Sherri Sand's Blog, page 10

Blind Faith

Can we feel the fear, but walk in faith?

How often do lies come to our minds and we give them more weight than they deserve:

My child will always struggle.

I’m not good enough.

This situation will never get better.

My life is a mess. I can’t do anything right.

They are better than me, prettier than me, smarter than me.

If only I had more money.

If only I had that husband.

If only I hadn’t married him.

I never make the right decisions.

I’ll never amount to anything.

This is as good as it’ll get for me.

These lies may be real to our emotions, but they aren’t truth. They are whispered in our ear by a lying spirit that comes to steal, kill and destroy.

They aren’t based in fact, but rather they are speculations fueled by imagination. We build a foundation for them and give them substance through fear.

To speculate means to form a theory about a subject without firm evidence.

Fear leads us to build our homes on sandy and unstable foundations. When we give into negative emotions, we’ve walked away from truth.

Fear used to be my constant companion. Now it’s an unwelcome visitor I practice not letting in.

I have teenage drivers. Treasures that take my heart with them whenever they walk out the door, keys jangling in their hands. One particular night I lay in bed wondering if my son was okay. He was out of cell range. It was after midnight. He was late and I was glaring daggers at TDH who lay next to me snoring through my fear-infested imaginations.

I was mad at my son for being late, mad at my husband for sleeping peacefully and mad at God for not fixing it for me. For not taking away my fear. For not telling me EVERYTHING WAS OKAY!

I had a choice to make: give into the anxiety-inducing fear, or place my son in God’s hands. It was a wrestling match. Me against the enemy, with God cheering me on.

To stand on truth, we have to know the truth-Giver.

What does He say about you? How does He feel about you? How does He want to help you?

Fear is a substance, just as faith is. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb. 11:1 NASB, my emphasis).

Or we could say, “Anxiety is the substance of things greatly feared, the evidence of where we’ve placed our trust.”

Fear is just faith in the wrong kingdom. 

If we want to start living out our faith, we need to look into the eyes of the faith-Giver and listen to what He’s saying. We need a hand to hold in order to step off that cliff.

Nothing about walking with Jesus is “blind faith” when you know He has you.

Prayer

Father, I repent for letting my mind and imagination run with fearful thoughts and pictures. I want a mind that is set on you (Phil. 4:8). Teach me how to bring my mind into alignment with Your thoughts and with how Your kingdom operates. Teach me to love others and give the benefit of the doubt, to think the best of them, to think the best of myself. To walk in the grace that You give me.  In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo By Kevin B 3 via StockPholio.com

Photo By Alice Popkorn via StockPholio.com

Cracked Foundations

What keeps us from intimacy with God?

What keeps us from flowing in His power and kicking the enemy’s hind end out of our lives?

I wonder if there are some basic questions we need settled before we can move forward with Him. Here are three that either weaken or strengthen the foundation of our faith in God:

Is God good?
Is God powerful?
Is God with me and for me?

It isn’t enough to know what the word of God says about these concepts. We have to look past our intellect and into our souls.

We need to bypass our logic and the “right” spiritual answers and look at what we really believe, which for many people is:

No, He’s not always good. A good God wouldn’t allow tragedies to happen, especially to good people.

No, He’s not powerful or He wouldn’t let evil prevail in our world.

No, He’s not with me. I’ve prayed for help and been abandoned to struggle daily on my own.

It takes a brave believer to admit what is really in her heart.

If any of those answers is no, then it’s not surprising we can’t put our trust in our creator. Our belief system views Him as a small, powerless God.

How can we ask people to “step out in faith” when it feels as if they are stepping off a cliff with no safety net in place?

My youngest son struggles with fear. The torment comes at bedtime when shady creatures lurk in the dark, preying on vulnerable minds.

We’ve prayed with him and bound the enemy, and still he struggles. We taught him about his authority over the enemy and he practiced rebuking and using the weapons of warfare, and still no relief.

We cry to God, “Why?”

I found myself crying out one night, feeling alone and abandoned, telling God my pain for this precious boy who was trying so hard and so sincerely, and who God wasn’t rescuing.

I discovered the danger of defining love by my terms. Where I wanted rescue, God wants to train up a warrior.

The other night my boy came in late for a hug and prayer. He said, “I used to ask God to send his angels to take the demon away. But it’s not working anymore.”

In that moment, insight came and I knew God’s plan for him. I told him there was a lie in what he believed. Because the prayer no longer had the same effect, he thought God wasn’t strong enough to stop satan’s torment against him.

This is what I said, “God wants to take you to a new level. He’s no longer sending His angels to remove the demon because He wants to teach you something else. He wants you to send the enemy packing. He is with you and has given you the authority and permission to tell the enemy to leave. This is what you get to start practicing.”

He grinned and said, “It’d be a lot easier if He’d just do it.” Ah, don’t we know it!

But we can’t get to new levels when our belief system doesn’t allow for God’s constant goodness, or His immense and immeasurable power or His desperate and consuming love for us.

We can’t beg God for something He’s already given us.

We have authority and permission to stand in Him and wreak havoc on the enemy. But until we know who we are standing in, how He feels about us and if He can take the enemy, we lack power.

And we’ll live as beggar children instead of overcomers.

God is big enough and secure enough to handle our questions and doubts. If you have misgivings about God’s goodness and power and desire to be with you 24/7, then talk with Him about it. Wrestle it out until truth comes into focus.

