Heather Holleman's Blog, page 31

By Awesome Deeds

In Psalm 65:5, I note three interesting things. David writes, “By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness. . .”

God performs awesome deeds for us. In the Hebrew, “awesome” is the sense of the sublime; God acts in ways so astonishing we’re filled with fear and wonder. These awesome deeds come in response to asking. God answers in response to a question or request. Where might I need His awesome deeds performed today? How might I invite God to bring honor to Himself in my family, work, friendships, and daily life in general? We might pray, “God, display your awesome deeds our lives today!” These deeds align with God’s righteousness, including His well-ordered, well-designed, morally perfect plan. Imagine it: We serve a God who answers our prayers with awesome deeds that are perfect for the moment. He listens when we ask and sends a divine response.

We ask. He answers. It’s sublime.

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As It Ought To Be Cared For

I continue to love this theme of knowing God’s peace: well-ordered, pleasant, and righteous. His paths are best. His care for us is right, in whatever way it manifests. This morning, I read how Hannah Whitall Smith puts it: “Only God knows how to take care of things as they ought to be taken care of; therefore, nothing is really safe until it is handed over to His care. The most unsafe person in the universe to have charge of my things is myself. . .”

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Oh, For Grace to Know This

I love when I arrive to Numbers 6:22-27 in my Bible reading. Here you find the blessing God gave to Aaron to speak over the people. It’s stunning:

“The��Lord��bless you and keep you; the��Lord��make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the��Lord��turn his face��toward you and give you peace.��� So they will put my name��on the Israelites, and I will bless them.

God is a God of blessing. I read a sermon by Charles Spurgeon who reminds us so beautifully about inhabiting this reality of all the blessings we have in Christ as well as the innumerable ways to think about blessings throughout the day. He writes:

The Lord Jesus is ready still to bless us. Have you few blessings? You limit them yourselves. . . There is for you a blessing every morning: seek it when you wake. There is for you a blessing every evening: rest not till you feel it. There is a blessing for you at midnight, when you keep the watches wearily; and there is a blessing for you at midday, when you bear the noontide heat of care and toil. ���Thy blessing is upon thy people���: that is to say, it is always upon them. Our great High Priest doth not now and then bless the people; but from his lips grace distills as dew, and drops as rain, without ceasing. Our Lord is always blessing, and we are always blessed. Oh, for grace to know this, and to glorify the God of our blessings!

I pray God increases our capacity to perceive and gather these daily blessings.

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Everything Conspiring

I’m reading Andrew Murray’s book, The Ministry of Intercession, and I find myself so inspired and renewed in my prayer life. I love how Murray sets up scenarios of very busy people who deeply want to pray but who find they somehow cannot. In one account, he writes, “It was as if everything conspired to keep him from prayer.”

So many things conspire to keep us from prayer, but I think the one thing most keeping us from prayer isn’t busyness or distractions or anything else like this. It’s our mindset and belief about what prayer is.

Prayer is communion with God. I’m no expert here. But I’m learning.

Much like how evangelism isn’t about doing something for God but with God, prayer is being with God, flowing from our identity in Christ who is ever-interceding before the Father. We’re joining into something already happening. What is prayer doing? What’s happening when I pray? God is listening. God is answering. God is speaking.

When I coach writers in my consulting role, I often spent a significant amount of time shifting a writer’s mindset. Writers who can’t find time to write or cannot finish their manuscript often see writing as a luxury, a hobby, something extraneous to their real, other work, or even something they aren’t worthy of or qualified for. I’ll say over and over: You are writer. Writers write. I think it’s like this with how we think about prayer.

Moving deeper into the mindset shifts, we often talk about writing as worship, writing as soul-nourishment, and writing as a spiritual practice. That’s a profoundly different attitude from writing as a task. When someone asks, “Well, then, how do you find the time to write?” I laugh and say, “How do you find the time to eat?” We do the thing we need to survive. The vital thing. The thing our souls most need. The thing we want. We’ll stop everything to eat. But to write?

But to pray?

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Well-Ordered

I’m reading about the attribute of God as Peace and Order in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. I find myself returning to the same paragraph over and over again. He writes, “God’s peace can be defined as follows: God’s peace means that in God’s being and in his actions he is separate from all confusion and disorder, yet he is continually active in innumerable well-ordered, fully controlled, simultaneous actions.” Grudem also reminds us that God’s wisdom brings ways of pleasantness and peace.

I think about how when the Holy Spirit is present and controlling a situation, we will find well-ordered, peaceful, and pleasant paths. I invite that now. How wonderful!

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The First Word

Sometimes when I speak at retreats, I’ll ask people to call out the first word that comes to mind when they think about Jesus. I love this moment because we all learn so much about people, their stories, and what Jesus means to them. Shepherd! Savior! Love! Healer! Redeemer! I love seeing the glow on the faces of people as they tell the crowd what Jesus means to them.

What would you have called out?

For me, the word is Rescuer.

Rescuer! The first thing I always think of when I think of Jesus is how He rescues us from ourselves, from sin, from the world, and from evil. He rescues us and now seats us with Him and keeps us forever.

Psalm 18 is a psalm of rescue. If you read it, you’ll find that verb repeated. I love this part in particular:

He��sent from on high, he took me;
��������he��drew me out of��many waters.
He rescued me from my strong enemy
��������and from those who hated me,
��������for they were��too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
��������but the��Lord��was my support.
He brought me out into��a broad place;
��������he rescued me, because he��delighted in me.

