Beauty in your life- change your thoughts for a positive outlook
Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
The favorite place I’ve visited, has to be San Antonio Texas. I went there for a Veterans conference. I loved everything about it. The weather, the people, the river walk, the food, the history.
Even though I had meeting to go to. I sneaked away every chance I could to enjoy myself. Driving to Texas was no small task, but I was blessed with a chance to see some amazing places.
Romans 1:17 and Hebrews 10:39 tells us we are supposed to “live by faith” as followers of Jesus. But what most believers don’t realize is the faith leads us to and is inseparably linked with the knowledge of God.
Proverbs speaks repeatedly about the need for wisdom in order to have a complete relationship with God.
What Is The Knowledge Of God?
Knowledge is understanding -recognizing how things in creation relate to one another and how we are to make the best use of them.
All Knowledge is rooted in God’s knowledge, as He is the Creator of all things and knows all things.
Knowledge is a virtue – it is one of the many characteristics that God expects us to cultivate as His followers, as well as faith, love, kindness, patience, and the rest of the fruits of the Spirit. It makes our lives so much better as we get to know Him.
In order to develop knowledge, we have to cultivate a curious and excited approach to life, remembering that God has wonderful things waiting for us at every turn, so learning becomes something fun and desirable.
Knowledge also involves paying attention to and growing in our relationships with people, especially other believers, because we gain understanding as we see his others from different backgrounds and situations react to the ordinary events of our lives.
All knowledge, whether in involves simple learning about something or discovering truth about people and cultures, requires a basic foundation of trust. Apart from a few individual discoveries most of what we come to know in life is initially accepted on the authority of what others with more experience have told us, from which we should draw our own conclusions. But as I precautions if someone tells me something I all check their words. If it doesn’t line up with the Word of God, it’s not worth anything. I think this is where most people get in trouble with God. By taking another person’s word on anything and everything they say, we are as fools.
The greatest knowledge, knowledge of God, requires us first to trust in Him and believe what He says -for we can only know God from what He reveals about Himself to us. see Luke 10:22 and John 1:18.
Faith in God leads to knowledge in all areas, for only when we have committed our lives to God can we see and understand the way the world really is.
Faith gives us a sharper vision of what can happen if we follow God’s instructions, so we become more obedient and productive.
Knowledge tells us what God expects His children to do, deepening our convictions of what is right and wrong, and faith in Him gives us the strength and assurance we need to act on our knowledge of what is right in Him sight.
To grow in knowledge we must be willing to be corrected, and be able to replace a wrong way of doing things with a right way.
Share five things you’re good at.
Asking yourself, “What you’re good at? Is a key factor in finding a career that fits your strengths and interests.
I am a pretty good listener when people need an ear.
I’m a good baker. I love Thanksgiving and Christmas because I get to bake all the treats.
When I have to make decisions, I’m good at thinking about the consequences of the decisions I make. I find that if I ask God first then wait for His answer. I can be pretty dang successful.
I’m stubborn, meaning that I don’t give up easily. I learned many years ago if I wanted to be successful, to not let Satan win.
I’m always honest. I believe it’s better to hurt people with the truth, than to comfort them with a lie.
What is one thing you would change about yourself?
I personally would want to change the fact that I am a little socially awkward. I’m not one for small talk, I find that conversation that focuses in trivial unimportant topic’s absolutely bore me.
But, God makes us each unique in many special ways. While the environment has an ongoing and significant impact on our lives. God has already written on our slate when He created us.
He had given us each a unique personality as well as strengths and weaknesses. And the environment and our surroundings are also responsible for who we become.
How do you hear from God when you need direction? We are in one of the greatest shaking and times of transition in nations in the world’s history,and whether you look at the Marco or the micro, we need direction in many areas today.
Many of us need direction. Whether you are asking God to speak to you, or you have had friends or family give you insight, there’s a lot of people who need direction.
One of the central benefits of being a true believer in Christ is that we get to walk with God and get wisdom and direction, and even hear His voice and heart about our life decisions. The problem arises when we don’t know how to interpret His direction in our lives because He doesn’t always speak directly.
In a world filled with noise and chaos, it imperative that we tune our ears to His still small voice.
In Abraham’s journey in Genesis 12:1-4, God directed Abraham to leave his homeland and go to a land He would show him. Abraham’s obedience led him to become the father of nations.
In Exodus and Moses and the burning bush, God spoke through the burning bush, commissioning him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
Again in 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Samuel anoints David as king, guided by God’s revelation, even through David seemed to be an unlikely choice.
