Meditating is something I can almost guarantee that you are already doing and probably don’t even know it!  Do you worry? Well, then you are meditating. You talk about your problem.  You rehearse it over and over in your mind.  You imagine the worst case scenario. Worry is just meditation on the wrong things.  If you get your mind filled with the word of God and the love and power of your God, there won’t be any room or time for worry to stay a part of your life.  

Let’s start by clarifying that there are two different types of meditation. One type is about stillness, quietness and relaxation and I talked about this type in my article, Should Christians Meditate to Reduce Stress?  The second type is what we are talking about today and this type of meditation is about you being guided by the Holy Spirit into an encounter with God.

God told Joshua to meditate on the Scriptures day and night, not letting them depart out of his...

It seems like every expert today is recommending meditation as part of your daily routine if you want to have a happy, successful life.  But does a Christian have any business playing around with meditation? Be sure to stick with me throughout the entire blog as we look at this from several angles.

If we look at the origin of meditation, we find the earliest mentions of it by the Buddhist and Hindu religions.  Positive Psychology Today says, “The major split between Hindu and Buddhist meditation occurred when Buddhist followers no longer believed that meditation should be used to reach a closer understanding with a higher being, which is what Hindu meditation was for, but rather as a means of realizing one’s interrelatedness with all things.”  This eastern religious type of meditation became popular in the US in the 1960s for non-religious reasons as a form of relaxation. There is no one formal, accepted definition of meditation but most techniques...

I don’t know when the romance ended for me.  Being saved at the very young age of 4, I don’t remember a time of what life was like without Jesus.  I never had a honeymoon phase with Him like a person usually has that gets saved later in life.  So, when the romance ended?  I'm not sure.  

I remember the honeymoon time in my marriage.  I felt excited and as if life was just beginning.  At first, it was fun and it felt like anything was possible. Then money challenges came, dividing up chore challenges came, and raising a family challenges came.  

Life fell into service and busyness.  Duty and obligation. Some of the romance was lost in the relationship both with my husband and with God and my heart screamed, “There’s gotta be more to life than this!”

At times I felt guilty for feeling that way.  So I would work on gratitude and pouring myself into service at Church.  That would help me find...

Do you like window shopping?  How about going to open houses and looking at really nice houses in your area?  Do you car shop when you aren’t in the market for a new car? One day I discovered that I really didn’t like to do these things because it just made me feel bad about my current life.  I was so stressed about my current life, that I had stopped dreaming. It hurt too much to look at things that I would like but couldn’t have.

Now, I’m all for being content with what you have and sometimes these activities I’ve mentioned as well as our constant view of the best of other people’s lives on social media or HGTV, can be a source of causing discontent, jealousy or stress and should be avoided.  

What I found though with my inability to enjoy dreaming was that I had started to “just go along for the ride” in life, whatever happened was happening to me and out of my control, and that resulted in me not going the...

“Enjoy the time with your young kids,” they say.  “The time goes by way too fast and you’ll miss it later.”  But in the middle of changing diapers, strapping in car seats, making sure they didn’t break anything down low when we went to visit others and the occasional tired crying tantrum in a public place, the days seemed long.  Parenting of young children means you are rarely off duty and if you add in working full time on top of it, as I did, it can be overwhelming.

I remember when my kids hit about middle school age and I thought, “I wish I had enjoyed those younger, sweeter days more.”  I missed the snuggles, the wanting to be with me, the innocence of youth that seemed to already be disappearing. But life was busy in middle school too with football practices and games, dances, friends and parties to navigate.  Time kept going. There was no time to indulge my regrets.

In their high school years, I remember...

How many of you have said, “Why don’t we see the big miracles of the Old Testament, like the splitting of the Red Sea and the walls of Jericho falling down, in our world today?  Maybe if I saw these big miracles happening in my life it would be easier to believe and trust in God.”

Think about it though, if you had been in Moses’ shoes at the Red Sea incident, would you have heard God and obeyed?  Let’s look at this through Moses’ eyes for a moment. What was the situation?

• Moses was responsible for a lot of people’s lives!  It is estimated that Moses was leading approximately 2.4 million Israelites out of Egypt.  Plus Exodus 12:38 says “A mixed multitude also went up with them along with flocks and herds, a large amount of livestock.”  This was a huge undertaking.
  
  
• They had left Egypt in confidence (Exodus 14:8) after plundering the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35 & 36), a piece of the story that often gets...

When I first started hearing about and learning about faith, I didn’t realize that I internalized the message as a new thing to do.  I was excited to learn that just as Jesus healed every single person that came to Him for healing when He walked the earth, that I could believe in faith for healing too, for example.  So, I started seeking after healing and striving to believe harder for it. Quite often this all ended in no healing, condemnation about my lack of faith, and wondering what I was doing wrong.  

I had been stressed by the problems in my life before but now I still had the problems PLUS the stress of trying to have faith.  

The opposite of stress is rest and you can either have the stress of faith or the rest of faith.  Only one of them gets you the results you want. Let’s see how to enter that rest of faith.

The old-time Israelites, the ones who saw the miracles in Egypt that allowed them to get free, the ones who walked through...

I dislike religious sounding words that I don’t understand in today’s context, don’t you?  Sanctify is one of them. I don’t think I have ever used that word in my everyday life. When it is not a common word, it can lose its meaning on us and we can just skim by it in our reading in the Bible.  

Sanctify means “an act whereby, or a state wherein, people or things are set aside for...the worship of God [and]...treated with special care as a possession of God,” according to Vine’s dictionary.  The Israelites were called holy (again with the religious sounding words!) and that means “to sanctify.” If something is holy, it has been sanctified or taken out and separated unto God. Jeremiah 2:3 AMPC “Israel was holiness [something set apart from ordinary purposes, dedicated] to the Lord, the firstfruits of His harvest [of which no stranger was allowed to partake]; all who ate of it [injuring Israel]...

I was thinking the other day, “I wonder how far I can go in faith?  I wonder what the ultimate life is that I could expect while still here on earth for a person that was walking with God exactly the way God intends for us?”  And God showed me that even if I didn’t know anyone personally that was pushing the boundaries (and I do) I had the life of Jesus as my example. 

You might have heard me say before, but it bears repeating, that there are three levels of spiritual maturity I see when it comes to reading the Gospels.  Level one is you read about all the miracles God did – walking on water, calming storms, multiplying the bread and fishes, raising the dead, opening deaf ears – and you think, “Wow, isn't my God awesome and powerful!”  Level two is you read those same miracles and you think, “If God did it for those people He’ll do it for me.  If God healed them, He’ll heal me.  If God...

Have you ever read through 1st and 2nd Kings in the Bible?  You read over and over in the history of Israel how when this king was in power and did what was right and Israel walked with God, the nation prospered and then this other king comes into power and does what is evil in the sight of God and the nation fell on hard times.  It didn’t just happen once or twice. It consistently happened.

When the Israelites walked with God they lived in victory, freedom, and peace.  When they went their own way they lived in defeat, bondage, lack, and unrest. It is no different for us today.  In this stressful world, we all like the idea of peace and God gave us a very clear history lesson in the Bible of how to achieve it as a nation and as an individual…walk with God.

The Hebrew word for peace is shalom and it means “nothing missing, nothing broken,” or “to be whole.”  Sounds like a pretty good thing to have, right? Peace is a...