Tuesday's Scripture Meditation

PSALM 103 meditations:
"Bless the Lord, O my soul, & all that is within me, bless His holy name!"
My soul will bless; my soul does bless the Lord my God & I glory in Him.
Who is this God on whom I have believed?
He is not like the gods of this world who demand & destroy through fear.
No, He is a God, faithful & true.
"He forgets none of His benefits" (those are to us!).
"He has pardoned our iniquities" with His own life & ultimate sacrifice.
"He heals our diseases" for He is intimately acquainted with our bodies & our spirits & our souls.
He knows the places of our pain.
Not only does He pardon, but He redeems;
"He pulls us up from the pit" of the curse of sin into which we have fallen & sets our feet upon the solid ground of all that He is.
And is this not enough?!
To our God it is not for He is a God of extravagant love.
What other god is like unto Him?
There is none!
"He places lovingkindness & compassion upon us as a crown."
"He satisfies" our desires.
This is more than deservedly is required of Him;
This is more than we could ever hope or dream of.
"Our youth is renewed" by the strength of the Lord.
We may waste our life searching for the fountain of perpetual youth,
But "all our fountains are in Him" & we will never find them in another.
And the psalm continues, extolling the wonders of this God who loves us;
Who loves us with an everlasting, always true, love.
There is none like Him.
When we were dead in sin,
Then He chose to love us & He has never stopped ...
Come, come let us pursue Him.
Come, come let us run into the arms of the one who loves us with such extravagant & outrageous love!

PROVERBS 19:11b meditation:
"It is his glory to overlook a transgression."
How opposite the world's point of view which declares that we must defend ourselves & seek revenge. Defending & maintaining our honor, we say. But God says it is wisdom to overlook an offense & leave the revenge to the Lord. Do I do this? Do I overlook offense & choose to love? And do I do it because I love the Lord & not just because I don't want to make waves or because I'm weak? Heart motive, He always brings the issue back to the heart. We can do all the right things but if our heart is carrying the wrong attitude, it is worthless religion. Give me a right & pure heart that lives from the place of desiring to honor, love, and bless You, Lord, in all I do & say.

Learning Faithfulness

This morning I felt the Lord whispering to me about faithfulness once again. Faithfulness has been a reoccurring theme hightlighted by the Lord over the past year. It was the same this morning as I felt the gentle nudging from the Holy Spirit to purpose once again to pursue faithfulness in my life.

Psalm 37:3b says “Dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness.” Cultivating a garden requires being on our knees and getting our hands dirty. We don’t just wake up one morning and have a garden. It takes work and planning and diligence. In the same way, cultivating faithfulness requires being on our knees before the Lord and getting our hands dirty – being faithful to do the little things the Lord has put before us to do. Likewise, we will never awake one morning to find we have suddenly developed faithfulness. No, it takes diligence, perseverance, trusting the Lord, and daily choosing to be faithful in the little things.

I long to remain faithful to the promise of the Lord in my heart. But I can only do that as I learn to be faithful in the little things. Faithful to love my family. Faithful to serve my family. Faithful to work with excellence. Faithful with my money. Faithful with my body. Faithful to obey the whisper of the Spirit. As I do these things, I learn faithfulness. Psalm 37 goes on to say: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” We like to jump ahead to the promise that the Lord will give us the desires of our hearts. But first we must trust in the Lord and do good, dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. I see it as this: as we choose to trust, choose to obey, choose to flourish where God has planted us (even if we’d rather be somewhere else), choose to dwell in faithfulness, the God will give us the desires of our hearts.

I choose to be faithful to the promise of the Lord in my heart. But I also choose to be faithful with where I am now and what I have now. I choose to be content in my current position in life, ever laying my desires before the Lord. In this heart attitude I will learn faithfulness as I remain faithful in the little things.

I failed to remain faithful in this past year and I may fail again. But I carry this promise within me: though I am faithless, He remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself! He will be faithful to the promise even if I am not. How comforting! When my faithfulness fails, His remains.

