When are the true Believers going to step out of the crowd of cowards and pioneer a path forward with divine wisdom, supernatural strategies, and offer the world transformative love that actually does conquer a multitude of sin?
He told me that I needed to forgive the people who abused me or I would open the door to the tormentors in my life. It wasn’t easy at first but I realized that He had given me the power to forgive when He forgave me. Joyce Meyers said, “Unforgiveness is like drinking deadly poison and thinking the other person’s going to die.”
Tom Crandall and Cole Zick address the reality of what happens when you form an intimate sexual connection outside of marriage, and the strong influence that can have on us and our life choices. How can we become free from shame? What can we do to move past attachments that we have with people from our past that we’re tied to because we’ve had sexual experiences with them?
Christmas is a beautiful season of giving and spending time with the people we care about, but sometimes it comes with the realization that life did not turn out the way we expected it to. We look around at family or friends or people we’ve known forever, and it’s hard not to compare our life to theirs. It’s hard not to remember where we thought we would end up or how we thought things would be at this point in our life.
I believe that shame grows in the dark. We begin to question ourselves, “if they really knew me…. then what?” The things that we believe no one would be able to forgive, look past, or overcome cause so much fear, we choose to hide. As shame grows in the dark it begins to own our thoughts, our identities or we simply bury it so deep we are in denial about it altogether.
When you’re in the middle of what feels like a debilitating trial, it’s easy to think that God favors others more than you, or that the situation that you are going through is somehow beyond God’s ability to fix it. I know these feelings all too well…
Because our destinies hinge on the choices we make, I believe it's important to pursue and encounter love from God before pursuing and awakening romantic or sexual love from another person.
Healthy Masculinity - ft/ Cole Zick & Justin Stumvoll by Moral Revolution.
“We berate ourselves, talk negatively about our bodies, yearn to look like something else, concentrate on our flaws and yes, we even cry about what we look like in the mirror. We stop eating, work out more, take pills, shakes, and eat bars. All in the name of beauty? I don't want my daughter growing up to believe that her tummy is too round, or her legs aren't quite what they should be, or her triceps need to be more defined. I don't want her to think she's not gorgeous without makeup slathered on her face. If she wants to be a totally made up body builder, great. But I don't want her to need it to feel good about herself. I want her to feel beautiful when she wakes up in the morning, unashamed to be seen in public.”
Understanding God as our Father and truly leaning into a relationship with Him through that paradigm has many challenges in our generation. It is clear that God wants to engage with us in this way because in the book of John alone God is referred to as Father over one hundred times. I, myself, have been on a journey to truly see God this way and understand what it means for Him to love me as His son. My personal challenges have been the walls I created as a child to protect myself from the pain of disappointing people.
The greatest kryptonite of relational depth is insecurity. In romantic relationships, insecurities can cause a couple to spend hours, days, and even years circling back to issues that seem to never go away. In friendships, insecurities assume the worst rather than believe the best. In marriages, insecurities can cause one partner to shut down, another to be jealous and a marriage to fall apart. In our relationship with God, insecurity minimizes us to a form of godliness. It is imperative that a healthy individual get to know themselves, become sold out to the belief that God made you that way on purpose, and then love what God created. So here are some practical steps to becoming more secure in who you are…
Sex for Sale: Gaining Understanding from a Survivor Leader - ft/ Rebecca Bender by Moral Revolution.
