Month: August 2016

I am so glad I have read, journaled and blogged:  Get Out of That Pit by Beth Moore.  This is our last chapter and it has been such a great reminder for me.  See, I know what to do, it’s just doing it.  I’m a card carrying member of several  “Pit” Help groups:  Alnon, AA, Psychotherapy. I have completed Celebrate Recovery twice, taught it twice and recommend it to all women.  I AM a Former-Pit-dweller.

The problem is we forget sometimes just how painful that pit really is.  Oh, yes, growing pains help to remind us along life’s path of past pain. Consequences reminds us of our yet to suffer pain.

We’ve conquered one or two pits, moved on from 23rd and 54th.  Then one will sneak up and we’re on the edge again about to fall or be pushed in.

The biggest lesson I am hearing God say to me right now as I am standing on the edge of one of my last pits is that:

No one has the right to keep me in a pit or to shame me for asking God for His help out.

I can stand confident I am done with that pit!  Made my mind up.  I hope you also have learned some life changing habits to live by from now on.

I hope you also are confident now that we will know:

• If we feel stuck
• Can’t stand up
• Lost our vision

That it is a pit!

I know now and I hope you do also that we can be:

• Thrown in a pit.
• Slip in a pit.
• Jump in a pit.

Beth reminded us that we have a common enemy.  The devil, Satan.

If we:

• Wait on God.
• Stand up and watch.
• Make our minds up.

We will be delivered!

We have learned to not hold back the God-song in us, to sing out for God has put a new song in our mouths even when we are still dealing with a pit.

Take life and our deliverance seriously and take it joyfully!

The God of our Universe seeks and surrounds us with Songs of Deliverance.

We have a future beyond the bit and beyond life on earth.

I hope you aren’t one of those Christians who thinks heaven will be like church only all day and all night.  Remember the TV Character Mr. T?  He would say:  “I pity the fool”.

Despite our expectation, heaven is where the action is.  Our hearts and minds still need considerable healing as long as somewhere deep inside we still associate fun with sin.  No matter what somebody led you to believe, sin is not where all the fun is.  As good as life on earth can be at times, this ride will end.

There will be consequences for the devil for messing with us.  Poetic justice.  Read Revelations 20:1-3.  He will get his own pit.  A bottomless pit!

“God writes perfect endings.” Beth Moore

• Satan in his Pit!
• Our feet will forever be firmly set up on a rock.
• The air will be clear.
• The view Crystal.
• The fellowship sweet.

The sufferings of his present time won’t even be worthy to compare to the glory revealed to us. Romans 8:18

This anointed book, journal and blog reminds me forever,  right there while I was waist deep in a pit for what seemed the thousandth time,  Christ stretched out His Mighty Arm reached into the depths, and said in a way I could finally hear,  “need a hand?”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

God gave us a new song:

“He put a new song in my mouth…a hymn of praise to God”.  Psalm 40:3

Something like Bach only not.  It is not an emotional intoxication,  Beth says:

“It’s the unleashed anthem of a freed soul.”

“Nothing on earth clogs the windpipe like the polluted air of pit.”  Beth Moore

How often do you have a song on the tip of your tongue?

“I’m talking about a unstopped outlet of frequent compulsory praise?  Of a raptured spirit?  Of a Sabbathed Soul?  Beth Moore

When trouble hits can you still sing like that?  Even with tears coming down like rain?

A song like that full of praise freely sung and spontaneously offered?

That is a trademark of joy in tribulation.    Beth Moore

In the pit completely you know you have lost your God-song. Your hope is gone.

“Likewise, you know you are out of that pit when not only have your songs returned, but something fresh has happened.  God has put a new song in your mouth.  A brand-new hymn of praise to your God.”

A new song doesn’t mean we are out of that pain that caused our pit or the pain the pit caused.  Or if sin pit, the consequences are not behind us yet.

• It just means we are no longer stuck.
• Our vision is returning.
• Hints of creativity are reemerging.
• It’s a New Day.
• God doesn’t hate us,  We Are Forgiven and we Know It.
• You want to praise Him.
• You become hopeful.
• You absolutely know you are not going back to that pit.
• YOU ARE FREE!

You could come out of a season of difficulty where a new Christian Contemporary Song or a Praise and Worship Chorus or an Old Hymn becomes the expression of a fresh wave of love and awareness of Christ.  Which is meaningful and will be a reminder forever but:

What the Psalmist means is more like a whole new level of praise begins to erupt from a delivered soul.

