Tag Archives: Surrender

A Renewed Mind

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“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2

More and more these days God’s people are becoming apathetic to the things of God. Nothing gets them “stirred up” You might be thinking to yourself, “I sure wish I could get excited about the Word of God and God’s work, but I just don’t feel that way anymore.”  What can you do to be stirred up for God?

Who do you spend your time around? If we spend our time around lifeless people who do nothing but complain we soon find that we “adapt” to their ways and start complaining too.

I have a certain friend who calls me and loves to complain. Nothing is ever right with her, nothing good, according to her, ever happens to her and she sees herself as a victim. The problem with that is that the “bad thing” that happened to her happened over six years ago. Still she is stuck in the self-pity mode. When I get off the phone with her I feel as if that spirit of depression that surrounds her, has attached itself to me. Now I feel down.

When we get like that we need to quit wishing things would change and take action ourselves to change things. The longer we hang out and feel sorry for ourselves the worse our lives will be. Feeling sorry for ourselves won’t change a thing. It doesn’t matter that we have every reason to feel bad about things that happened to us.

We need to stop whining. I used to do that. I would sit down and think about something that was done to me or something I had lost through the cruelty of someone else. I would think about how unfair it was and then I would start to cry and pick up the phone and dump on first one person then another.

One day God spoke to me as clear as a bell, and said, “You need to make a choice here, you can forget the past and move forward into the Promised Land I have for you, or you can remain pitiful forever.” Paul said the following regarding forgetting the past;

“But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13:14

It is really quite simple. We make it harder then it is. When Satan brings thought to us regarding hurtful things of our pasts, we can make a choice to tell him. “Buzz off Satan, that’s the past and I am moving forward.” Then we make a concentrated effort to put our minds on something else. We just won’t allow ourselves to wallow in self-pity anymore. It’s over, it happened and nothing can change it. We accept it, and we move on. PERIOD.

Now, we find a group of people who are excited about the things of God. Their excitement will “rub off” on us. They have plans and they have visions. If you attend a dead church where you walk in there on Sunday, punch a ticket and walk out and forget what you learned that day, you are not where God wants you to be.

You need to get the strength inside of you to move on and visit someplace else. I don’t care if you and your whole family have gone to that church for fifty years. You need to move on to a place where God is moving mightily in folk’s lives.

God wants us to be on fire for Him, and He wants us to associate with others who can motivate the Holy Spirit within us. We are always to be motivated by what is inside of us, and not by things on the outside. I believe the reason for such apathy in Christians today is that we tend to spend too much time in the world and not enough time with other believers.

When you make up your mind to find Christian fellowship God will present opportunities to you.  But that is the point today, it’s all about changing our outlook, by changing or minds about how bad our lives are, and going into another direction mentally with God.

We can do all things through Christ, who will strengthen us. If we continue to dwell in self-pity, Satan has us where he wants us, down and defeated. He gets a lot of mileage out of things that we refuse to let go of.

It breaks my heart when I see people who ruin each day by dwelling on something that happened in the past that cannot be changed. I have so many of those situations in my own life. If I wanted to dwell there I would probably go nuts.  God showed me that time wasted in self-pity is time that we can never get back. Today might be the last day for anyone of us. Only God knows how much time we have. I want to make the most of each and every moment. I want to choose to live happy in whatever time I have left. I want to be used of God, and God can’t use negative, unhappy people.

If you are still dwelling on something from your past, let it go. If you are a defeated Christian that has been saved for ten years or more, and you still seek comfort from others, rather then giving comfort to others, you need to grow up and mature in Christ.

Confront the lies of the enemy. Don’t constantly sit around wishing for you life to change so that you can be used of God. God wants to use you NOW.  God will use us for His glory in whatever situation we are in today. There is no such thing as the perfect life. There never has been and there never will be.  We need to learn to bloom where we are planted.

Constant self-pity is self-centered behavior. We can come out of it by putting our minds on someone else and solving their problem for them. God and His people should be our priority, not our own lives. Today, lets decide to not dwell on our past hurts. Lets’ put them behind us, take God’s hand and walk forward into the plan He has had for us from the beginning of time.

Father, we take our eyes off of our problems and ourselves. Put Your Hand over our mouths when we start to “go there.”  Turn our lives around today as we seek to be a problem solver for others. Bring happy, on fire for YOU Christians across our paths. In Your Name the Name above all names we pray today. Amen and Amen.

In His Unconditional Love,

Cathie

Quit Telling People They Are Going To Hell

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New International Version

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. John 16:13

I believe we are all born with a conscience and with the ability to tell right from wrong. Over the years, however, our consciences become numb. We often ignore sin, and it’s consequences, or we find excuses for why our favorite sin is okay.

This morning as I read through my Facebook feed I found a lot of people telling people that if they do not change their ways they are going to hell. I am sure that is true, but is saying these things the way to bring people to salvation?

I don’t know about you, but if I am weak in some area a person like that is the last person I will seek out for counsel.

First of all, according to the word of God, we are not to confront those who are loss with the consequences of sin, but rather those in the church who are involved in sin. You can study this yourself in Matthew 18:15-17.

We are to counsel people with love, not beat them over the head with our bibles.

The scripture I started with, above, tells us that the Holy Spirit will convince people of sin. Once a person is saved the Holy Spirit will clean that person up. Not me and not you, but the Holy Spirit.

I always use this analogy to make that point; Do you catch fish that are already cleaned? It would be nice, but it doesn’t happen that way. We catch them, then we clean them. Jesus told the disciples to leave their nets and go with Him and He would make them, “Fishers Of Men.”

So if a saved person continues in sin it only shows that they love the pleasure they get from that sin more then they love God. We are told to deny ourselves and “take up our cross and bear it.”

Anything, or anyone, we put above Jesus is an idol. Any sin we love more then God is an idol.

I will tell you how God handles people who call themselves Christians and play with sin. I know this well because I straddled the fence between God and the world for years. You need to understand that when we accept Christ, the same Christ who was savagely beaten to become the perfect sacrifice for our sins, we lay down our life and take up His. So, as Christ has no sin in Him, he sets about to clean us up.

In my life, one thing after the other would go wrong until I finally realized that God was giving me wake up calls. Once I repented, and quit doing what was wrong, things got better.

Do you ever observe another Christian, who is living a half-baked Christian life, complaining about all that is going wrong in their life? You know that person is playing with sin and you believe it’s because God is trying to wake them up, but the person keeps sinning because they don’t get it. God won’t let a Christian stay in sin because it cost him too much to allow it. He will either wake them up and they will straighten up or he will take them out. You may think that’s harsh but I have seen it.

So what should we do about this? All we can really do is pray for the person. If they ask for advice we THEN give it, but not unless they ask.

What we don’t do is go around telling folks they are going to hell. The Bible says that is the Holy Spirits Job. He will bring a born again Christian to repentance. He’s the only one who can.

It shows a self-righteousness that reminds me of the Pharisees when we constantly tell people they are going to hell. It also shows that we as Christians are not loving towards sinners but instead we sound judgmental, “I am better then you, you lowly sinner.”

God warned Peter that he would betray him three times before the cock crowed. Peter denied that he would ever do such a thing but the Word teaches us that he did just that.

The minute we start acting, “Holier then thou,” the biggest temptation of our lives will come at us and often it brings us down.

We can preach better with our lives then with our mouths! That’s why I say quit telling folks they are going to hell. Let the Holy Spirit do that. He will cause things to happen to bring about their total surrender, trust me. Just pray them into the Kingdom.

In His Unconditional Love,

Cathie Miller