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How To Make Trusting God Easier

How To Make Trusting God Easier

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Are you trusting God more or less than you were yesterday? If you are trusting Him less than you used to, perhaps something has happened to cause you to give up on God. God promises you are not wasting your time when you seek Him, trust Him, and make your requests known to Him.

Trusting God throughout your day can be challenging because of distractions. Some distractions are positive and some are negative. Either way, consider how much you have increased your trust in God today. The best thing you can accomplish each day is to end it by trusting God a little more.

Strengthen your faith requires an intentional effort to cleanse negative memories with God’s truth. If you want to trust God more, you must apply biblical truth to infected memories. Infected memories cause you to doubt God’s character.

Trust God Because He Knows Everything

In Isaiah 46, God says much about who He is and what He likes to do. God promises He will act. He isn’t a worthless idol. God doesn’t forget about you. He knows your future so of course, He knows your past. He’s been attending to you since even before you were born.

I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born.

Isaiah 46:3 NLT

Trust God Because He Keeps You Safe

But that’s not all. God proclaims that He will care for you and carry you throughout your future.

I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you.

Isaiah 46:4 NLT

If you put your trust in something other than God, you will be disappointed. But God cares about you enough to rescue you from trouble.

[An idol] can’t even move! And when someone prays to it, there is no answer. It can’t rescue anyone from trouble.

Isaiah 46:7 NLT

God has already rescued you and is more than capable of keeping you safe.

Trust God Because He is in Control

God is in complete control of the past, present, and future. Only God can make such bold statements as these:

Remember the things I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me. Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.

Isaiah 46:9-10 NLT

God can and will do whatever He wants. For those who are friends of God, this should provide increased comfort and trust. For those who are yet enemies of God, this is likely scary and irritating. I remember the emptiness I felt when I was unable to understand who God is.

Memories Can Help You Trust God

If you are a believer, then you must have some positive memories. At the very least, God has done a work in your life to cause you to cross over from death to life. Can you remember what that felt like? I remember how uplifting and hopeful I felt when I first believed.

Remembering what God has done in your life is a source of spiritual strength. When you recall the ways God has touched your life, it helps you trust Him with current life challenges. When God breaks into your life, that’s God building trust with you. Use it for all it’s worth to make your faith solid.

As you focus on the positive, be equally willing to revisit the negative memories. These significant life events desperately need to be considered in light of the truth you now know. Learn details of how to cleanse hurtful memories so you can trust God more.

God is real. Let’s pray with anticipation of the good things He will do. No matter what is happening around us, God is still good and in control.

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Last Updated 2024/09/22

Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

Remember Your Past For A Healthy Present

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Reading time: 3 minutes

How does remembering your past help you today? Think of re-membering as bringing scattered parts of your life together. It’s like gathering the parts of a jigsaw puzzle and assembling them where they belong.

God wants you to see the whole picture of who you are. Have you ever worked on a puzzle only to get to the end and realize some pieces are missing? It’s frustrating because it feels so incomplete.

I’m fascinated by my past. I’m not thinking of historical facts. I mean my psychological and emotional journey. Memories are important because they are the key to setting a person free from being trapped in the past.

You can’t change what has happened to you but you can change its meaning. You decided how much a particular memory has the power to define who you are. They answer the question: How did I get to where I am today?

How you first experience something has long-lasting implications. Your journey is, in many ways, a series of first-time experiences. To put the pieces of your life together, you must revisit your first-time experiences to create follow-on experiences. Healing can be both strengthening the positive memories and weakening the negative ones.

Questions to Help You Remember

Your relationship with your childhood memories can tell you a lot about yourself. Here are some questions you can use to explore your emotional health:

  • How do you feel about your childhood?
  • Do you feel like you are still a child?
  • Do you feel like you are stuck in your childhood?
  • Do you feel extremely distant from childhood, almost like it was another lifetime?
  • Does childhood feel real to you or more like a fantasy?
  • Does childhood seem unimportant or highly relevant to you?
  • Do you remember a lot or a little?
  • How much was childhood the same or different every day?
  • What positive memories come to mind?
  • What negative memories come to mind?

Did you skim through these questions or pause on each one and give a real, in-depth answer? Are you willing to embrace your childhood or do you think you’d be happier if you never thought about it again?

Even if you considered only one of the questions, you’ve got a taste of what it’s like to move toward emotional health. You dipped your toe in the water. If you considered more than one, you might feel overwhelmed as you swim in a pool of emotional memories.

