08.05.2006

Jeremiah 29:11-13
"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

2 Timothy 1:7
For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.

John 14:1
"Do not let your hearts me troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me."

Hello everyone,

How are you all doing? I hope that all is well, and that our Lord is continually teaching you and working through you.
Before I go on into my regular spiel, I thought I would touch on something that's going on in the world. As you undoubtedly know, there's a lot of crazy stuff happening between Israel and Lebanon right now. There's always something going on in the world, and there are always wars going on... But I just wanted to ask that if you haven't already prayed for the two nations, I ask that you would do so. Pray for Israel, pray for Lebanon, and pray for whoever else gets involved. I don't mean pray just that they would stop fighting, but pray that the way of Christ may be made known and that He would use our brothers and sisters there to help all of those in need.

Thanks.

This week, as I was reading through Matthew and had been comparing it to the other Gospels (study bibles are so handy with that!), I came across Mark 5, and a verse (36) that stuck out to me was when Jesus says to the synagogue ruler, "Don't be afraid; just believe." Now the context is that Jesus wanted the man with the sick girl to believe that He could heal her. But it's a verse that just strikes a chord in such a way that I need to cling to it. As I step out into college ministry, there are so many things that I could be afraid of... In fact, there are a lot of things I could be afraid of without even going into ministry. That's just just the way life is - I'm sure it's nothing new to most of you. Whether it's with graduating and needing to get a job, or going through classes, or getting into a brand new relationship (or struggling in one), or dealing with sickness, or dealing with family issues, or money's getting tight.... So on and so forth.
here's a commercial for something or other that basically says "Life comes at you fast." It's true. There are a lot of things in life that just come at us and tempt us to quake in our boots. And yet there's Jesus, saying to the man who has just been told his daughter was dead: Do not be afraid, but instead believe. Believe that Jesus can, and will, take care of you. I really needed to hear that in the beginning of this week, and I'm finding that at the end of the week, it's still something I need to hold onto--tightly. If Christ is God, and if God is the God of all things, then certainly He is more than able to take care of us. What usually gets in the way is our own human ideas of what we think we need.... and it's then that we ought to read Matthew 6:25-34 to set things into perspective. Do we believe God is going to take care of us? We all struggle with this question...
Later in Mark (9:24), a man says to Jesus, "... help me overcome my unbelief!"
I think we could all do with crying out like that.

I pray that each one of us learn to cry out like that... That, although God knows it, we would ask for Him to help us believe. I pray that He would continually be working in our hearts, and that we would come to hold onto His amazing faithfulness. I ask that the Holy Spirit be working and refining each of us, molding us into dedicated sons and daughters that want to be instruments of the Father's glory. I also ask that we be conscious of the fact that the Lord is us, holding onto us and teaching us to hold onto Him through the difficulties in life that cause our faith to quake. May we learn to rely on and trust our Lord more and more every day.

In love and in Him,
your sister,
Yvonne