When Life Gives Us Lemons

When Life Gives Us Lemons

It sure is easy when things aren’t going the way we think they should, to find ourselves siding with the opposition! Without realizing it I found myself it this very spot.

It all began one rainy afternoon, in a time not long ago, in a city exactly like mine, on a bed in my bedroom. Where a husband (actually my husband) had committed the unpardonable sin of forgetting that his wife is always right. Feeling the injustice and looking for a way to justify my offense, I retreated to the bedroom to complain, I mean pray. Yet when I eventually quit whining I realized that the Lord was quiet. He did not respond to whining. I tried crying. Then asking for the Lord to fix that man He gave me. Still nothing. The pity party began to feel rather lonely. Finally after the tears had run dry, and the Kleenex were soggy, I listened. In those new few moments I heard ‘Let’s talk about you’. In the most gentle way, the Lord told me about all of the good things that He had put on the inside of me. He would not discuss the wrongs of another with me, because His love covers a multitude of sin. As I wrote down the things that He told me, joy and peace exploded on the inside of me. The situation had not changed but I had changed.

Isaiah 26:3: He who keeps His mind stayed upon the Lord is kept in perfect peace.

The whole time that I was focused on the bad, the wrong, the hurt, my thinking took a downward spiral. Anger, frustration and turmoil played with my emotions.   Yet within minutes of mediating on the truth of God’s word, my heart was free again. The truth literally sets us free.

John 8:32:

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Romans 8:6:

For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

I learned an important lesson that day. That our thinking produces fruit in our lives and if we want to taste the good stuff it comes from planting good seed. The joy of the Lord is our strength, and it’s one of those things that the enemy tries to steal from us when we get distracted focusing on all the junk that’s going on rather than on the Lord.

Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.

Keeping our mind stayed upon the Lord, plants good seed. You can often tell the type of seed people have planted by the look on their face and the words that they speak. It’s that tell-tale lemon sucking expression that gives it away! If we don’t like the fruit that’s in our life, we can to pray for a crop failure and replant!

Be encouraged today, that the Lord has uniquely planted in you: gifts, talents, ability and purpose that position you for victory. Life may give us lemons but we don’t have to suck them! We can start agreeing with His promises today and we will see the fruit of them in our lives.

Check out the link to my confession card:

https://carlieterradez.wordpress.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/

When our thoughts spin out of control the best thing to do is……..refuse them permission to land!

When our thoughts spin out of control the best thing to do is……..refuse them permission to land!

(Preparing our hearts to receive a miracle part 3)

Life happens whether we are ready for it or not! Everyday there are circumstances that develop and continue without our input. People speak, act and change, governments rise and fall, life starts and ends all outside of our control. It is often those moments which we can’t control that disturb us most. Those are things that play over and over in our minds while we lay awake at night wondering if we will see every hour tick round on the clock, because we can’t switch off our brain to sleep.
The truth is, we will never be able to control everything around us, but we can learn to control those thoughts that appear from nowhere and send us spinning in circles. We can become the Ring Master in this circus called life!
The realization that I could control my thoughts was never more real to me than in those moments when life and death were hanging in the balance. When I’d had so many seizures that I needed to learn to walk again, when the doctors told us that our unborn baby was deformed and offered us a termination, when our child was given a week to live, when we were sued and it looked like we would lose everything that we had worked for, when thugs threatened to burn our house down, when we had loved and lost, when life hurt so bad it hurt to breathe, in those times survival depended upon our ability to listen to the voice of God above the chaos.
In my last blog I mentioned fear being the enemy of faith. Fear was an emotion that I lived in for a long time, until the Lord showed me that I had power over it through a simple picture. The picture was of an airport control tower and planes circling overhead. Each time a plane approached the tower and came into radio contact it had to request permission to land. Those planes did not have the authority to land without the go ahead from the control tower. Our thoughts are like those planes. We cannot stop those planes coming into contact with our mind but we do not have to give them permission to land!
This is what the bible is talking about when it mentions taking every thought captive. 2 Cor 10:3-5
Literally we can recognize and isolate thoughts and judge whether they are good/bad or ugly. In other words are they from God, the devil or just our flesh? A great measure to decide this is John 10:10:
The thief cometh not but to steal and to kill and to destroy. I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
Does the thought bring fear or dread? That would be from the enemy. Does it fill me with love, joy, peace? That would likely be God. The flesh can be a little harder to distinguish sometimes, but if we are seeking first the kingdom of God, and God wants to give us the desires of our hearts, chances are that our ambitions will be in line with His. Failing that the Holy Spirit will guide us in the right direction because we are in relationship with Him. In finding a thought circulating that’s not good or God, serve the eviction notice! That would be anything that challenges a promise of God: fear, anger, poverty, sickness, despair etc.
This amazing ability on the inside of every believer enables us to be in control of our emotions rather than having our emotions control us. Thoughts left unattended can quickly turn into a runaway herd of wild horses, they need training!
This is your life, your air space. Start controlling the air traffic in it today, and watch the transformation in your life that happens as a result of preparing your heart to receive more than you could hope or even imagine!
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, Eph 3:20

