A couple of weeks ago the phrase “hold fast” kept coming to me. It came in the daytime and even in the middle of the night. Finally, I got up at 3:00 a.m. to see where it appeared in the Bible. The first instance was Hebrews 3:6 which reads, “but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end.” The…
On the National Day of Prayer in the first part of May, as I drove I heard someone on the radio praying for the nation from II Chronicles 7:14 which says, “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.” As I drove, I quoted the scripture with the speaker and was…
Forty-three years ago today, I recorded in my journal, “Lord, what do you want me to do with these poems I’ve begun to write these past two years?” I had 373 poems typed, and in a box. The box was beginning to overflow. Jesus’ admonition about hiding your light under a bushel had been heavy on my mind for several days. Searching in the yellow pages under “publishers” brought me to the Nazarene Publishing House in Kansas City. I knew…
Mark 11:24 (Jesus said) “Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you.” When our desires are His desires we can ask Him to intervene in a situation and He will. Some people call this, “Having no mind in the matter.” In other words, we need to put our agenda aside. Ask God to pray through us whatever His will is in a given…
Psalm 146:5-9 How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord raises up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous; the Lord protects…
How many times do we pray and pray and think God hasn’t answered because I doesn’t look like how we pictured the answer? He asks us to ask, seek, and knock, (Matthew 7:7), but nowhere does He leave the scripting to us. That’s His job. We’re not in charge. He is. Many of the people who viewed Jesus, missed who He was because He didn’t look like the person they had scripted in their minds. He didn’t arrive on a…
Micah 7:19 He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities underfoot. Yes, Thou wilt cast all their (our) sins into the depths of the sea. Our God is a God of compassion, of mercy. He loves us deeply with a love that never lets us go. This scripture tells us that He is going to bring our bondages, our perversity, depravity, and guilt under His foot. In other words, He captures the things that put us…
Acts 4:12 “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved.” Today, many people run to this philosophy and sit under that guru in search of the truth. They follow a teacher only to find out the teacher twisted the truth for his own gain. There is only one who holds true salvation. It is Jesus Christ. God gave Him the…
Psalm 91:11 For He will give His angels charge concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. In God’s Little Miracle Book III, I share a story of a woman whose very abusive husband made several attempts to take her life. One day as she swam in their pond near their rural home he waded in after her with the intent to drown her. She cried out to the Lord as she had done many times before. When he…
Have you ever prayed for a thing and waited, and waited, and waited? Have you given up hope of ever seeing that prayer answered? In Bible study, we recently studied the book of Acts. Near the end of the book is a very long account of the struggles Paul had after the Lord told him he was going to Rome to stand before Caesar. After two years he was finally on his way when he was shipwrecked, bitten by a…