These are many biblical accounts that remind us that God speaks in diverse ways, guiding His people with divine precision. To hear from God for our direction today, we must cultivate a listening heart through prayer, meditation on His Word, and an intimate relationship with Him.
I know for me, I hear God mostly at night. Sometimes I wake up suddenly with a word from Him or just a scripture. Other times it’s just an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach when I’m about to do something. Or a check in my spirit when I’m about to make a quick decision without stopping to ask Him for wisdom. God does speak to us we just need to be willing to stop, listen and obey.
Are you more of a night or morning person?
I would consider myself a morning person, I usually awaken at about 2 AM and start praying, and reading my Bible. I love the early morning hours because everything is so quiet and peaceful. It’s a good time for me to connect with God.
Many cultures call this the “witching hours” when spiritual things happen.
I call it a getting a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit urging me to seek a deep connection with God. It is said that these awakening hours can lead to significant spiritual growth Anne a renewed sense of purpose in life.
If you’re living without Jesus, whatever sin wants sins gets. That doesn’t mean your living a wild lifestyle. It simply means that the primary within your life is your sinful nature. It is what’s in control. In Romans 6:14 Paul refers to sin as your master. controller.
When you’re born again something beautiful happens. God gives you a new nature and more importantly, fills you with His Holy Spirit so you are no longer under the control of your sinful nature -you will be set free. Paul sums it up pretty much in 2 Corinthians 3:17, “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
Because when the Holy Spirit lives in you, you are free. The penalty of sin is losing your eternal life. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Outside of Christ, we all have an eternal death sentence. When we carry the penalty of sin – we are on death row, that’s the gravity of it.
Unfortunately, today many people still don’t understand that. Because sin puts us on a path to be eternally separated from God, This is the liability of our sin.
Thankfully though the story doesn’t end there. Paul tells us the gift of Gods eternal life in Christ Jesus. When Jesus sets you free. He takes away our death sentence. When you ask Jesus to come into your heart you no longer have to pay the penalty for your sin. Thank God because I’ve messed up most of my life with sin.
If you’ve ever experienced the guilt and shame of sin. And if you’ve ever repented but felt like you needed to repent again because you feel so bad that you want to make sure God “really forgave you?” Ya, I’ve been there.
We have all done things that we are ashamed of. Things that we wish we could take back and never do again. Things that can haunt us and cripple us, and take away our capacity to live and develop our vitality.
This is one of the biggest weapons of Satan: encouraging us to look back at the shameful moments of our past. When we become overwhelmed by guilt and shame, and condemnation it strips us of our joy, robs our peace, and destroy our vitality. Please if you’re suffering through this accept Jesus into your life. I can tell you I lived in hell for over 30 years because I was to stubborn to accept Jesus into my life.
The good news is when accept Jesus, and repent from your sins and let God take away that heavy baggage you’re carrying it’s an amazing feeling. God forgives that sin from you as far as the East from the west and He will remember it no more. He will never bring it up and neither should you. God doesn’t only forgive the sins of the past. He also liberates you from the shame and guilt of your past. He takes away the thing that limits your ability to live and develop which is your guilt and shame.
When you understand what Jesus has freed you from, it sets the stage for you to live in what Jesus has freed you from. Giving you the freedom to live to your full capacity. It increases your capacity to have a relationship with Almighty God. And begin to experience joy, and peace.
We can even think of having a relationship with God until we become free. You cannot have a vibrant, living, loving relationship with Gondor anyone else for that matter if you’re holding on to guilt and shame of your past.
If you remember in the Garden when Adam and Eve sinned, they hid from God and their capacity for a relationship with God was hindered. When God comes and sets you free you don’t have to hide anymore.
James 4:8 says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.” This is the essence of what Jesus has freed you to.
Having all your hinderances removed is what truly living free is. You are saved by grace. You live by the grace. Jesus frees us so that your activity doesn’t flow out of some sense of trying to win God’s approval. Our approval doesn’t come from because of what we do, but because of what Jesus has already done.
Freedom is defined as the power or right to act, speak, or think without hindrance or restraint. That completely wraps up everything Jesus has done for us. There is only one thing left for you to do. Live Galatians 5:1,
lIt is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and donor let yourselves be burden again by a yoke of slavery.”
Enjoy your freedom and live the life Jesus had freed you to live.