As I said, memories are fascinating. They aren’t part of who you are. Yet, in another way, they are part of you. You’re not five years old anymore. But you might feel five years old sometimes.

Remember the Past, Compare it with the Present, and Plan the Future

Here are a few more questions for you to consider: In what ways do you feel the same, today, as you did when you were a young child? In what ways are you the same? In what ways are you different?

Life can lead you away from being in touch with who you are. The pressures, demands, and trauma open a chasm between your performance and who you are. It’s possible to become so familiar with present-day performance (life responsibilities) that you forget what it’s like to enjoy life on your terms.

Here are three more questions that should help you “pull yourself together.” What day would you most like to relive? What makes life worth living today? Now, what new day do you imagine you would like to live in the near future?

In answering all these questions, look for two things. First, look for any infections: emotional wounds that haven’t fully healed. Second, look for peak experiences: emotional highs that give you energy.

If you’d like more practice at developing follow-on experiences, then you should try a book from my Journal Your Way series.

More about the benefits of exploring your past.
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Last updated 2022/12/11

Is Love A Choice

Is Love a Choice?

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Reading time: 3 minutes

God loves you. But what does this mean? God is love (1 John 4:16). So, God has to love. He can’t not love. Does He love out of obligation? Is His love involuntary?

We know God cares enough to die for us (John 3:16). He paid the price to redeem us. He is patient with us. He did what He had to do to keep us alive (spiritually).

To say love is a choice is to say that it is objective. You and I can show love despite how we feel about another person. If we only loved when we felt like it, our actions would only be motivated by how others treat us. But here I am talking about human love which can be fickle.

God’s agape is different. It always does right. It flows out of who God is. In that sense, it could be described as involuntary.

Love makes it impossible to harm another, so love fulfills all that the law requires.

Romans 13:10 TPT

Much of life is starkly unpredictable, so it’s nice that God doesn’t change His mind about loving us.

Is Love More Than a Choice?

When love is a choice, it’s a rational, steady, and dependable love. But there is more to it than that. Love as only a choice is incomplete. Love includes compassion, affection, and favor. Agape is motivated by feeling. But keep in mind that God’s feelings are pure, undefiled by any sin.

The Lord your God is in your midst,
    a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
    he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

Zephaniah 3:17 ESV

Subjective, irrational love is at the center of agape. God is not cold, loving only out of obligation. He is passionate and unrelenting. God’s favor, from the core of His being, drives Him to save us no matter the cost.

God’s Love is Irrational

God goes “all in” with His love toward us. This makes it an extravagant love. God’s loving favor doesn’t make sense, but that’s what makes it wonderful.

God doesn’t only do the minimum decent thing to do. He doesn’t save us in compassion and then tell us to go on our way. He adopts us into His family (1 John 3:1; Romans 8:14-30).

God’s family is forever. In Isaiah 49, God’s people felt like Yahweh had abandoned them.

Yahweh responds, “But how could a loving mother forget her nursing child and not deeply love the one she bore? Even if a there is a mother who forgets her child, I could never, no never, forget you.

Isaiah 49:15 TPT

God’s affection for you is greater than any imperfect parent.

If you, imperfect as you are, know how to lovingly take care of your children and give them what’s best, how much more ready is your heavenly Father to give wonderful gifts to those who ask him?”

Matthew 7:11 TPT

God has a strong bond of love with you. He withholds nothing good from you. What can you do today to believe, trust, and feel God’s affection for you?

For God has proved his love by giving us his greatest treasure, the gift of his Son. And since God freely offered him up as the sacrifice for us all, he certainly won’t withhold from us anything else he has to give.

Romans 8:32 TPT

So, God loves you. He values you. He saves you. He rejoices because of you. He makes you a co-heir with Christ.

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 NIV

God has many good things in store for you, things too wonderful to fully comprehend today, but things that allow you to experience the fullness of hope as you are filled with God (Ephesians 3:20).

Read more about God’s love.
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Last updated 2023/04/30

Christ’s Death Is Sufficient For Security Of Salvation

Christ’s Death Is Sufficient For Security Of Salvation

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Reading time: 5 minutes

The security of the people of God is of the first importance to every Christian. There is a life and death difference between the hearts of these two possible Gods:

  1. A God who saves you from sin and promises to keep you with Him for eternity.
  2. A God who saves you provisionally and reserves the right to change His mind and abandon you to hell for eternity.