Heart Movements

So I haven't written for a long time & my only excuse is that I've been busy. & Mom would definitely say that was an excuse only. More accurately, I've been using my free time for reading & knitting & my thoughts have not been collected enough to put them on paper.
That's not to say I haven't been thinking. The thoughts are in my heart, just they're not yet in English.
It's hard to explain & it's sorta funny thing. My heart's in this mode of processing where thoughts haven't become words yet, not English ones anyhow or any language for that matter. They're more impressions or movements that at any time will come welling up into my mind & from there to my journal. It normally starts as a slow trickle; some short, schizophrenic conversations with God that probably leave Him scratching His head wondering how my thoughts fit together. But then one day it all just fits together & comes out in a flood of conversation & prayer & dialogue & emotion. Commonly, this happens in my car. & I later wish I had a voice recorder since I am, as yet, unable to drive & write. Maybe someday . . .
So here's the funny thing in this. I'm not doing anything, I can't do anything. It's like this heart processing takes so much energy, I don't have much left over. No, it's not that I don't have energy; it's that my heart's thinking so hard that my head can't do much thinking.
So by this point, if any of my siblings are reading this (Kari or Jordan, I mean you :), they're thinking, "Kendra, you're way over-analyzing!" Sure I am. But the only way for me to begin to translate my heart movements to English is to begin to interpret them as best as I know how. & this is how I do that: I put words together to make sentences to make paragraphs. Eventually, my heart catches on & the trickle becomes a flood until the processing's complete.

I Choose You

I choose You & only You;

Above all else,
Before all else,
Instead of all else,

I choose You.

Strip all away,
Take all of me.

My hand is open,
My heart is vulnerable;

Strip all away
Until only You remain.

Doug & Becky's

I remember being thrilled when my cousin invited me ...

I remember leaving work that first night ...
I remember wanting to back out and just go home ...
But my cousin was expecting me, so I went.

I remember walking into the quiet room ...
I remember seeing people spread out soaking in the presence of the Lord ...
I remember hunger welling up in my heart and knowing I was where I should be ...
So grateful I had come.

I remember Doug saying that they would pray for me ...
He said they would ask the Lord to give them words of knowledge for me ...
I was excited and scared at the same time ...
What would God tell them about me?

They prayed and one by one shared what God spoke ...
I sat in silence as they spoke about who I was ...
About things that God was placing inside of me ...
They prophesied a gift of healing in my hands.

I remember driving away that night, marveling ...
Their words had touched a deep place in my spirit ...
I remember the hunger to experience more ...
I remember coming back nearly every week for six months.

Doug & Becky are a young couple with a gift for the prophetic. Once a week, they opened their home to young people; it started as people from their church and grew to include others. It was a small, intimate gathering; nothing like anything I had ever experienced. Sometimes Doug would teach; someone played guitar and sang or we listened to CDs of worshipful, "soaking" music; we prayed for each other and learned to recognize the voice of God together.

I remember the night Doug explained what the voice of God can sound like. He said it can be that thought that that comes so quickly and gently into your spirit and mind, that you go "oh, where did that come from?" (Well, something like that; he explained it much better). That was an "ahha" moment: I realized I had heard the voice of God before but never recognized it as His voice. This answered so many questions in my heart. Every week then we would practice hearing or rather recognizing God's voice as we prayed for one another (and any new people who would come) and asked God for words of knowledge for each other.

It was all preparation for and the beginning of the beginning of the walls coming down around my heart. But that didn't happen until I did my Discipleship Training School at Youth With a Mission (YWAM).

The Early Years

So as I promised, I'll now begin to tell my journey with Jesus.

Boring stuff first, well, okay, I shouldn't call it boring, but it doesn't feel unique:
I grew up in a Christian home, a solid Christian home and I am forever grateful for the foundation my parents laid in my life (THANK YOU, Mom and Dad!). At some point before ten years of age, I accepted Christ, prayed the prayer. But my understanding was limited, of course. As my understanding grew, I prayed the prayer a few more times, each time with a fuller knowledge of what I was doing. I spent a great week, each of three summers, at the best camp in the world (here's a shout out to Circle K Camp: you're the best!). There my heart grew in hunger for the Lord and desire to be fully devoted to Him in truth and purity.

