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July 23 - August 18, 2023
To hope is to acknowledge reality in the very same breath that I acknowledge God’s sovereignty.
God isn’t picking on me. God is picking me to personally live out one of His promises.
God doesn’t expect us to handle this. He wants us to hand this over to Him. He doesn’t want us to rally more of our own strength. He wants us to rely solely on His strength.
If we keep walking around, thinking that God won’t give us more than we can handle, we set ourselves up to be suspicious of God.
the right story is, yes, God will give us more than we can handle. But He always has eventual good in mind.
We see more and more unnecessary heartbreak. But God sees the exact pieces and parts that must be added right now to protect us, provide for us, and prepare us with more and more of His strength working through us. We don’t have to like it, but maybe knowing this can help us live through it.
Isaiah 45:9: “Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands’?”
saw that in all my circumstances God was keeping me moldable while adding even more strength and beauty in the process.
Take this, Lord, and shatter it just right, so I can be made stronger, more beautiful, and able to withstand fires as never before. I believe that You see things I cannot see. And You have eventual good in mind.
God is who He says He is, and He will do what He says He will do. But to partner with Him in His work of transformation in our lives, we must seek Him with all our hearts. It’s our choice whether we stay stuck in our hurt or get renewed in our hearts.
For I know the plans I have for you . . . plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you. (Jeremiah 29:11–14)
how thankful I am for the Great I AM. The One who will absolutely guide me in truth and teach me, the One I put my hope in all day long (Psalm 25:5). Yes, He can handle all the things I know I can’t, and I trust Him to take my broken and make it beautiful.
hardship happens not because of what you’ve done but because of something God is doing and will eventually make right.
His friends were determined to identify what Job did to cause his hardship. But God made it clear that Job’s friends were misguided in their accusations.
“Because [Jesus] never lost sight of where he was headed . . . he could put up with anything along the way.” That’s why we must keep our eyes on Him and go over His story—the Bible—again and again.
walking out the good things God purposes from my suffering produces eyes of hope, clearheaded thoughts, and a heart full of real joy.
He will allow us to suffer sometimes, but He won’t let that suffering be wasted. And He will use that suffering to shape us, mold us, and make us even better prepared for our purpose if we throw off what hinders us, stay free of the entanglements of sin, and persevere by keeping our eyes on Jesus.
When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. But, if my Bible is collecting dust and my conscience is being hushed, then my heart is in danger of being crushed.
Temptation only works if our enemy keeps the consequences hidden from us.
The enemy is thrilled when we don’t open our Bibles, and he knows when we don’t. He also knows how to attack us in that vulnerable place. But Truth sheds light on healthy ways to process our disappointments and the good things God can bring from them. If we can remember this, we can see more clearly what a horrible trap Satan’s temptations really are.
Remember, Satan knows how powerful God’s Word is, and he wants to keep us from it. Don’t let him.
Anything that doesn’t line up with Truth is a lie. And where there is a lie, the enemy is at work. The longer he can keep someone deceived, the more their flesh will scream for pleasure, and soon they will become slaves to the most depraved versions of their desires.
“people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” (2 Peter 2:17–19)
Instead of being grounded in Truth, they are driven by their feelings.
“When God says ‘don’t’ we should read it as ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’”
Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:7–8)
Taking time to check our motives is crucial. I challenge myself with, “Will this make me more like Christ or less like Him?” Some other questions to ask are, “Will this help me get more healthy spiritually, emotionally, and physically?” and “Would the most spiritually mature person I know think this is a good choice?”
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 2:1–5)
our desire to ease the ache of our disappointments will lead us right into the enemy’s lies and his grip of destruction. We must not forget that our soul hunger can only be satisfied by daily doses of truth, otherwise we will be prone to snack on deception.
When we sin we give the devil a personal script for how to make us feel unqualified and unable to be forgiven.
The worst thing that can ever happen to Satan is for us to believe that God loves us, has our best in mind, and forgives us of our sin.
Our enemy never wants a testimony to come from our lips. Therefore, he never wants us to experience freedom, truth, and redemption.
Don’t be intimidated by the thought of being holy. God isn’t expecting perfection. He just wants us perfectly surrendered to His way and His Word.
We are all just a few poor choices away from sinful situations we never thought we’d be in.
The crucial detail for us to have peace in the middle of everything we face is to stay close to the Lord.
The Israelites appear to be the ones not being “saved” from hardship by God. But if we look through the lens of what’s best in the long term, Israel was being strengthened by God for its eventual good.
Make no mistake: being lulled into a false sense of security is worse than going through the process of suffering.
We must sip the suffering of today, so we don’t have to drown in the devastations of tomorrow.
we have to be poured into circumstances that will result in our being transformed if we want to gain spiritual strength.
In the middle of our disappointments and hard times, we must seek to be transformed into thinking biblically, processing with truth instinctively, and trusting God implicitly.
Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. (Romans 8:5–6)
To be like Jesus, we must become more and more saturated with Him and less and less saturated with our human ways of processing circumstances.
when they were desperate for God, they remained with God. And those were the times when they would experience great blessing, joy, and peace.
Every time we face anything that causes us to cry out to God, let’s declare that this hard time will be a holy time, a close-to-God time.
These disappointments we all go through are actually divine appointments to see God do a new thing.
We were not made to dwell in the past but instead to abide—to soak in and be saturated—with Christ in the present.
“God will strengthen you with his own great power so that you will not give up when troubles come, but you will be patient” (Colossians 1:11 NCV).
When we express God’s truth, we depress the enemy’s lies.
“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.” (Jeremiah 24:7)