In the New Testament, I love 2 Timothy 4:18: “The Lord will��rescue��me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

Consider the great love of God and how He sent Jesus to rescue you.

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Because of Him

I love this short clip of from Alistair Begg. Watch till the end and rejoice that you know the man on the middle cross. Nothing depends on you or me. Everything depends on Jesus.

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“Everything Is Content”

When I recounted my recent travel trial to my friend, she encouraged me that “everything is content”���meaning everything God puts me through is a wonderful lesson that I might one day use in another book. The thought did feel comforting, especially as I considered the following verses:

In 2 Corinthians 3:1-5, Paul talks about our trials. He writes this: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,��the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,��who comforts us��in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.��For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ,��so also our comfort abounds through Christ.”

I’m learning that when I’m in a trial, I should first look for God’s comfort both in tangible and intangible ways. Then, these comforts I can then pass on to others as they go through trials. And remember this second verse of encouragement from 2 Timothy 2:1-3: “You then, my son,��be strong��in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.��And the things you have heard me say��in the presence of many witnesses��entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.��Join with me in suffering,��like a good soldier��of Christ Jesus.“

So let me share.

After speaking in Florida, we flew home for a day of rest. Then I taught two classes and quickly hopped on a plane to speak in Atlanta. Intending to returning for a day of rest and recovery before a trip to Iowa, instead my phone announced a big snowstorm in Chicago the next day. In order to make my trip to Iowa, we decided I might instead fly straight from Atlanta to Iowa. Imaging the scene: I’m dirty. I have no clean clothes. I don’t have travel necessities. I don’t have my speaking notes or materials. I’m beyond exhausted. I’m hungry. I don’t have a winter coat. But still, I knew God wanted me in Iowa. It’s also very late, and I find myself so tired I cannot even drag my suitcase.

Then, the comfort begins.

I find travel necessities in the airport store. God provides a kind young man who helps me with my suitcase. When I arrive from the airport late at night, my host brings everything I need including laundry detergent and quarters for the hotel laundry. She even brings yummy snacks. There I am, wandering a strange hotel alone in my dirty pajamas at midnight, trying to wash my clothes. Tired, disoriented, and a little homesick, I nevertheless begin to see God’s provision at every moment. I wake up refreshed, with clean clothes, a day to spend in Iowa with my dear friend, and an administrative assistant who provides all the notes and things I needed for speaking. Moment-by-moment: everything I needed.

For some, this wouldn’t count as a trial or any kind of hardship. I know people reading are going through far more difficult things. But for me, in all my travel anxiety and need for control, this event stretched my faith and dependence on Jesus more than anything I’ve experienced lately. It felt scary, uncertain, and lonely at first. The interesting thing? In Atlanta, I kept thinking of Philippians 2 and how Jesus took on the “nature of a servant.” In my journal, I wrote down that a servant has no rights to her time, her comforts, her sleep, her food, or her own ideas of a schedule. She’s there to serve and empty herself. I asked God to help me learn to do this���to become more like Jesus and give up my rights to myself���and He did with this travel trial. I learned I can do what God asks and go where He sends me (with or without clean clothes, sleep, or regular meals) because it’s absolutely true what Billy Graham once said: “The will of God will never take you where the grace of God cannot sustain you.”

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Made for This

This morning I read this sentence from Hannah Whitall Smith:

“Our souls are of such a divine origin that no other joy but God can satisfy them.”

Hannah Whitall Smith

If we wonder why this or that thing still has not brought us the joy we know deep inside we are capable of, it’s because we are of divine origin. Others have said it this way:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.���

Saint Augustine

���If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.���

C.S. Lewis

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Water Into Wine

This morning, I remembered the miracle in John 2 where Jesus turns water into wine. It’s perhaps one of the most well-known miracles as the first public demonstration of power after Jesus calls the first disciples. When I viewed this account in The Chosen, the whole scene really came to life for me, especially the embarrassment and disaster it would be for the family to not have enough wine.

But the miracle. The miracle is that ordinary water becomes good wine���the kind of drink so good it astonishes the master of the feast. I’ve always loved this moment in scripture. It became symbolic of all those moments I needed God the way the wedding hosts need God.

I remember how 20 years ago, I felt like everything I had to offer God was “ordinary water.” And anything good I could do for God was like wine that had run out. I was worn out, overwhelmed with motherhood, and lost in my own mind. What could I do with my life that God could use? I was, and still am, ordinary water. My work, my writing, and my first attempts at public speaking all felt embarrassingly lacking���the kind of offering so poor that nobody would want or need it. Even my motherhood, friendships, and marriage felt like they all needed a miracle of transformation.

So I would pray in tears, “Jesus, turn this water of my life into wine! I need a miracle here! In my teaching! In my ministry! In my whole life!” The miracle awaits. When we invite Jesus to the problem, He transforms our ordinary offering and makes wine. He can, when we give Him our gifts and talents and all the things the Holy Spirit has stirred in us to say and do, turn these stone water jars of ordinary water into beautiful, blessed wine. And people will sit there, astonished about a life that lets others “clearly see that [these things] have been carried out in God” (John 3:21).

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