Monday, March 13, 2006

Be Encoraged Oh My Soul


One day recently I was feeling very overwhelmed. I had an end of the year report due which I had barely started; a five year budget proposal and an upset boss, six or seven phone calls to make before five, emails had flooded in demanding answers and my cell phone rang so much with messages it sounded like a doorbell.. Ding-dong, ding-dong! Ding-dong ding dong!
I told my soul in so many words that I should bless the Lord. I should just stop and focus on God and what he had done for me just recently. I started to share this with friends and ended up prophesying. It went something like this:

I'm at the library mixing work with finding quarters to live and such. I'm trying to fill my commitments and obligations. I just got caught up in being overwhelmed, trapped, and scared. I'm behind in many things and may miss the mark on some important assignments and obligations this week. Sometimes I get it in gear and sometimes not. Sometimes I have my wits and will and sometimes not.

I stopped a minute and remembered that all things work to the good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.
I thought about how I miss the mark on really important things... not that family, work and friends are not important but they are not eternal. God has more than proved himself strong and faithful in my life especially over the last 2 or 3 years. Through all of the pain much of which came about by being confronted with who I am, God has never let me go. I have more that survived. I have overcome. What was meant for harm God has meant for good. God has made me to prosper in the valley of the shadow of death and is raising me up. Even though I am more Jonah that Elijah, More Samson than David, more Peter than Solomon God tells me.
Oy! God is telling us,
"Satan has desire to sift you as wheat, but don't worry you have a High Priest in my Son and he is ever before my throne making intercession for you all. There is no need for anymore sacrifice but the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Praise me like Paul when I ordained that he be imprisoned and I will tear your prisons asunder and bring you closer to me. Do what you know to do and repent when you do not, always knowing from whence comes your salvation. When the enemy comes in know that like a tsunami I have already raised a standard against him.
You are mine dear children and the depth of my love for you is. The depth of my love for you is. I Am is causing a new thing to happen. Be thankful. I need you to.... I desire for my thoughts to be your thoughts and my ways to be your ways. Those things that come against you are not as heavy as they appear unless you take them. But take me. Take my burden and see what I am doing.
Look to me. Look at me. Look to me. Look for me. Hunt, seek, excavate, dig for me. It's not that I don't want you to find me. It is that you need a single eye to enter in and find me in ALL of my glory. Look for me like a lost child in a crowded mall looking for its mother or father and know that I will be revealed arms out stretched and running toward you. Dig for me like a diamond miner or a gold miner with a lamp at night seeking fortune and despising what is not worthy of being found. See me in all things and I am there. See me in all outcomes. I reign supreme. I am sovereign. Nothing nothing nothing happens that I do no see, that I do not work to my good pleasure for my children."

I can through Christ who gives me strength do all things. I can be cast down and without as well as I can be lifted up and prosper. I can hit all of my earthly marks or miss them and be allowed to suffer the consequences. He is there.
I r rebuke the spirit of fear and despair because I have not been given a spirit of fear but of love and power and of a sound mind. My God reigns and will not allow me to be torn asunder!
He knows the work he has begun in me and in us and he is faithful who promised. Thank God it depends on Jehovah Jireh, Jehovah Rofi, and Jehova Sidkinu El Shaddai the Author and the Finisher of my faith. I come against that feeling of being overwhelmed and lost and tear down anything that would raise itself up against the Word of God.
With purpose, thought and in the power of the Holy Spirit I put on the whole armor of God. I will through grace and mercy, faith do all and STAND. If God is for me who can be against? I realize to those called to life everything is spiritual. If some of these things that have come against me come against you realize it is a spiritual battle against principalities and powers of darkness but that the gates of hell will not prevail against the onslaught of the Kingdom of God, the Army of God, and to the Family of God to which many of us belong.
I'm better now! So now to answer those phone calls!
Praise the name of Jesus!
If you are receiving this email I just took time out to pray for you. I love all of you in Christ.

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