“Sit up a little”, Beth asks of us, “Shake the numbness from your head and pay some extra mind as you read something else the Psalmist testified to God:”

You are my hiding Place;

You will protect me from trouble

and surround me with songs of deliverance.  Psalm 32:7

• If you’ve been in a pit, God wants to deliver you!
  • Take it seriously!
    • Take it joyfully, gloriously!

Christ, the King, the Creator of the Universe, seeks and surrounds you with songs of deliverance!

He put a new song in your mouth, a hymn if Praise to God.

Many will see and fear

and put their trust in the Lord.”  Psalm 40:3

 

I hope you are enjoying this book as much as I am.  Feel free to drop me a note of encouragement from you to me if you want.  We only have one more chapter to go.

Next blogging/journaling I will do will be more random things I think about or run across or guest bloggers.  I personally will be doing a Precept Class on the book of the bible, Hosea, starting September 15, 2016.  I might blog tidbits from it.

 

 

Beth says, “God can deliver the most hardened criminal or the most hopeless addict in one second flat.”

Have you seen it or has it happened like that for you?  One moment in the throes of habitual sin and the next moment you were free as birds?

Would you be skeptical?  Or eagerly watching to see a divine spectacle?

Beth asks us to remember in Acts when Paul and Silas were in prison, severely beaten and bound.  “Around Midnight the two men started praying and singing hymns.  Suddenly an earthquake.  Prison doors flew open and anyone’s chains came loose.”  Acts 16:26

“Sometimes God can put you or I in a prison of sorts just to set us free.”

I’m not the one to be chosen to be instantaneously set free.  Like Beth, God and I have to get some hard work done.  Beth says she is high maintenance.  I think I am too.  My life is like a golf course where the gofers have taken over.  Pits all over the place.

Beth says her tombstone will probably read “God got tired”.  I feel that way too.  Always work to be done, keeping me out of a pit.  We are opposites, God and me.  I am more prone to do bad than good.

God summons the most faithless of all to faith. He is a magnet to weakness, perhaps the ultimate proof that opposites really do attract.

History is told through the encounter and experiences of men and women God would call to know Him. To trust Him, often under nearly impossible circumstances.  People prone to wander, prone to bruising, prone to doubting, prone to losing.

“So when it is not instantaneous, God can take His own sweet time because sweet time is God’s to take.”

Time, time was created for man.  Relationship. God wants relationship with man.  Us!

One of the things to come out of a crisis often is relationship.  While waiting you build a relationship with God, with others, deeper, longer more meaningful talks with God.  Usually crying out to God.  Waiting on God is good for us.

“It takes two to tango, even out of a pit.  His part is to lift you out.  Your part is to hold on for dear life.  That’s the Liberty tango!”

God does what ever works, whether instantaneous or a long process. Obviously, a process works best for me.  I am a slow learner.

What do we do while waiting for God to work?  Well the Psalms are full of examples, and commands even, of what God expects of us while working things out.

On page 148 read again, Psalm 40:1-2  it tells all we need to know.  We may have to wait for deliverance while the vehicle of time jolts and lurches.

But we never have to wait on God Himself.  Never have to wait to enjoy His presence or be reassured of His love.

The wait is on seeing His work manifest in the physical realm, seeing our petitions come to fruition.

Beth assures us, “that huge things happen as you wait upon the Lord to deliver you from that Pit.”

You can see them start to work as a process is well underway.

The moment you begin reversing the three characteristics of a Pit:

1. When you are stuck
2. You can’t stand up
3. You lost your vision
   • When you are convinced that you are no longer hopelessly stuck (you proved that when you cried out.)
   • When you resume a standing position against the enemy (you did that when you began confessing truth and consenting to God.)
   • When your are regaining glimpses of vision (you realize God doesn’t hate you nor is He, worse, oblivious to you.)
4. You are no longer in the dark of the deep until you are all the way out, so you wait…

Never fear that God is not at work while you wait.  He’s doing what no one else can.  Get a load of Psalm 64:4 “…..who acts for the One who waits for Him”

Psalm 130 where eager expectation is beautifully clear from the context(be sure to look this one up).

