It’s God’s Good Pleasure to Meet Your Needs
God gave us life in order to enjoy it. We are meant to enjoy our basic needs of daily bread, safety and health, and fellowship with God and people. But these things can only be enjoyed to the fullest within God’s reality and standards.
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How to Know That You Know, That You Know, that God is Pleased With You
Two or three days before I traveled to Kansas City to attend the IHOP-KC young adults’ conference, back in ’00/’01, I sat on the couch of the Lion Room at the Olive Street house in Evansville, Indiana. The Lion Room was thus dubbed because of the large lion picture hanging on the wall, the lion-colored couch, and the other lion-themed items spread around the room, here and there. .
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How to Stay on Fire and Alive in Christ
As we seek after Christ, his desire is to baptize us, and continually fill us, with the Holy Spirit and his word. The first step in our fellowship with God is to turn from sin and turn to Christ. But then, we have to keep going on with Christ and we have to feed on him.
Christ said “I am the bread of life.” And he called the Holy Spirit the living water. Both of these descriptions are of substance that we continually consume in order to stay alive. It’s the same way if we want to stay alive to God and his purposes for us – we must consume Christ, who is the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.
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How to Rise Above Fear and Live a Meaningful and Useful Life
She sat cross-legged atop the khaki-colored, mammoth-sized, rolled-up hay bale. The sun was setting on the horizon, and lit up the field and farms with a glow of yellow. The heat from the summer day began to subside.
In front of her lay open her notebook. With a ball-point pen in hand, she began to list the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5:22-23: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. She looked at them with tension all up her back and into her face, then branded herself, in her mind, with a searing iron of shame, with: inadequate, lacking, failure.
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Sin Keeps Us From Seeing Beauty
What did John’s words above even mean for people back in those days? What do they mean for me – that is, for people now? What does this mean for my evangelistic ministry? (I don’t know why, but I can’t help but to think about evangelism when I think about the above words….. Oh, I do know why, never mind. It’s that “repent” word.)
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The Role of Obstacles in Reaching God’s Goals
I don’t think it was ideal for Mary and Joseph to go and live in Nazareth after Jesus was born. They had already packed up and moved, like, two or three times before this. (I know what it is to have to move. I’ve moved quite a bit in life, and it’s a boring and tedious chore.)
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How God Makes His Promises Happen
“You’re supposed to be writing,” is what Jenny’s dad had told me. He was a pastor. “O, yeah, and I can see some artistic, graphic talent, too. You do, like, some drawing and stuff. You’re going to be doing some writing and creative stuff online.” He then proceeded to pray for me.
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What to Do When God’s Promises and Goals Manifest
Studying for her teaching license, with four babies at home and a very job-focused husband, was no easy feat. Afterward, there was an out-of-state move, then three years of substitute teaching, before she finally, probably more by kindness, landed a full-time position, teaching 10th grade language arts.
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How to Fight for God’s Dreams and Goals for Your Life
She had a dream. A literal dream. In the dream, she was giving birth – was about to give birth – and there was a man there to help her deliver the baby.
When she awoke from the dream, she knew this was a spiritual birth. She would give birth to something spiritual. She would give birth to something that would help others to be born anew into life with God. And the man, she understood, would be her husband. Her future husband would help her with whatever this spiritual birth was.
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New Year, New Writings (or Devotional Writings Launch)
Happy New Year, friends. How are you doing? How did you ring in 2022? Did you take some time to reflect on 2021 and the memorable moments of the year, personally and communally? Have you reflected on your personal accomplishments in 2021? Are you planning things for 2022? (Could I pray along with you specifically, for a goal or two you have in 2022? I’d love to, if you’d like to share. Just click on the black “2022 Goals Prayer Request” button on the left hand side of the screen.)
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I Need Safety
Do not fear for your life – do not fear human beings who can take your life. Not just because they have no power to take your soul, but because God, your heavenly father, who is a protector beyond your earthly father and mother, cares for every miniscule detail of your life.
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If Hypocrisy is Driving You Away from Church
Teachers, pastors, prophets, apostles, evangelists, all you church leaders (myself included), beware of yourselves. Your job is not easy and people are looking up to you and expecting you to be perfect. Sometimes they can’t discern that you’re a human just like them and they put you at a standard way higher than themselves. They will call you a hypocrite, and it’s true, you are a hypocrite. We can all be hypocrites. They can by hypocrites, too.
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God Is Watching Us For Our Success
God, help me to not be someone who sits around and just watches people around me, “lying in wait” for them and waiting to them to say something or do something wrong. Instead, let me be someone who watches to see how I can bring someone help, encouragement, grace, life.
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I Need Someone to Notice Me
Y’all, I’m a writer, an artist. I’m gonna be honest with you: I desperately want what I write and produce to be useful and meaningful to someone. I want so badly for my work to make a difference in the world.
I’m sure you can relate to some degree.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing to make a difference in the world.
And I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with needing attention. I need attention. I need to be noticed. We all need it.
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How to Love People When You Don’t Like People (or, Can’t I Just Throw Money At People and That’s Enough?)
It’s so much easier to give money (especially when you have it) than to do the work of loving someone. Dealing with people is not easy. Especially for me. It really does take a special grace and miracle of God to get me moving in the direction of loving people.
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Clean and Alive on the Inside
I have understood that being “clean” on the outside and doing good deeds or wearing special clothes, does not make me right with God, or make me clean on the inside – in my spirit, soul, mind. I’ve understood, even, that I can’t make my own mind and soul and spirit clean…
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Keep Your Eyes in the Light
This right here is not so much about letting my light so shine before all men, or this little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine. This is about keeping my focus on Christ and keeping my eyes in the light.
My eyes were first uncovered and brought out of darkness when I accepted Jesus Christ as God and savior, who forgives and saves me, and as Lord, who governs my life. I once was Godless – without God and in darkness of sin. But then Christ reconciled me to God through his death on the cross and my faith in him. Being without God is equivalent to being in darkness, blind, and covered up.
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Knock on Wood (or plastic or a book or whatever is at hand)
When I’m desperate and comfortless, there is something about literally knocking, as I start a prayer time, that brings me in – into a sense of God’s presence, into a tangible connection, into a holy moment with him.
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Seek for the Sign
When you seek Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and the sign of God to this world, you’ll see many confirming signs along the way. Christ doesn’t leave us alone and abandoned when we begin to seek him, the ultimate sign from God.
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Cling to the Stronger Man
Jesus Christ is the stronger man. Christ and satan are not equals with each other in strength.
Remember this when all the devils in hell show up at your doorstep, trying to get back in. Remember that Christ living in you is the stronger man,
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Have Babies
The passage above is rather baffling. Why would his woman just pop out of the crowd like this and proclaim these things? My best guess is that the culture highly valued reproduction. If that’s the case, and I don’t think it’s too far off of a speculation, then it means that the woman was really enamored with the thought of how some woman out in this world gave birth to this blessed man..
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Eat, Drink, and Thrive
It is not enough for our inner life – that is, our motivations, desires, thoughts – to be forgiven, purified, and clean. We must ask the Holy Spirit to fill us up, on the daily, in order to keep those devils away. Those devils are going come back. They’re going try to jump back in. And they will, if we’re empty. That’s why Jesus Christ called himself the Bread of Life, and the Holy Spirit the Living Water.
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Sara Rosa Oyela 