had failed to do mine.

The Bible tells us we have to work out our own salvation. I never really understood what that meant before. Now I know it means we have to decide to do whatever we need to do to stay and the straight and narrow path that leads to Heaven. God won’t force us.

Last Christmas I invited my good friend Gail to our Christmas Eve service. She came and really enjoyed it. When I saw her 3 days later she started asking me all kinds of questions. One of the things she wanted to know about was communion. She hadn’t taken communion since she was young, in the Catholic church. She wanted to know when we did communion and I told her it was the first Sunday of each month. She asked if it would be okay if she came to our communion services. Of course I told her it would be great. A few days later she told me she had decided she wanted to come to church every Sunday. Since then she has never missed a Sunday except one time when she was sick, and a few times when she and her husband went out of town. She made the decision and has stuck to it. It has been so fun and interesting watching her spiritual growth. It is amazing. Why is she growing like this? Because she made the decision and she is staying true to it.

Have you been failing or faltering in your Christianity as you are waiting for God to give you your miracle? He doesn’t owe you a miracle you know. You owe him your commitment and dedication. When you finally do that you will start seeing that miracle beginning in your life. God won’t just hand it to you on a silver platter. God calls you to salvation, but you have to accept it and make the decision to stick to it. Of course God will help you with it, but He won’t just do it all for you. God says laziness is a sin. Wanting God to do everything for you with no effort on your part is laziness and you will never grow that way. You will probably never make it to Heaven that way either.

So, have you made that decision or are you trying to ride other Christians spiritual coat tails to Heaven. If so, you need to make the decision while you still have time.

Think about it.

Slow Fade

 Disclaimer: Obviously I am not an actual angel. However, I feel like God speaks to my heart and I would love to share it with you. Please enjoy.

Have you ever been surprised when someone you thought was a good Christian just walked away from God? Or perhaps you saw them drifting away but didn’t know why.

Well, one thing is for sure, it didn’t happen overnight.

There is a Christian song called Slow Fade. Casting Crowns, a wonderful singing group, put out the song. It is one of my all-time favorites. Some of the words go:

It’s a slow fade when you give yourself away.

It’s a slow fade

When black and white have turned to grey

And thoughts invade, choices made

A price will be paid

When you give yourself away

People never crumble in a day

Daddys never crumble in a day

Families never crumble in a day

It’s a slow fade

Do you believe someone who was very happily married woke up one day and said, “I think I will have an affair,” and started looking for someone to carry on with? No, it never starts like that. They might start entertaining an “innocent” little fantasy and watch it grow. Or perhaps someone gave them a special smile that they couldn’t quite forget, so they kept thinking about it. The more they thought about it the more they looked forward to seeing that smile again. And so it begins.

No one ever decides they want to become addicted to gambling and lose their spouse and home, but it happens. They are just going to go to the casino one time for fun but find they want to gamble more and more. So what, it’s no big deal, until it is. And so it begins.

They never set out to become addicted to drugs. Perhaps they have always wondered what it was like to take cocaine, so they thought they would try it just once. They were blown away by the feeling it gave them so they wanted to feel it one more time. And so it begins.

Maybe you have always been curious as to what is really on a porn site. Just to be a little more street-wise you decide to take one look and then never again. But, you can’t forget what you saw, and soon you find yourself thinking there is no one around to see what I am doing, so it’s not going to hurt anything to take one more look. After a while it is an everyday thing. And so it begins.

Satan never drops sin on you like a bomb. He sneaks it in the back door. It always starts small and begins to fester. Other people will look at you and never guess what is going on in your mind. But you know and you ignore it.

It is like the frog in a pot of water on the stove. You begin warming the water up very slowly and the frog gets used to the gradual change in temperature. By the time it realizes it is in trouble, it is too late. The frog has already started to cook and can no longer move. It will sit there and die because it never sees what is happening. It never gets itself out of the danger it is in.

Sin starts small and grows slowly. You can hide the symptoms so well other people don’t see what is going on. Even though you see it, the gradual changes in you are subtle and you can excuse them away. The slow increase in the water temperature goes unnoticed until you are in real trouble.

When you step into sin you often don’t realize what a slippery slope it is. The downward incline is very slight at first. The further you go the steeper it gets. The steeper it gets, the faster you slide. The faster you slide, the harder it is to stop.

You can hide your sin from others, but you can’t hide it from yourself of God. You can, however, ignore it until your world crashes down around you.

Don’t let that slow fade get ahold of you. That slippery slope will slide you right into destruction. When you see you have taken that first step onto the slippery slope, turn around and run to God. You can get back off the slide. It is your decision.

Take a good look at yourself. Are you on that slippery slope? Are you in a slow fade?