According to the Complete Word Study Old Testament, the Hebrew word for wait: qwh means “to live in wait for someone…to expect , await, look for patiently, hope; to be confident, trust; to be enduring.

In God-terms that means to take a watchman’s posture.  He is focused, centered, goal orientated.  Watching and waiting. Expectantly.

After we cry out to the one true deliverer, scripture exhorts us to exercise unwavering, and have daily confidence that God is coming to our rescue.  Wait. qwh!

That means stop being comfortable in that pit. 

Stand up and watch!  Anticipate your absolute, inevitable deliverance!

There you have it.  Cry out, wait for God to work to manifest your sure deliverance by wrapping Him around you as tightly as possible.

Ask Him to make you more God-aware than you have ever been in your life.

Bind yourself to Him and His Word.

Be willing to go where ever He goes.

Let His Words live in you and you in Him.

God doesn’t make His home in a pit bound to his Holy robe and neither will you.

Pitching every other plan, you can opt for God. Oh, the wonder of the One who comes as Three!

You can opt for the Father who reigns as King over every intricate detail in the universe and can micromanage a complicated life like yours and mine.

You can opt for the Son who paid y0ur debt in full, not just to deliver you from earth to heaven when you die, but also for pit to pavement while you live.  In Him, you have the full right of sonship or daughership, including the right to live wildly in victory.

You can opt for the Holy Spirit who first hovered over the Genesis waters and brought order out of chaos.  The one who enables a people bereft of holiness to be holy by His very presence within them.

Beth feels, “if you are willing to engage God as your deliverer from the pit, the full-throttle relationship you develop with Him will be the most glorious thing that will ever happen to you.   Far more glorious than the deliverance itself.”

We Christians hold in our hands the incomparable Manual for life, bulging with instructions, reasons, and countless real, human examples to illustrate them.

One preacher hits us with 80% conviction and leave us wanting more than 20% of the cure.  We know something has to change, but we’ve got so many issues, we don’t know where to start.  We don’t even know who we are with out them.  We figure we deserve to get bruised or beat up at church.  We keep coming back.

Beth agrees that we long to know how to make us right again.  Everyone of us who authentically calls Jesus Lord has the right and power to be victorious.

We need lasting answers that don’t just target our behaviors.  We need answers that tap the power of heaven and change the thought and feeling that drive those behaviors.

Beth hopes her strong scripture based lessons and books are giving hope and offering some practical page-to-the-pavement answers.

She believes the Bible proposes three steps out of the pit, and each involves our mouth:

Cry Out–

• Crying out erupts from the deepest part of a person’s soul as if your life depends on it. It does.  Scripture reveals over and over God’s intervention coming as a direct response to someone crying out.  Psalm3:4, 9:9-12, 72:12, 106:44-45, 116:1-2.
• Scripture proves that God more often waits until the challenge comes and the hurting cry out,  just as we see in Exodus 3:7-8.
• We must wait on the Lord.  He usually waits for us to cry out so He can remove all doubt about who came to our rescue.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that God will forever be more interested in you knowing your Healer than experiencing His healing, and knowing your Deliverer than knowing your deliverance. The King of all creation wants to reveal Himself to you.  Bring Heaven to a standstill with your cry.  Get God’s attention, show Him you really mean it.

Confess-

• Your sins, but think wider.  Though it’s absolutely vital, confessing sin is not the only way we practice confession.
• Agree with what God says about Himself and about us.
• Don’t forget pride.  Pride contributes to the length of our stay in the pit.
• Bitterness, anger, lack of forgiveness, coldness.
• Examine your heart and see if, somewhere amid your loss of control, you sought to regain it with manipulation.
• Ask yourself if you used your love as a weapon.
• Ask God if there is anything you are overlooking.
• Keep confessing every day, over and over until you accept God’s forgiveness over you confessions.
• Believe Him for His forgiveness.  Live as if forgiven.
• Cry out for Him and keep confessing.

Consent-

• The most beautiful part of the process of getting out of the pit.
• It is God’s will for you.
• God wants you out of the pit.  He wants you in victory. Out of defeat. Period.
• So all you have to do is consent to what He already wants.
• Believe it and have faith in it.
• Speak out scripture, pray scripture out loud.  Your own faith will be built by hearing your own voice speak the words of Christ.
• God’s Word carries its own supernatural power.  It’s His very breath on the page that, when you voice it, you release into your own circumstances.

