Are you struggling in your walk with God?
Are you in search of answers because of an inner wrestle going on in your heart?
I’ve been there. Here’s a pull from my latest book, Ripple Effect. I pray it stirs up a desire to open your heart wide and turn to God and His Word, and experience all that He has for you.
Much love, J
“There was a season I realized I didn’t really have a desire to read my Bible. Knowing it was important and the way to the wisdom of God, I simply asked Him to give me a hunger for His Word, and He did. A deep thirst for His Word developed inside of me that could not be quenched otherwise. I picked up my Bible over twenty years ago and haven’t put it down since!
Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you your heart’s desires. — Psalm 37:4 (NLT)
From there, I became saturated in the bigness of my God. Story after story began to impact me. A deep longing for the God of the Bible to be my God today began to stir in my heart. I was no longer satisfied with reading about Him; I wanted to know Him in tangible ways. I quickly realized that in order to fully experience all of who He says He is, I had to get me and my small thinking out of the way. I am finite; God is infinite. My human understanding and limitations had to be shattered!
Our thoughts, in comparison to God’s, are so small . . . His ways are higher!
I asked Him to show me through His Word who He is, and who I am to Him; because I really didn’t like myself all that much. I learned I had a self-hatred inside of me that was developed through negative life experiences. I would hear scriptures and go through studies on who God says I am. My brain could memorize the scriptures. I knew them well, but in my heart, I had deep-rooted insecurities. What I was experiencing and feeling led me to a belief about myself that was in opposition to what I read in my Bible. Rather than explaining it away, I boldly went to the Lord and asked Him to take His Truth from my head to my heart until I was living from His Truth, not my human understanding.
If I noticed that I was not experiencing what the Bible says is available, I would simply ask the Holy Spirit to move in me and through me in powerful ways. I had to choose (and still do) not to allow my limited life experiences, man’s theology, or my inner wrestle of doubt and disbelief, to put parameters around the bigness of my God or how He moves.
This rhythm of going to God with a childlike, teachable spirit is living life in the Spirit. Living in the Spirit develops spiritual maturity as I lay aside my natural human response to ‘figure it all out,’ and run to God with everything.
…We need to surrender our hearts to God, giving Him full permission to move in our lives. When we give Him our whole hearts, inviting Him to increase our understanding of Him, He will.
As our understanding increases, trust deepens, and our ability to live by faith expands. It’s through believing and receiving by faith, not by sight or by what ‘makes sense,’ that we gain access to the bigness of God. Through this transaction, we become transformed and, in turn, become change agents to the world around us.
If we build our belief system around human understanding and not through the Word of God by going to Him for the answers to our questions, we can easily miss a facet of God’s nature that He wants to pour into our lives.
…Running directly to God is the key to receiving wisdom and understanding that smashes the borders of our humanistic thinking, unlocking the Kingdom of Heaven in our lives here and now.”
—Ripple Effect: A Transformational Journey into God’s Heart That Will Change You from the Inside Out