The slippery slope leads to spiritual ruin, but you have the choice to stop it if you turn back to God. If you don’t will ruin your life. The slippery slope.  Does it always end there? No, not always. But, it always starts there.

Think about it.

If you enjoy my blog but are not currently receiving my email notifications, you can send your first and last name, and your email address to austinlass1948@gmail.com and I will notify you each time I post something new. I promise I will never give your information out to anyone or use it for anything other than my notifications to you. Please share my blog with your friends and family to help me spread the words from my heart with others. Also, if you have any family or friends who you believe might enjoy my blog posts and live in another country, I would especially love to have you share it with them. I am trying to reach more countries around the world. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Janice Austin Bates

Shame

 Disclaimer: Obviously I am not an actual angel. However, I feel like God speaks to my heart and I would love to share it with you. Please enjoy.

Our pastor, (my nephew) Chris Light, gave a powerful sermon yesterday, and I really want to share it with you. Of course, it will be in my words, and I am sure I will not express it as well as he did. However, I will try my best.

We hear so much about how, as Christians, we are not to carry any shame. Actually, that isn’t true. God uses shame to bring us to our knees and turn to Him. Without shame there is no repentance. Without repentance there is no forgiveness. Without forgiveness there is no Christianity and eternity with God.

Unfortunately, God has to bring punishment on us to wake us up. How long and painful the punishment is depends on how long it takes us to fall to our knees and repent. As you probably know, repenting is far different than apologizing. Very often people apologize to God but there is no change of heart. They are just afraid of going to hell, as they should be. If they are not truly ashamed of their sin, then apologize it is. God doesn’t listen to apologies. If that is all it is, when we meet God He will have to tell us to depart from Him because He never heard us.

Punishment is seen by many people as God just being angry at us and taking out His belt to give us a good whipping. The Bible says that punishment is God’s strange work. Strange doesn’t mean weird in this case. It means unusual. That is not what God normally wants to do.

When a parent properly punishes their child, it is not to take out their anger on them, but rather to correct the child, in an effort to cause the child to see what they are doing is wrong. The goal of the parent is to teach the child right from wrong in order for them to become a good person as an adult. God has to teach us right from wrong also.

Chris compared punishment to a prescription for our sin. One of the requirements of taking a prescription is that you have to continue the medicine until the illness is gone. If you stop the medicine early the illness will come back on you and might be worse than it was before.

It is the same with sin. If God were to stop the punishment before we are truly rid of the sin it could come back with a vengeance. Stopping the correction before we really understand how bad our sin is will give us a false sense of being cured. It can make us feel like the consequence of our sin wasn’t so bad. If I sin again I can go through that because it didn’t hurt all that much and the sin was kind of worth it.

God knows the punishment has to be painful enough to truly cure us. Only then has the prescription been completed. Only then will we turn our eyes to God and seek Him. He says when we seek Him we will find Him. When we cry out to Him, He will listen and forgive.

We will carry our shame until we understand how bad our sin was and have decided deep down that we will never want to experience this again. Then and only then can God take away our shame, because we no longer need it.

The shame God gives us is for our benefit. There is another kind of shame that beats us down and destroys us. That kind of shame is from the devil and has no redeeming quality to it. That is the kind of shame we don’t want or need. God does not want shame to plague us for the rest of our life. It is for correction only.

Tears are not always a sign of repentance.

When Esau sold his birthright for one morsel of food he shed many tears about it but to no avail. Why did his tears mean nothing to God? Because he was crying because he wanted his birthright back. They had nothing to do with being truly sorry for selling it in the first place. His tears were just self-centered. They had nothing to do with repentance. When you cry about the judgement you are receiving, is it because you are ashamed of what you did, or because of the price you are paying?

When we have sinned in a way that causes our friends and family to no longer trust us, we cannot expect them to start trusting us as soon as we repent. We have earned their distrust, and in turn we must re-earn their trust. We must prove to them that we have truly changed. That can take a long time, but we have to do it. After all, we caused the loss of trust and we have to earn it back. It is not their responsibility to learn to trust us again. It is ours.

Godly shame for what we have done will cause us to do whatever we have to do to fix it.

So, to shame or not to shame. That is the question. Don’t worry. Trust God. He always gets it right.

Think about it.

If you enjoy my blog but are not currently receiving my email notifications, you can send your first and last name, and your email address to austinlass1948@gmail.com and I will notify you each time I post something new. I promise I will never give your information out to anyone or use it for anything other than my notifications to you. Please share my blog with your friends and family to help me spread the words from my heart with others. Also, if you have any family or friends who you believe might enjoy my blog posts and live in another country, I would especially love to have you share it with them. I am trying to reach more countries around the world. Your help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Janice Austin Bates