Don’t let up when you begin to feel better.  The goal is freedom from the pit for the rest of your life.

Beth ends this chapter with great words to encourage us:  You have the power of the entire Godhead behind you.  You have the Fathers’ will, Son’s Word, and Holy Spirits way.  What more could you need?

How are you feeling about now?  I feel energized to once again believe that my God is bigger than my pits.  I will reach down deep to my core and continue to cry out for His help, to keep on confessing as I pray everyday, and then I will consent to do His Will.

Are you ready to do these three steps?  I can’t wait to see what is next.

See you then.

 

 

 

You can get out.  I mean you.  Can’t deal with it, you need to get out.

Here is the catch:  You can’t get yourself out. Remember the number 1 characteristic of a Pit?  Mud and mire.

You are stuck.  You can’t do it alone.

Two options: human help or opt for God.  Human help sound good.  You can see, hear, and respond to a person.  They can help.  But help alone is not what we’re talking about. Yes,  God meant for people to offer one another a helping hand.

The trouble comes when we insist upon someone equally human becoming our deliverer.  Physically they could pull you out but they can’t set your free.

The Word of God tells us God raised up men like Moses and Joshua as leaders, deliverers, yet the Nation still eventual defaulted to its old pattern.  Not trusting or believing God.

Isaiah 30:15 “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have  none of it.”

We are the same.  Rather than humble ourselves and do what is required for true protection and restoration, like the Israelites, we call upon Egyptian for protection.

Back stroking to Egyptian is a phrase I heard years ago to describe our journey of returning to human strength rather than leaning on the only true deliverer.  Read Isaiah: 30:1-3,5 for God response to Israel.

Try as much as we can, people simply can not by Devine.  Can’t set us free.  Can’t set our feet on a rock.

Human help allows us to be a victim.  Not God.  very thin.  He knows all we are, all we feel and all we hide.  God over flows with love and willingness to deliver us.

Again Isaiah 30:18 “The Lord longs to be gracious; He rises to show us compassion”  also “His love endures forever.”  We need a Deliver who is in for the long haul.  You and I need a strong and a long arm to reach to the bottom of our pit.

When we count on a person rather than God, and they grow tired and weary, they let you down.  You’ve worn them out.  It can be devastating.  Can ruin a relationship.

When a faithful friend hangs in there with you for months, even years, you might reason that at least they didn’t sell you off into slavery.  Well, yes they did.

That’s called “Codependency”.

In this scenario they jumped on the wagon to Egypt with you.  Luke 6:39 “Can the blind guide the blind?  Shall they not both fall into a pit? (ASV)

God has left us former pit-dwellers here on earth to have a tremendous impact over a life in the pit.

• By example
• By prayer
• By encouragement
• By directing them to Jesus
• By sharing the wisdom God gave us.  Counseling and advice:  Remember Professional counseling is not your job.

Isaiah 43:11 “I, even I, am the Lord…apart from me there is no savior”.

Beth wonders if maybe you feel this chapter wasn’t meant for you.  Maybe you can’t think of a single time you made someone else responsible for your happiness…your wholeness…your fulfillment…your healing… your future.

Maybe the fog has cleared on a relationship you believed at one time would be a deliverance of sorts for you.  Instead, you were left disillusioned or disappointed when the person dropped the rope.

That is what happens when we use Human help rather than God’s.  Maybe you can allow God to bring you to the place to forgive that person for failing to be Jesus for you.

Or maybe you should fire someone who still insists on trying.  Maybe you, like me, can now forgive yourself for accidentally setting someone up for failure.  Maybe that some was you.  And maybe both of us could just let Jesus be Jesus.

Great chapter for me.  I have been on both ends of Codependency.  It’s not a fun place to be.  Your pit feel more like drowning with no help.  I am a recovering Codependent.  I consider it just as dangerous as an addict with a drug.  I have done several Celebrate Recovery type classes over the years.

My God had restored me and I see the pit falls and know now how to avoid them.  Praise God!  That’s just one pit.  I still have more.  Ugh!

Looking forward to your thoughts and comment.  See you Friday for Chapter 6.

 

 

 

 

 

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I love our lesson today, sounds like a love letter from a sister warning us of some danger. As we are all reading together from Get Out of That Pit, by Beth Moore, she hits us with the hard truth right away.

