I hope He comes for us tonight
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I hope he comes for us too @Susan tonight! We are so detached from this world. Every day we are hanging on to His Word and Him. We cannot wait to he raptured!
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I want extra food lol! I cannot wait to eat!
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So encouraging today!
Also this podcast.
I just heard a great audio guide to Mark 4 on Through the Word. Check it out! Mark 4: Audio Guide - Through the Word
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Yes and we will be at the wedding feast of the lamb, that will be some feast, better than any suzzler or hometown buffett. Just hope theres chocolate in heaven, after all every good and perfe t gift comes from God the father of light
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Yummy 
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Difficulties Produce Depth
Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and High Priest of our confession, Christ Jesus.
Hebrews 3:1
Frederick A. Tatford was a prolific twentieth-century pastor and writer who was born in 1901 and ministered among the Plymouth Brethren. His pastoral heart was tender toward those who faced troubles in life. He wrote, “The shadows of life have their purpose as well as the bright sunlight, and the dark hours of sorrow bring their own rich satisfaction. The one who has passed through trouble is equipped by his own experience to sympathize with others who pass that way. Our Great High Priest sympathizes with His brethren because of His own experience on earth.”Although they are difficult and painful, times of trial cause growth in our life. We look to Jesus and draw comfort from Him, and He equips us to encourage others with the same comfort we’ve received.
Among our items of gratitude, remember to thank God for this—He uses difficulty to develop us into disciples.
Those who know the trials and difficulties of life’s road can enter into the feelings of others who are tired and can provide strength and encouragement for the weak and weary.
Frederick A. Tatford
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Yes, we can empathize with those who are hurting because we have had our own afflictions.
This is something different but when He breaks us, He makes us because it is at this time when everything fails us that our hearts realize God CAN not nor will not EVER fail us and so we put our total faith and trust and dependence in Him alone!
Oh the wedding feast and the glorious food! And to think Jesus hasn’t eaten in a long long time and He is even more excited than we are!!!
I wonder what He has planned for us!?!
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I am going to put this in practical terms in hopes others can understand the necessity of breaking before blessing.
In Jan. '75 I stepped of a bus at MCRD San Diego. There were foot prints painted on the ground and more yelling than I had ever witnessed. The guys yelling had veins popping out everywhere. My first thought was what I had I gotten myself into. That continued unabated till graduation day especially if you screwed up. Now back in high school I was not on the track team but I ran long distance with a friend who was. I was in pretty good shape. After high school we went our separate ways and I stopped running altogether, gained weight and was not in the best of shape. The very first platoon run I almost fell out half way and it was only a mile long. I had been used to running upwards of 9 or 10 miles in school.
For the first month and a half or so we exercised incessently. We were hammered till we dropped. Then there was the constant correction on every little detail. Leave a visible loose thread on our uniform and it was Katy bar the door for the next ten minutes. Non stop in your ear, in your face for something that seemed very trivial but it had a purpose. If those doing the yelling where it was legal and expected of them did that at home they would all be locked up in jail for abuse. That was abuse on steroids but there was no relief from it, not even legal because I had signed a contract.
It was not till many years later when I came across a former drill instructor and got to ask why basic training is done that way. When I got my answer I remember backed to some of the things I was told that I was not longer back home on the street ditty bopping and was now engaged in an organization where such things get people killed. In essence the first half of the three months of training is specifically designe for tow things, to break old bad habits and to physically break down the body so it can be built up better and stronger. And that it did. I broke old habits in how I addressed people. Now I was alwasy as a kid a yes sir/no ma’am kid. My parents were both military and very old school. But for others it was street stuff. Also when I went through the evaluation PFT(physical fitness test) I could barely do 5 pull ups, maybe 10 situps and could hardley run a mile as compared to when I was in school and in shape. By the time I graduated I was doing 15 pull ups with ease 50 situps and the three mile run was again a joy.
How does that relate to what Pastor JD was talking about breaking comes before the blessing. Well we are sinful humans in a fallen world.We have an ardent enemy that is constantly on the attack. We are not born knowing how to deal with those attacks and in fact the longer we live without Jesus the more ingrained our sin nature becomes. God has need to break that sin nature first then He can build a Godly nature in us. The principal is the same physically and mentally as it is spiritually. The old bad stuff has to be broken and removed before the good stuff can be put in place. Is the breaking of the old painful? Oh you betcha and more than you may ever realize till it happens. Once in the middle of the breaking you will be thinking this is just not fair, it is useless, and most of all why me.