It’s sometimes hard to know when someone is lying. There have been several books developed to help us spot lies by studying body language, eye flickers, facial expressions, voice pitch, among other things. But good liars can even fool polygraph machines.
Psychology tells us there are simply no behavioral cues that can reliably indicate when someone is lying. Researchers have searched high and low for such cues for decades. And the best anyone has come up with is a small number of behavioral cues that are extremely unreliable.
But don’t abandon all hope just yet. There actually are some fairly effective ways to detect liars. It’s not by trying to read body language. The real secret is to listen carefully to what’s being said.
Lying is nothing more than communicating false information. We have to pay attention to the information we’re told, see if it aligns with reason, with evidence, and with what we know or can learn. We have to ask questions and see if the story stands up to scrutiny.
While that’s good advice when suspect a person is lying. It’s also how to deal with the never-ending lies that Satan tells us. He’s an expert liar. Satan never tells the truth, he’s a master at twisting the truth. If we’re not careful Satan can prompt us to lie to ourselves, often without realizing it.
We’ve all called our self stupid for doing things, or even had people tells us lies about ourselves. They say if a lie is repeated long enough we will start to believe it. Especially if you were told things that weren’t truth as an impressionable child. That is part of Satan’s master plan. Tell lies long enough and we will begin to believe it as the truth.
Satan is so cunningly deceptive that we instinctively believe what we whispers in our ears.
He loves to tells us these 4 things constantly,
1.God doesn’t want me to be happy
One of Satan’s worst lies is telling us God isn’t the source of happiness; that He’s a hinderance to it. “All I really want is to be happy, I don’t care what it costs, I only want to be happy.” Isn’t that the desire of literally billions of people?
It’s ironic that according to the Bible, God made us in Him image, He loves us, we are His handiwork and craftsmanship, and He longs to fill our lives with joy. Yet most people reject Him and go off looking for happiness on their own. Psalm 8 tells us who we are in Christ. It’s no mistake that only the truth of Gods word can wash Satan’s lies from our minds.
I find that even often 30 plus years, and being a follower of Christ, I can still hear my Satan’s lies haunting my head from childhood. At what point can all the pain disappear from my head and I completely rely on who God says I am. I’m afraid it’s a never ending battle. But the key is to not give up. To never let Satan win.
2. I’m no good
Satan wants us to think that we are no good. If you often feel this way because of the faults and regrets that haunt you satan has you where he wants you. He loves to damage our self-image by comparing ourselves to others. Admittedly without the grace of God we are warped and ruined by lies that cause us to sin. But, Jesus placed a high value on us. He died and rose again for us. With Christ with in us, there is only one “no good” we need to claim -the promise in Psalm 84:11: “No good thing will He withhold from those who walk upright.”
When Satan is telling us we are no good. Psalm 84 combats Satan’s distortions, and reassures us of our value and uncover fresh blessings from the Heavenly Father.
3. I’m a failure
Another fabrication of Satan is that we are all failures. While we all fail at times, that act doesn’t translate into who we are. In Christ, we are who view failures as a learning experience and as opportunities to find God’s best plan for our lives. Psalm 73:26 says, “My flesh and my heart my fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
When adversity strikes as it always does refocus your determination and try again. Commit to making each day better than the one before. Then do it again the next day. In the long run, people care far more about who you are that what you do.
Reading Psalm 73 every time Satan is hissing failure in your ears. David struggled with a sense of failure and frustration, but he overcame the lies with God’s truth saying,
“My heart was grieved, and I was vexed in my mind. I was so foolish and ignorant; I was like a beast before you. Nevertheless I am continually with you. You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, afterward receive me to glory. When have I in heaven but you? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” – Psalm 73:21-26.
4. I can’t overcome this temptation
In addition to Satan’s other lies, he is a master at deceiving us with self-destructive habits. He wants us to say we cannot overcome temptations.
To counter that lie Psalm 51 is a great prayer of David’s confession after his moral failure that we can use to implore forgiveness. In Psalm 51:12 David prayed,
“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me by your generous Spirit.“
We can’t withstand temptation in our own str, but God forgives us, restores our joy, and then upholds us by His generous Spirit. He will uphold you in temptation. Accepting this truth will set you free from Satan’s debilitating lies.
We have to learn to not listen to a single word from Satan because lying is hiss native language. When we learn to spot his lies and to counter each one with the brilliant truth of God’s infallible Word.
If you want to come through any crisis with your emotional health intact,you need to learn to control what’s controllable in your life and trust God for the rest.