However, during my early teenage years, my Christianity took on a strong legalism though I did not recognize it as such at the time. I also placed walls around my heart in an effort to protect it from pain and disappointment.

Legalism: it was born out of a desire to be pleasing to the Lord, but a misunderstanding of how to do this. I did the "right" things out of obligation and to uphold my reputation. I remember consciously "training" myself to walk through a store without moving to the beat of the music playing because it was secular (read: secular equaled bad). I would never say 'dumb' or 'stupid' because those were "bad" words.  And I made other silly rules for myself. I was doing the "right" things, but from a heart of pride. Yes, I was trying to please the Lord, however there was no joy in it. And I was attempting to maintain a reputation of who I thought others thought I should be. It was very unrewarding! And in my heart, I felt the hypocrisy of it.

Walls: early in my teenage years, I experienced some relatively small disappointments. They hurt, more than I expected them to. And I began to question the goodness of God; specifically, the goodness of God towards me ... Could I truly trust Him? So I built walls around my heart to ward off further pain and disappointment. If I didn't have any expectations of God or others and if I held people at arms length (never sharing my heart, who I truly was), I would avoid pain, right?

I spent my adolescence striving to please God on my own strength, yet holding Him at arms length. Were it not for the grace of God on my life and His constant pursuit of me, I don't know where I'd be! Seriously ... God has been so good to me!

There were also precious times when God began to capture my heart and mark me as His own. I read a book called Extreme Godchasers by Tommy Tenney one summer. It ignited a desire to know and experience God. I spent hours every week that summer on my face before the Lord. In that time, I began to sense God's calling on my life though I could not yet verbalize it. I sensed incredible grace being poured out on me and a realization that I was being raised up for something.

Because of times like this, a strong hunger developed in my heart. This hunger kept me pushing forward, because I knew God had a plan for my life. And my heart hungered to experience more of Him. Through conversations, a cousin sensed this hunger in me and invited me to Doug and Becky's. But I will leave that for next time ...

Never Before ...

Well, I said I was going to start writing about where I've come from in my journey with the Lord, and I will. But tonight, I want to take a few minutes and write about something I'm beginning to walk in now.

I've spent the last seven months reading through my Bible. I'm almost done. I've been in the Word more than ever before. I've been consciously making it a priority to spend more focused time in the Lord's presence. I've been pursuing His face, pursuing His presence, pursuing His heart. And now I'm beginning to sense a change within my heart.

There's a growing sensitivity; a growing tenderness towards the Holy Spirit.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this in my journal:
"Never before has my heart been so tender before the Lord. Last year this time I was coming out of three months of bitterness. Only after three months did the conviction of the Holy Spirit reach my heart that I recognized the bitterness and repented. Now after only a few hours, my heart is repentant before the Lord and the bitterness is laid aside for the grace of the Lord. Thank You for tenderizing my heart. Thank You for pouring Your grace out upon me and Your favor upon my life. Thank You for making me more like You. Thank You for Your love, for the gentle conviction of the Spirit upon my heart. I do love You!"

This morning I came home from work after a frustrating night of work. It wasn't anything big, just little frustrations, little annoyances. As I crawled into bed, my heart cried out. I felt such a hardness and a darkness falling upon my heart as bitterness and resentment festered. I recognized anger and a spirit of offense building within my heart.

In that moment upon my bed, I knew I had a choice. The Holy Spirit was bringing His conviction as I recognized the emotions within my heart. I could have held onto my anger and offense; I could have held onto my rights. But by the grace of God, I released the emotions and asked for forgiveness and cleansing by the blood of the Lamb.

I've experienced bitterness and resentment before. I've held onto them in the past as my right. And I know by experience that I can't grow in the Lord and cling to a spirit of offense at the same time. That is why I am so thankful for the tenderness within my heart to continue to desire the Lord. It's a tenderness that recognizes and responds to conviction by the grace of God.

I pray that as you seek the Lord, He will grow this tenderness within your heart as well. I pray your heart will forever be soft before the conviction of the Holy Spirit.

Blessings!
              ... Kendra Sheree