Taking Control of Crazy

Taking Control of Crazy

(Preparing our heart to receive a miracle part 2)

When our kids were little, trying to keep them on task and contained was always a challenge!  Having three children under three years old could be likened to raising goats.  In many ways they are similar and if you have ever ventured into a supermarket with a cart full of toddlers, you will know exactly what I’m talking about! By the time you arrive at the checkout to pay for the empty boxes, because goat number 1 and 2 have already eaten their contents, goat number 3 needs rescuing from the display rack they mounted while your attention was on the other two.

Yes our little ones had the ability to bring to their knees a sane adult caught off guard in a matter of minutes.  However, they were no match for Crazy Mom!  Crazy Mom was nothing more than a look in my eye, a twitch of my head and a shrill cackle that originated from watching too many cartoons too early in the morning.  Yet the mere mention of Crazy Mom sent our little goats reeling with laughter and focused their attention back on me.

Our thoughts remind me of those toddler moments.  If we don’t contain them they can get wild and crazy pretty quick! They consume our time, energy and emotions as our feelings begin to follow what ever we have been thinking upon.

Fear is something that everyone at some point deals with, you can’t help it right? Wrong.  Actually that’s a lie that is not based in scripture at all, but has become so common in the world today that we can be fooled into thinking that it’s normal.

God does not want us to be in fear, 365 times in the Bible He tells us to ‘fear not’.  That’s one for everyday!

‘Perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.’ 1 john 4: 18. There is only one tormentor and that’s the devil.

Fear is nothing more than False Evidence Appearing Real. It’s a deception that draws our focus away from the truth of God’s promises and gets us looking only at what we can see or feel.  This is the opposite of faith.

‘We walk by faith and not by sight.’ 2 Cor 5:7

Faith is our response of trust and confidence in God’s promises, which is what enables us to receive them.

When we were believing for a healing miracle for our daughter, there were many times that we had the opportunity to be gripped with fear. The doctors negative report, bad test results, constantly dealing with hospitals, medication, pain, exhaustion, balancing the rest of the families needs, financial strain.  All of these competed for our time and attention.

Somewhere inside of me I knew that I must not allow my mind to go there and entertain anything other than God’s word if we were to win the battle.  Thoughts of Hannah dying were always there, but now I realize how important it was that we did not allow ourselves to dwell on them or else they would have carried us places we didn’t want to be.

As a man thinks in his heart so is he, Prob 23:7

The biggest battle is that crazy fluff between our ears.  The good news is that we can change the way we think, and take captive those thoughts which are not from God.

2 Cor 10:5:

casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ

Jesus tell us that all things are possible to him who believes, to only believe.  That’s good advice!

Peter was the only recorded man other than Jesus to walk on water.  He walked on top of the storm, the circumstances that said it was impossible, the thoughts that told him he was crazy, the whole time that he kept his focus on Jesus.  He did not start to sink until he began to look away from Jesus and focus on the size of those circumstances!

Peter had to take control of those crazy thoughts in order to step out of the boat. Fear was real in the moment but faith overcame it!