 

“Jumping in the pit is the Third and final way you can land in a pit.

Unlike the second route into a pit, you didn’t just slip in before you knew what was happening. You had time to think, and then you did exactly what you meant to do even if the pit turned out to be deeper and the consequences higher than you hoped.”

Beth assures us she’s “not talking down to us.  Just straight talk from a fellow pit-dweller.  If you are a confirmed pit-jumper, you’ve probably got a pretty serious authority problem over all.”

Self proclaimed, amateur psychologist Beth says, “That your primary authority figure was or is either a wimp or a fraud.”

God is neither.  He knows what it will take to get your attention, and He’s willing to do it.  Trust me, I know first hand. We all know the game we play with one another as we make excuses for our actions.

You ordinarily jump in a pit because you like the trip.  It looks good.  It feels good. Or it tastes good. “Like a drug,” Beth says, “it just doesn’t last long enough, which is why we come back and take the next trip.”

From experience, Beth tell us, “It almost killed me.  In fact did kill the old me.”

• Job 33:29-30 says,
• “God does all these things to a man-twice, even three times-to turn back his soul from the pit, that the light of life may shine on him.”

God brought Beth to a place where she was willing to do anything to get out of the pit and everything to stay out.  She remembers, “to be out of the mud and mire and have my feet upon a rock became what I wanted more than anything in the world.”

She wants that more than anything else in the world for us, to cry out to God for deliverance before we reach the point she did.  God in His mercy, gives us plenty of warnings enabling us to avoid pits, but the problem with us pit-jumpers we don’t want to hear those warnings.  We want what we want.

Jumping into the pit is by far the most dangerous and most consequential.  Motive and character are huge to God.  We were created to emulate His Character.  He looks into the heart.

• 1 Chronicles 28:9 says:
• “The Lord searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts.”

Some of our motive might be:

• I wanted to steal that wallet.
• I meant to cheat the company.
• I wanted to go to bed with that person.
• I wanted to have the affair.
• I wanted to take vengeance.
• I set out to hurt that person.
• I went into that relationship knowing full well beliefs were different or that they had a dark side and a dark past.
• I wanted to experience something illicit
• I want to get drunk, get high.

Get the picture, my friend!  We recognize some of these examples or forms of them don’t we? Psalms 19:13 calls it “willful sins or blatant rebellion”. Ouch!

Beth assures us that she, “knows for a fact you can be completely set free from every sin that rules over you”.  I couldn’t agree more.  I too have been set free. Praise God.

To get there we only need:

• Some deep repentance (a change of mind resulting in a change of direction)
• Some marrow-deep healing

Or we will simply change right back. The name for this pit is Evil Desires.

• A strong or passionate desire.
• Also a “deformed desire.”  (New American Commentary)

Our desires can be tremendously unhealthy, self-destructive.

We were created out of Holy Passion for Holy Passion.

If we don’t find it in Christ, we will find it in things like lust, anger, rage, and greed.  Never under estimate the power of desire.

Ps 40:8 “I delight to do our will, O God my God:/Your Law is within my heart” (NASB)

We just don’t trust God to provide for what we think we need.  Our drive for the proverbial forbidden fruit is our innate belief that what we are denied is exactly what we want most.

Proverbs 22:14 warns, “The mouth of forbidden women is a deep pit.” (ESV)

If God forbids something, the sooner we believe and confess it’s for our sakes, the better off we will be.

Forbidden relationships never turn out well.  Never!  The pit is deep and dark.

• Learn to associate darkness with a pit.
• Listen to the Holy Spirit.
• Repent and RUN!

Ephesians 4:27 warns, “Do not give the devil a foothold.”

Beth assures us, “I may walk with a Spiritual limp, but thanks be to God, who holds me up and urges me to lean on Him.  At least I can walk.  So can you-Walk away from that pit before it is the death of you.”

With love, Beth

Well fellow pit-dwellers we have our work cut out for us.  I have been set free from some of these pits but there are a couple I jump right back in.  Usually in three days I realize it and start the long hard climb back out but not always.  Like Beth said.  We enjoy doing what we want to do, well until we realize how hurtful or painful it is getting our will.

See you Wednesday for Chapter 5 Getting out of Your Pit.  A shorter chapter.  This one was long but had such good correction for us.  Until then, to God Be the Glory!