Wow, it took me a lot of years to learn that lesson, and that God is active in our mental,spiritual, and emotional health. Whether we realize it or not. He wants you to make wise choices based on His guidance from the Bible and through prayer.
I think back when everyone was scared to death with the pandemic. But, when you surrender to God what you can’t control, He will work it out for you.
A good biblical example of this is with Abraham in James 2:22, “You see that his faith and his actions were working together,and his faith was made complete by what he did.”
It’s easy to go to extremes with this. For example, you can say it’s all up to God and become too passive to the point where you do nothing or you can act like God doesn’t play a part in your life and assume everything depends on you.
Of course, both extremes are wrong. Maintaining good physical health is about balance, and the same is true with emotional health. Finding a balance that helps us recognize what’s in our control and what’s not is key. When we make wise decisions, based on God’s guidance we learn to,ethos of things that only God can handle. We can do this through reading His Word (The Bible) and talking to Him in prayer.
There’s a movie called “Lord of the Rings” and in it there’s a part where Frodo complains about all the evil and pain in the world. He says to Grandalf, “I wish none of this had happened.”
Grandalf wisely responds to Frodo and says, “So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”
There are a lot of things in our lives that we have no control over. You can’t control all the circumstances of life, but you can choose how you respond to things. And that makes all the difference in the world. And God is always there to help you make the right choice if you choose to surrender the things you aren’t able to control.
What are your feelings about eating meat?
I have no reason not to eat meat. Although many today have qualms about it. I love animals as much as the next person.
But the Bible teaches that humans can eat meat they so wish. Deuteronomy 12:20 says “When the Lord your God shall enlarge your border, as He had promised you, and you shall say, “I will eat flesh, because your soul longs to ear flesh, you may eat flesh, whatever the soul desires.
And if we read Leviticus 11 it says “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.
The Lord put wildlife on this earth so that we may eat it. I myself love meat. I enjoy it meat has many benefits such as preventing anemia, maintaining cardiovascular health, band balancing your cholesterol.
Some say it is not correct to eat meat. But I say how about you choose what you want to eat and let me choose to I want to eat.
I have real issues with people telling me I have to live by their beliefs. People who want to control the narrative. I don’t think another person has the right to shove their belief system down my throat and force me to comply. That’s not what America is. And that seems to be an big issue in America today.
If you want the peace of God to reign in your life, you have to stop doing several things.
The number one thing I’ve done in the past until God convicted my heart. You have to stop trying to figure out how God will work everything out. I am an over-thinker. I have a tendency to over think everything in my life, every situation, every thing someone says to me I scrutinize. God wants us to trust Him.
You must stop worrying and fretting. “Be anxious for nothing…” -Philippians 4:6.
You must stop telling God what you think is right for you. God knows what’s right for us and has a plan already in place.
However, the most important thing to stop is stop thinking you are a failure. Stop thinking you do not please God.
One of Satan’s most effective traps for robbing believers of peace is to convince them that they must strive in the flesh to please God. He springs this on me all the time. Sometimes when I need a quiet place to pray. I get in my car and drive to a secluded spot. Somewhere I can praise the Lord and enjoy His presence while looking at the nature He created.
Sometimes the thought hits me that I am not doing enough for God. I pray, “God, I’m just not accomplishing much for your kingdom. All I do is pray, share my messages on this blog, go to church. The whole world is going to hell, and I’m not doing anything for you.”
I’m sure we’ve all had such thoughts. We can do everything we can in order to please the Lord, yet we do feel holy. I hardly ever feel holy. Even when I am teaching under an anointing from the Spirit.
People tell me the things I do for the Lord are amazing and tell me I’ll get crowns in heaven. It doesn’t matter where you are with the Lord or what you do for Him. Satan comes in and makes us all feel unworthy, and unfulfilled. It’s easy to lose our peace by giving into these awful feelings.
Paul’s prayer for us in Romans 15:13 says, “Now May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Trust in God’s goodness. Believe in His love and mercy. Do not accuse Him of being angry or upset with you or of not speaking to you. Let His peace rule in your heart and over your whole life.
What are your two favorite things to wear?
Thinking about this is a no brainer. I love wearing boots, ankle boots, knee high boots, or mid-calf boots I love them all. It’s what I feel most comfortable wearing.
My other favorite actually a hoodie, or a cardigan. I don’t feel comfortable unless I have something over my shirts. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s something I picked up from my Nagymama (grandma). She always wore a shawl or sweater.
From Pity to Praise