Prayer

Father, I’m afraid to tell you how I really feel. I’m afraid You’ll be angry with me. But I want intimacy with You and I need these things settled before I can trust You and go deeper with You. Please show me Your goodness in a tangible way. Reveal Your power in a way that I can’t doubt. Show me how close You are to me and that You never ever go away. That there is nothing I do that repels or repulses You into withdrawing Your love and Your presence from me. Show me how You keep me close to You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Cracked photo by Wayne Troung via Flickr – no changes made

Best Warrior by The National Guard via Flickr – no changes made

The Pain of Disconnection

Broken relationships don’t have a place in God’s kingdom.

They happen, obviously. All the time, unfortunately.

Disconnection is from the enemy’s team. Their demonic objective is to steal, kill and destroy. From us, God’s kids.

The enemy of our soul is consumed with stealing our joy and peace. Killing our hope and love. And destroying our trust in God and people.

The enemy is a devourer of connectedness.

If he can trip us into offense, keep us in the pride that justifies our stance, and then feed unforgiveness and bitterness…the branch of relationship grows brittle and breaks.

If we don’t take our stuff to God—–whether our pain or our fury, the wounds will either fester or harden.

Infected wounds make us sensitive to the manipulation of the enemy. We interpret actions and motives through the grid of our unhealed emotional injuries. Over time, the connections we do create will be slightly malformed. We may put other people in charge of our happiness, or blame them for not meeting our needs the way we want them met.

Hardened wounds develop in us a grid of cynicism and suspicion. We don’t extend grace easily and negativity becomes our default.

Speed Bumps

The other day, my life hit a speed bump and I disconnected from God’s Spirit and my middle son received the brunt of it.

I didn’t recognize at the time that I’d come down hard on him. We usually don’t when we are walking in truth without the love. I felt justified in handling it the way I did.

So I left to go to the gym. As I stepped onto the treadmill, I set my iPod to shuffle. In my self-justification, I apparently wasn’t listening to the flow of the Spirit, so God had to get creative. The first song that played was Toby Mac’s Suddenly.

Here are the words from the first stanza:

She blew everything to pieces.

He’s there hanging on to Jesus.

She broke everything about him down.

He said he never saw it coming,

Until the day she dropped the bomb

And she broke everything about him down.

Every word penetrated my heart and I nearly shot off the treadmill in shock.

I had an instant revelation of what my sharp tone had done to my son. After a long day at school, he walked in the door to a mini-rant directed completely at him. So I repented and asked God to heal his heart. Could hardly wait to get home to apologize and hug that boy.

In my frustration, I forgot to hold onto the relationship. My need to be right trumped love.

We aren’t to separate truth from grace. Nor grace from truth. They are inseparable in God’s kingdom and lead to loving correction.

Prayer

Father, show me where I’ve tripped into withholding love from others. Show me how I’ve applied truth without grace, or grace without truth. Teach me what they look like in Your kingdom, and teach me how to walk in them with You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Showing the strain photo by Brian Smithson via Flickr – no changes made

Iron Chain via Pixabay

How You Drink Your Coffee

God is desperate to hear from you.

His Father’s heart knows no limits. It is unbound by expectations. It is a river flowing from an eternal spring of love.

It cries out for connection no matter the age of His child. It longs and hopes for more.

God is desperate to hear from us. To have us lay our burdens at His feet. To draw close and lean our heads against His knee when our hearts are hurting and crushingly heavy.

When the agony of a wayward child or spiraling marriage or lack of a job becomes too much, He wants to comfort our hearts. Hold us close and tell us it will be okay.

He wants intimacy with His people.

How often do we send up a quick prayer for help, as if God is just another contact in our address book, and then sign off. In essence, leaving Him to stare at a dark computer screen.

He wants to know and be known. He wants more with us than one-way communication.

He wants to know how you drink your coffee.

Sound silly? It’s not. Our closest friends know minuscule details about us. They can finish our sentences. They can tell from a look that we bumped into a guard rail that day. We feel their care from across the room…or from across the country.

With our closest friends, our security and sense of well-being comes from being known and accepted. Loved despite our flaws and deficits. And the fulfillment of this need to be known is knowing another, and giving them the gift of acceptance and love without conditions.

That is the relationship God desperately yearns to have with us. He wants to be known by us and share mysteries with us (Jer. 33:3).

Do you think it’s possible for God to not know us? For us to close the door to relationship with Him and put up a wall that He honors and chooses not to breach?

Jesus said, “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’  And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matt. 7:22,23, emphasis mine).

Let’s be clear. Our ability to be connected to God has NOTHING TO DO WITH OUR BEHAVIOR.

Jesus makes that obvious in the above passage. Those “works” had nothing to do with connection to Him.

He yearns for more with us. He wants to sit with us while we have coffee. He wants to hear our sorrows, hear our laughter, let us vent our frustrations all while looking into His eyes.

And then He wants to share. To be heard. To help.

He loves you that much.

Prayer

Father, teach me how to relate to You. I want to learn how to share my daily life with You. I struggle with revealing myself fully to You. Please show me where my belief about what You yearn for with me is contrary to what You truly want with me. I want everything You have for me and for my relationship with You. I am willing for You to take me deeper. Thank you! In Jesus’ name, amen.

Coffee photo by Doc Searls via Flickr

imac photo via Pixabay