Author: shbcadmin

Whatever you’re going through today, I want you to remind you of a verse in Psalm 118:24…”This is the day that the Lord has made: I will rejoice and be glad in it!” You may be thinking that it’s a little difficult to go around rejoicing when you just don’t feel like it. For some of you it’s difficult to praise God because you find yourself “dwelling” in a place of REGRET, always looking back and wishing you could change what you said, what you did, and the choices you made. Regret has a way of always messing up TODAY! It’s like a black cloud that hangs over us all the time. So…it’s time to move to a new dwelling place. You can’t change what happened. It’s done, finished, OVER! God has laid out this amazing day ahead of you. It’s full of all kinds of opportunities to grow, to laugh, to see the wonderful gifts that He has given you. Now you may be thinking that I don’t know what it’s like to regret something. Oh, yes I do. But I learned the hard way that if I stayed in that place and rehearsed the regrets over and over…

Perfection will wear you out…Trying to be the perfect spouse, parent, friend or employee is exhausting. We end every day wishing we could have done more, regretting what we did that wasn’t quite up to “our standards” or regretting what we didn’t do. Unfortunately, we also carry that need for perfection over to our spiritual life. Always striving but never attaining causes nothing but stress and feelings of guilt. You and I are a work in progress. We will have successes and failures but both are taking us to the place God has planned for us. Relax! God is on your side!

Let’s talk about labels! All kinds of things have labels…designer clothes, cans in the supermarket, even tennis shoes and handbags and that’s just to name a few. The one thing that should never have a label is people! The world loves to stick “labels” on us according to how it judges our “condition”: stupid, failure, defeated, broke, crazy, disorganized and the list goes on and on. Do you know that labels are lies that the enemy sends your way to bring you down and keep you down. But God doesn’t look at us that way! He sees what we CAN be not what we are or what we were. Thank Heaven for that!! Remember Gideon? He was hiding from the Midianites in the bottom of a winepress and God called him O Mighty Man of Valor. Nobody would have called him mighty. He was a coward! But then, that’s a label and God doesn’t like labels. God will always call you by your POSITION and your position is Son or Daughter of the Most High God…Child of the King…and in that “position”, you are joint heirs with Jesus. You, my friend, are living in a kingdom with kingdom rights and…

God is in the details! Think about the Temple. God cared about every detail down to the rings that held the curtains! In your life, God is in the details. Nothing happens by accident. Remember that, the next time you feel like your life is spinning out of control. God is right there working behind the scenes to bring all things together for your good.

Abraham, the father of our faith, was a godly man but he also made mistakes! One of those mistakes came when God told him that he and his wife Sarah would become parents of a child. The promised child seemed like an impossibility so Sarah set about trying to “make it happen”. Of course, WE would never do anything like that! To make a long story short, Sarah convinces Abraham that he needs to sleep with her servant, Hagar. Bad idea right from the start! Hagar has a son named Ishmael and later Sarah has a son named Isaac. Now there are two boys growing up in one household: Ishmael, the son of the flesh and Isaac, the son of the spirit (the promise of God). The flesh will always rise up against the spirit and that’s exactly what happened with Isaac and Ishmael. They were constantly fighting. Sarah has had it and gives Abraham an ultimatum: Genesis 21:10…”Get rid of that slave woman and her son. He is not going to share the inheritance with my son, Isaac. I won’t have it!” Now Abraham loved both of his boys. Genesis 21:12… But God told Abraham, “Do not be upset over…

“Some prayer, some power; more prayer, more power: much prayer, much power”. How much power do YOU want? The more you pray and grab hold of the heart of God, the more He can create miracles in your life!