To put it another way that some might better understand is that project car you want to restore. It is well full of body rust, then engine has run in years, the tires are show the interior looks like a rat hotel. You can’t just tinker with the engine till it runs, inflate the tires and throw some paint on it and have a restored car. Nope you have to tear it down completely, examine everything(remember this as I will touch on it again) so you can discard and replace what is broken warn out and not repairable with new parts. You have to remove every bit of rust and in some places replace or fabricate new body parts as well as probably redo the uphosltery and replace and/or fix things inside. When I say examine every part on the car the correlation is we need to examine our whole life, every aspect of it when we are getting broken by God. God already knows what is broken, He is just point that out to us so we need to see it understand it and let go of it.
So like military basic training a car restoration starts out with tearing the old down, finding where the damage is and either discarding it or fixing it. But what of the blessing? Well that turned out to be I had slimmed down and looked pretty darn good in my dress uniform. I was in the best shape of my life, physically fit. I had learned new things or advanced on many things I learned from my parents. Like I could make a military bunk with hospital corners but I had learned to do that in under 2 minutes. I knew how to shoot as I hunted a lot as a kid but, now I was able to deal with blockages, tear down and put back together my weapon in under 5 minutes. I expanded my knowledge of first aid into areas I was not familiar with. Cleaning a wound and bandaging it as a kid meant a fast wash of a cut some antiseptic on it and then a bandaid. Now I was able to semi triage more serious injuries, would pressure be enough to stop the bleeding or would a turniquet be neccesary. Those things I did not know before but after I was well versed in them. I could march with a group and remain in perfect step with them, change directions, even stand lined up perfectly on a line without even having to turn my head to make sure. All of that has been a benefit since those days both inside the military as well as outside even now all these many years later.
I can tell you from a life time of experience that when I do have problems and like Pastor JD said they are just symptoms I know to look for the root cause and correct them. That is the blessing I got from the breaking a life mostly filled with self discipline which has prevented me from going down more than a few wrong paths. That is God’s gift to my life that has protected me from serious problems. Much like we are often failing to understand that the magnitude of our suffering now is so minimal compared to the glory we will experience in heaven with Jesus so to has been light my afflictions compared to the life filled with blessings and many of those not realized till long after. That is why it is often good to just reflect on our lives and count our blessings. Many happen and we don’t know it so we don’t know to be grateful. But reflections helps to point out those hidden blessings so we know the love God has for us and we can be grateful.
It also helps facing trials later. in Oct. 2015 I went to the ER because of symptoms I was having. They were not all at once so they may have been overlooked but because of my first aid training I did not as they could have been serious. They were. With in a week I had a cardiac surgeon deep in my chest fixing some blocked vessels. That means I had my chest cracked open they cut through the brest bone to gain access to my heart. I knew going in that could be a possibility but God. Because I knew much of the process because my Dad had it done years before me I also knew I could blow through it. I did . I was diagnosed on a Monday, and much to the surgeons wishes I went home to take care of personal matters and showed up in the wee hours of the morning on the following Friday. I came to in the recovery and because my numbers were doing so good the by passed observation time in the ICU and I went straight to a room. I stared the required walking on Saturday, did double of the minimum they required. Sunday all the tubes and IV were removed and I tripled the walking requirements of that day, By Monday was up and moving around like I was just a paitent with an illness not one who had gone through major surgery. I went home the next day. By December I was back to work for two weeks light duty and back to full duty the week of Christmas. Now recovery was fast but it was also painfull but I expected it braced for it and worked through it. That was not me. That was the grace of God for me. Had I not been broken some 40 years earlier I doubt I would be here now and that my friends is the blessing that came from being broken.
I would finish with this. We do have trouble in this world but God, if we let Him break us safely He is sure to provide the blessings after. The breaking is necessary like the refining of silver. It has to be heated so that the dross will rise to the surface to be removed. The heat used has to be the right temperature, too cool and we don’t remove all the dross, too hot and the silver is ruined and useless. God is the premier silversmiths of our lives. He know when to raise the heat and when to let it cool down but when He is done we are the perctected vessels of silver he made.
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I am looking forward to seeing the finished product.
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Isn’t the irony mind boggling? We (God’s children) are being made into our Father’s image and satan is using AI to make his own into his image.
Satan always imitates God, even to the very end of times!
Wow, just WOW!
I am soooooooooooooo Grateful to be a child of God!!!
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