I have come to find that the more we step out and believe God for the impossible, the more crazy fluff there is to take captive, but the greater the victory is in the end!

So keep believing, ya’ll are world overcomers!

Next blog we will unpack practical ways to take our thoughts captive.😊

Preparing Our Hearts to Receive a Miracle (Part 1)

Preparing our hearts to receive a miracle

(Part 1)

Ps 27:13-14:

I would have lost heart unless I believed that I would see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

It’s easy to get frustrated when we know that God has good things for us but they seem just out of our reach. We found ourselves in this predicament when our daughter was born.

Hannah was diagnosed with a life threatening auto immune disease at two years old. Eventually the doctors ran out of options for her, and at three years old they sent Hannah home from the hospital, expecting her to live about another week.

During the months leading up to this point, Ashley and I threw ourselves at Jesus and dug down into the scriptures.  We were determined to see the power of God in our lives like we read about in the New Testament.  If Jesus really was the same yesterday, today and forever, it was high time we experienced some of that power!

Matt 6:33:

Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.

As we sought after the truth we found it. In our search for the Healer, we found the healing. In a miraculous chain of events we discovered the depths of God’s love for us and that caused our faith to become effective.

 Philemon 1:6:

The sharing of our faith becomes effective by the acknowledgement of every good thing that is in us in Christ Jesus.

 

Gal 5:6, says that faith works by love.  As faith is the way we access the promises of God, this was the catalyst we needed to receive healing for Hannah. After all it is a prayer of faith that heals the sick!

Next month will be the 9 year anniversary of Hannah’s healing. Praise Jesus!

If you are believing God for something that needs a miracle, you have come to the right place! Jesus is still in business today!

There are the first two key lessons that we learned in our healing journey, and we are still learning but I believe these will help somebody;

Seek first the kingdom

In the middle of a crisis, it’s easy to lose focus, to get distracted and take our eyes off Jesus.  If we are not careful we can begin to base our relationship with God on what we can get from Him.  This quickly becomes exhausting as we try to receive through our own effort. So long as we keep our eyes on Jesus we will be able to walk on the water and rise about the circumstances. This is water walking 101!

Relationship with Jesus takes time. 

Phil 3:10:

That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death…

 

Really knowing Him. In seeking the Healer we find the healing. When we seek the Savior we find salvation, when we seek the Deliverer we find deliverance, when we seek the Provider we find provision. These things are by-products of our relationship with Jesus!

We all want to be people of faith and power, raising the dead, healing the sick and casting out Devils. In order to see these things we must first Know Him.

The Lord has provided for us awesome and mighty promises and they are not hidden from us, or out of reach despite what the circumstances may look like. We will see them come to pass in our lives, just hang on and dig in, and watch!

So What Do You Know About Healing?

So what do you know about healing? I am often asked this. Well not as much as some but a little more than I did!

Our views and experiences on the subject have changed over the years, partly due to circumstances and necessity but predominantly because we heard the Gospel. We were Christians and had been for about 12 years, yet we had not heard the whole Gospel in all that time. How can you be a Christian without having heard the Gospel you might ask?

We had received our salvation through belief in Jesus, but the Gospel is much more than just a ticket to heaven. It is the ‘good news’. Romans 1:16 , The power of God unto salvation for all who believe. This literally means that gospel is: the good news of God’s miracle working, abundant and mighty power to deliver, heal, save, forgive and protect from harm all those who trust in Jesus! Now that is good news!

Understanding this gave us a hunger to see more of the New Testament play out in our lives. After all Jesus said that He came to give us life and life more abundantly. John 10:10. Why settle for just life when you are promised an abundant life?

All Believers can and should experience the power of God demonstrated in their lives on a daily basis. This is the normal Christian life and it is not just confined to Bible times. Our lives are a testimony to how God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary exploits. Healing has become a huge part of our lives, not because we are so special or have a particular anointing in that area, but because we have come to see that it is for everyone. God’s will is for all of His creation to know Him and experience the power of His resurrection. Phil 3:10.

With this in mind, we become more aware of the power of God in us, to the point where it spills out and transforms those around us. Rom 12:1-2

All that is left is for you to find some sick people to practise on!