Which one do you believe is the true heart of the God who is love? Which one can you trust? Which one sounds amazingly God-like and which one sounds like a human father? Confusing the two, Christians might ask with deep concern:

Although I have been born again and passed from death unto life, is my final salvation in heaven certain or are there uncertainties about it?

Is there anything in the nature of the atonement, or the work of regeneration, or the character of God that may justly lead me to believe that, after the blood of Christ has cleansed me, I am permanently saved?

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

John 5:24 ESV

Security is Yours Because God Does Not Count Your Sin Against You

Some might argue that security is left in the people’s hands instead of in God’s hands. It cannot be denied that we all sin and forget God and do wrong, some more and some less, and if God counts our sins against us, we would fall to be sure, but if God does not impute sin to us, we cannot fall. To “impute” means “to say that someone is responsible for something that has happened, especially something bad.”

While we are responsible for our sins, we are also helpless to save ourselves. This is why we need the Savior Jesus Christ. We fully depend upon Him for our security. This is the essence of being a Christian: not trusting in self-effort in the least but trusting in God in every way.

In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

2 Corinthians 5:19 ESV

God’s way of saving sinners is by not counting their sin against them.

“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”

Hebrews 10:17 ESV

When God says, “never remember” He means He will never bring up the matter again. God will never use your sins against you, but the devil certainly will. So, God has not imputed sin to those who are saved. He clears away their record, resulting in the joy of the believer.

David also spoke of this when he described the happiness of those who are declared righteous without working for it: “Oh, what joy for those whose disobedience is forgiven, whose sins are put out of sight. Yes, what joy for those whose record the Lord has cleared of sin.”

Romans 4:6-8 NLT

Security is Yours if You Believe Christ’s Death is Your Only Hope

David also taught that if God should count sin against us none of us would be able to stand (Psalm 130:3). How then can anyone be saved?

The blessed man to whom God does not impute sin is the Christian, and if God does not impute sin to the Christian, he cannot “fall from grace.” In other words, the only way to fall from grace is to have your sins counted against you. Therefore, you have security in your salvation because Christ no longer counts your sins against you.

Satisfaction must be rendered for every sin, and certainly, our obedience cannot satisfy a broken law. It requires death, and Christ’s death hushes the claims of law. Now, if all our sins were borne and satisfied by Jesus, the claims of law fully met by him in its very jots and tittles, then the ground of our hope is in what Jesus has done, and nothing else. Our deeds may be mixed with sin, and we often go astray, but these shall not overthrow us because the death of Christ is our only hope. This is the only principle upon which sinners can hope to be saved.

Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

Hebrews 9:22 ESV

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

1 John 1:7 ESV

So there never was nor ever will be a single sin forgiven on earth without that forgiveness being procured by the blood of Christ. And, you have been cleansed from all sin (including past, present, and future sin).

From what has been said, we can conclude:

  • works are no part of the cause of our salvation;
  • God does not impute sin to his people;
  • the only ground of forgiveness is in the blood of Christ.

All these being true, apostasy is impossible. You have a guarantee from Christ, as a genuine believer in His death and resurrection, that you will be with Him in heaven for all eternity. That is true security!

Learn more about eternal security.
This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While substantially the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
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Loneliness Is Deceptive

Loneliness Is Deceptive

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Reading time: 3 minutes

What is the opposite of loneliness? It’s not necessarily being around other people or enjoying others’ company. It’s being content with who you are. It’s hard to be lonely when you are at peace with yourself.

Loneliness can be debilitating and result from the self-fulfilling prophecy of believing “I do not belong.” If left unchecked, it can develop into a disease. A disease becomes progressively worse until a cure is found. People who lack sufficient relationships will become emotionally unstable over time. This is how loneliness can become a deception–a belief that one is stuck in a trap and no escape is possible.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

Mark Twain

While overcoming loneliness does involve other people, it’s not physical proximity to others that irradicates the disease. It’s the genuine, life-giving connection with God, others, and self in healthy balance.

Loneliness is Optional

Loneliness is real, but it’s not intractable. You can be alone and not lonely. Being comfortable with yourself means you have taken the antidote of internalized love. A Christian is never truly alone. Even though God is not usually physically felt, He is always present. You can be not alone but still feel alone if you become numb to others. You can have food but still feel hungry if you have problems digesting.

