Author: shelleybea12153

Today, you and I may need to be challenged and inspired to take on a new task or stand strong in a tough situation. Perhaps you need to take control of your choices so you will be healthy. Perhaps you need to strengthen your emotions so you can forgive someone. His Word is the place to find what you need.

via The Living Word — Arise DAILY Devos

I pick a word every year and have for several years now as a suggestion from author, speaker, and friend, Pam Farrel.  My mentor.  This devotional pops up on my daily reading in my Logos.com software.  It has haunted me since I read it.  It couldn’t be more right on for me.

So at the risk of boring you I am reposting a segment of a previous post called:          2017 Dealing with Disappointment.

Quote from my devotional, Read What I Wish I’d Known in one year, by many Authors one being Susie Larson. She is a radio host, speaker, and author of 10 books. You can connect with her at  http://susielarson.com/:     (Pam Farrel, my friend and mentor is also an author in this book)

“There is a big difference between expectation and expectancy.

Expectation is premeditated disappointment, whereas expectancy involves faith.

To cling to your expectation is to decide ahead of time how things need to turn out for you to be okay.

To embrace expectancy is to engage your faith that God will move on your prayers and that he may come through in a way that’s different than you expect.”

I had said in that post that I had not committed to a Word for the Year yet.  Well I have now.

It is Expectancy.

I need to work on this shift in my way of thinking.  I don’t like the idea of premeditated disappointment.  I have seen it at work in others and realized how ugly it is on me.

So there you have it, short and sweet.

Praying your year, now in the 2nd month is starting out good and that you too have chosen a Word to meditate on and ponder all year.  It is such a rich blessing and good thing to do.  Thank you Pam for encouraging us year after year to do this.

Psalm 40:1–3 (The Message)

¹I waited and waited and waited for God. At last he looked; finally he listened.²He lifted me out of the ditch, pulled me from deep mud. He stood me up on a solid rock to make sure I wouldn’t slip.

³He taught me how to sing the latest God-song, a praise-song to our God. More and more people are seeing this: they enter the mystery, abandoning themselves to God.

Now engage your faith that God will move on your prayers and that he may come through in a way that’s different than you expect.

My devotion today really moved me.  I thought I would share it with you.

The Lingering Love of Jesus

Kasey Van Norman
“He’s coming! He’s coming! He’s outside the village now!”
As the words rang out through the grief-stricken shadows of her home, Martha let the small cup she’d been relentlessly scrubbing come crashing to the floor. Her brow was covered in beads of sweat, and she gasped as the tears threatened to spill over.
She’d known somewhere deep inside that he would come, but that confidence had been strangled bit by bit with each day that had passed since her brother’s death. Yet even her deep grief and disappointment were no match for the small flame of hope that flickered to life when she heard he was near.
Martha’s emotions were playing tricks on her, it seemed. Simply hearing that Jesus was on his way reignited her hope—the same hope she’d felt the day she sent word for him to come right away. But now it was four days later, and Lazarus’ lifeless body remained untouched by the miracle of healing she’d been hoping for.
She had prayed desperately that Jesus would come in time, but God hadn’t answered her prayers. Day and night, weeping and wailing beside her brother’s lifeless body, she’d pleaded for God’s mercy, yet he hadn’t come to Lazarus’ aid.
I wish I’d known that God ordains his children’s disappointment and suffering in order to give them far greater joy in the glory he is preparing to reveal.
As she stood beside her washbasin, her mind told her to stay, to finish cleaning the dishes and forget about Jesus. After all, hadn’t he forgotten about her? And yet her heart tugged her into motion, pulling her body toward the only one who had the power over life and death.
When her eyes met Jesus on the rocky path outside her home, all she thought she knew crumbled as she fell to the ground. She could not contain her grief and love as she collapsed at Jesus’ feet. “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
As her body trembled before him, she felt a sudden wave of peace and warmth overwhelm her as Jesus placed his hand gently on top of her head. As she looked up at him, she gasped at what she saw—tears! Tangible traces of sadness had broken through the dust and grime on her Savior’s face.
And as she watched her Lord weep, she loved him more, trusted him more, and believed him more—despite the pain that told her to do otherwise.
Ministry is simply this—life. And often times in life, Jesus lingers.
In my own life I have spent more time in the wandering than I have in the knowing. I have cried out to God in anger, I have wept before him in brokenness, I have retreated from him out of fear, I have found my steps paralyzed in doubt, I have questioned my calling and have doubted my worthiness to claim any of it.
As difficult as it is to see in the midst of the lingering, everything God does is motivated by love. And believing this truth is the heartbeat of life and ministry; the knowing, seeing, and the walking out of our calling.
He often allows his love to linger in order to show us that his love for us is anything but common—just as he did for Martha.
God sees the full potential for our lives, and he deeply desires us to know his love so that we might fully believe his greater plan for us. God never lingers out of wrath or anger, but out of a pure and holy desire for us to believe he’s bigger than we thought prior to our season of waiting.
Check yourself against the following “ministry traps”—ones that I have personally fallen in to and that have the potential to grieve your soul and calling.
In the past when God has lingered, I have done one or more of the following:
• picked up an addiction or gone back to an old one
• become angry
• gotten bitter
• wished for death
• become depressed
• gotten discouraged
• let my marriage or other significant relationships fall apart
• become violent toward myself or others
• become jealous of those God seemed to be blessing
• become overwhelmed with fear and anxiety
• clung to unforgiveness
• allowed guilt and shame to get the best of me
• basked in my loneliness and despair
• blamed God or others in the wait
• allowed stress to take over all the time
• become a workaholic
• stopped waiting and started doing my own thing
• lost all hope in God
As Martha wept, I picture Jesus gently lifting her face to meet his and then, with loving intensity, speaking over her, “Your brother will rise again.” As his living words began to revive her hope, she might have wondered, Could he mean …? No, surely not. She dared not let herself hope in that way. Not after four days.
“He will rise when everyone else rises, at the last day,” she finally said (verse 24). And her statement was true. Lazarus would rise again on the last day. In fact, Martha most likely had no idea how deeply Jesus longed for that day. But Jesus was referring to something more in that moment.
He replied, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?” (verses 25–26).
The power of Jesus’ words must have caused faith to swell in Martha’s soul—an awakening of sorts.
I doubt she was sure what it all meant, but as Jesus spoke, it was as if death itself was being swallowed up (see 1 Cor 15:54). No one else had ever spoken like this man (see John 7:46). Martha answered, “I have always believed you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who has come into the world from God” (verse 27).
You know how this story ends. Lazarus does wake up. But in the horrible days before that, during her brother’s agonizing illness and in the dark misery of the days after his death, Martha didn’t know what God was doing. He seemed silent and unresponsive. Jesus didn’t come. She was confused, disappointed, and overwhelmed with grief.
Yet Jesus delayed precisely because he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus. He knew that Lazarus’ death and resurrection would give maximum glory to God and that his friends would experience maximum joy in that glory.
When Jesus makes a trusting saint wait in pain, his reason is only and always love. God ordains his child’s deep disappointment and profound suffering in order to give him or her far greater joy in the glory he is preparing to reveal.
Before we know what Jesus is doing, circumstances can look all wrong, and we’re tempted to interpret God’s apparent inaction as a lack of love when in fact God is showing us love in the most profound way.
The way we believe Jesus in his lingering is how we live out a life-calling that is honoring and glorifying to him.
The question for us is the same as it was for Martha when Jesus peered into her eyes and asked, “Do you believe this?”

taken from a devotional named:
What I Wish I’d Known in one year
Bio
Writer and speaker Kasey Van Norman and her husband serve at Still Creek Ranch, one of the largest child rescue organizations in the U.S. You can connect with her at KaseyVanNorman.org

Start the new year 2017 with a Word. Pick a word you can exercise, meditate on, ponder, consider, incorporate into your life. Ask God to help you find your word and scripture to go with it.

My Word for the new year hasn’t quite revealed itself to me. Maybe “walk”. But after reading this devotional I’m looking more for a word here in this scripture in Psalms 40:1-3 below.

I need a year of not being disappointed but engaging. I’ll let you know what my Word is soon.

This was my devotional today. It is right on the money! A must read.

Dealing with Disappointment
Susie Larson
Several years ago my mentor said these compelling words to me:
Susie, there’s a big difference between expectation and expectancy.

Expectation is premeditated disappointment, whereas expectancy involves faith.

To cling to your expectation is to decide ahead of time how things need to turn out for you to be okay.

To embrace expectancy is to engage your faith that God will move on your prayers and that he may come through in a way that’s different than you expect.

Wise words, wouldn’t you say?
I don’t know what kind of year you’ve had, but for me, it’s been a bittersweet one. On one hand we’ve seen God move in ways that have completely inspired our faith, and on the other, we’ve experienced loss and heartbreak in ways that have left me breathless.

Can you relate?
I wish I’d known to release my puny expectation of what I thought my life should look like and pick up expectancy instead.
What are we to do with the very real sense of loss, disappointment, and heartbreak we encounter along life’s way?

How do we keep our disappointments from tangling us up, from strangling our joy and skewing our perspective?
The answer (as far as I can tell) is this: To release expectation. To embrace expectancy.

• It’s time to open our clenched fists and release the crinkled picture of how we thought things would look by now.
• It’s time to hand it over to the one who knows us best and loves us most. God has a bigger canvas and a far bigger brush. He can paint something beautiful with our lives and with our story that we can’t even comprehend right now. We need to give him time and space to work in, through, and around us.
• It’s time to release our puny, detailed expectation of what we think our lives should look like.
• It’s time to pick up expectancy, to wrap our arms around the fact that Jesus is alive and active in our lives.

He moves on faith. Fear doesn’t motivate him. Faith does. As we embrace his love, and trust his promise to hear our prayers and respond to our faith, we can know that any day now, Jesus will break through in ways that surprise us.

We’re never out of his care, never out of his reach. He is the God of breakthroughs, and he loves to break through when the time is right.

Embrace expectancy. Tell yourself that any day now, you’ll see glimpses of glory and evidence of his activity in your life. Because it’s true; right now, he’s moving on your behalf.
Look up. Seek him. You’ll find him. He’s got you.

“I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire. He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along.

He has given me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see what he has done and be amazed. They will put their trust in the Lord” (Psalm 40:1–3).

Bio
Susie Larson is a radio host, speaker, and author of 10 books. You can connect with her at  http://susielarson.com/

Sharon Paavola is one of those trophies of God’s grace; I’ve seen the Lord work powerfully in her life and in the lives of those she loves. In this special Thanksgiving UPGRACE—which is also a spiritual UPLIFT—she encourages us to be joyful on “two counts.” “My husband accepted Christ later in life,” Sharon says. I…

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