You can be not alone and not lonely. This is possible in a couple of ways. One, if you have internalized enough love, you have it stored up. You can survive in nutrient-deficient environments because you are healthy. Previous positive interactions keep you going even during a relational drought. Two, you could be with people that feed you relationally. When your genuine emotional needs are being met, it’s impossible to feel alone.

Loneliness is not Caused by People

You can be not alone and lonely. This demonstrates that other people do not automatically make loneliness go away. Healthy relationships makes a difference when they meet emotional needs. They are mean to be a conduit for emotional needs, not an end in themselves. Unhealthy (or unhelpful) relationships create emotional scars (or perpetuate neediness). Sometimes two needy people do more harm than good. Moderately needy people might bicker but still live to fight again another day. Desperately needy people can end up tearing each other apart.

For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.

Galatians 5:14-15 ESV

If your relationship is a place of doing more harm than good, it doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on the relationship. It just means you temporarily need help from outside the relationship. After you have internalized enough love, your relationship can thrive.

You can be alone and lonely. If you find yourself here, it’s time to put yourself in a (relatively healthy) community. There are no magic cures but neither is there a better alternative. Not everyone will be a good match for your needs but one good relationship is enough to move toward health. Even so, limiting yourself to one person will not be effective. No one person can give you everything you need.

God designed us to ultimately receive what we need from Him. But He frequently uses other people to communicate His love. If you are lonely (whether alone or not alone), your needs are not being met. It’s time to do something different until your needs are being met. Cry out to God. Tell Him what you need. Tell at least one other person what you need.

Learn more about fulfillment.
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Overcome Resistance To Value Your Identity

Overcome Resistance To Value Your Identity

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Reading time: 4 minutes

To live is to encounter resistance to all that is good. Given the curse the world will naturally degrade as long as evil is in control. Even the sin in us resists God’s goodness. But our suffering does not need to lead us to despair. God tells us to hope not in this world but in Him.

We know that God is ultimately in control even though it appears like evil has control. Bad things happen. God offers His truth to us. Are you winning or losing the struggle between these two?

If I offered you a new, crisp one-hundred dollar bill, would you accept it? What if I first crumpled it up and submerged it into a concoction of oil, mud, and blood? The bill might be tattered and dirty, but it’s still worth the same amount.

The same is true for you. You have an enemy who wants to drag you through the mud. He wants you to forget who you are. Or, better yet, he’d like you to never figure out or accept who you are. You are valuable even though you have some scars and dirt.

Resistance is not Futile

You have a force working against you as you discover who you are. As you learn who God made you to be, the evil one will work to make sure you don’t believe or can’t accept who you are. He’ll try to get you to think you’re worth less (worthless).

Resistance is not futile (see Hebrews 12:4 and James 4:7). You can submit to God and resist the devil’s schemes. Fortunately for you and me, this strategy of the enemy will backfire eventually, like all of his strategies. How? Because whatever the evil one plans for discomfort and destruction, God can turn it around and use it for good. Even so, it’s important to keep expectations adjusted appropriately. The ending is awesome, but we’ll still experience some darkness, discomfort, and even some deterioration along the way.

Understanding the truth is difficult when life isn’t working out in your favor. In the end, though, the enemy can only redecorate your life. He can’t destroy it. What the enemy can touch is superficial.

Joseph is a great example of patience during suffering. His brothers betrayed him, and he still felt compassion for them at the end of his life. He saw his life events, the good and the bad, with a positive view of God.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

Genesis 50:20 ESV

Growing Stronger Requires Befriending Resistance

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.

1 Peter 4:12-13 ESV

If you want to grow stronger, you must actively face some resistance. All else equal, in light gravity, you lose muscle and bone strength. In heavy gravity, you can gain strength if you resist.

You can’t live without hope but equally true is: you can’t live without exercising your body and mind. When who you are is under attack, you must resist what is false. During the process of refuting what isn’t true, you’ll learn what is true about you.

Therefore, whenever you’re feeling discouraged by life, remind yourself, “I have value no matter what I look like or feel like on the outside. This body I have today is temporary. My spirit is eternal. God will make me a new body in the next life.” And, bonus! God has already started the cleanup process, so you can experience some comfort in this life.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV

Read through or listen to Mandisa’s songs, Stronger and Overcomer.
Learn more about overcoming resistance.
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Last updated 2024/01/14