Have you ever tasted freedom?

The Gospel revealed.

If you’ve never come across one of my blog posts before, I hope that the Spirit of God will cause you to stumble upon this one. My prayer is that God will move you to read it because I am certain that He wants to fill your heart with truth and hope. We so need His truth and hope! I feel so compelled to write what I’m about to share with you and I’m so excited as I’m typing this! My heart is ready to burst with joy but I need to take a deep breath and allow God to write through me. This is so good! Are you ready? The Gospel is such a much needed treasure for every living soul. No wonder the enemy is doing everything he can to keep us from seeing it for what it TRULY is! That’s what he did to me for 19 years and it was only by the grace of God that I finally saw the truth! I touched it and tasted it and it was better than anything I’ve ever known before! God stepped in at a point in my life when I was at my lowest. Lower than I’ve ever been. I had no hope. Everything was going so wrong, nothing fulfilled me anymore- there was no more joy for me. I felt dead, terrified, and so desperate for help. It was then that God started speaking to me clearer than ever. My heart was SO disconnected from life and it took a very desperate situation for me to stop and realize how much I needed God. I didn’t just need Him then but I’ve needed Him all along. Before, I was too caught up in living for my own glory and serving myself- too blinded to see reality. Even as I write this, I remember the fear and disappointment that weighed down my heart like heavy, rusted anchors that kept dragging me lower and lower until I reached the bottom of the deepest and darkest of oceans. Have you ever sunk to the very bottom? I have. It’s such a lonely place! I was so unhappy! I don’t even want to be reminded of what my life was like then but I decided to travel back to that period of my life for your sake. Your soul is too precious! The price paid for your freedom was too costly! And you CAN be free! What I found is so good that I can’t help but share it. You really need to read this! I hope you’re paying attention. In my misery, when I was the most alone and hopeless I’ve ever been in my life- I found Christ! Like never before! I always knew God existed, but I had no interest in finding out more. I didn’t think I needed to be forgiven. I considered myself too good to even care about what the Bible had to say. I thought I was much better than that. I COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG! My first memory of Him is tragic, yet so beautiful. I saw Him bruised and beaten. I saw Him crucified. Crucified! It hurt me so much to see Him that way but at the same time it made me feel so enraged for not accepting what He did for me earlier! I found Him bleeding but there was so much beauty in His eyes. When I opened my heart I realized that I did that to Him. I made Him suffer, I made Him die! Yet I was so thankful for His death! I cherished His wounds. I treasured every whip mark. I found myself at His feet, kissing them and holding them close to my heart- until His blood ran over my whole body and washed me clean. He made me whiter than snow (Psalm 51:7)! Every stain was gone, every wound was healed, every tear was wiped away from my eyes; only tears of happiness remained. I FOUND SO MUCH FREEDOM AND PURPOSE AT HIS FEET! It’s where I belonged. All I could do was cry and I wanted to keep on crying forever because it felt so good. I was free! Words fail me in expressing what it felt like…it was the most amazing experience I’ve ever lived in my entire life! I found so much love and hope and joy! HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN LIFE. Better, stronger, and more powerful than any love I’ve ever experienced before. I wish I could explain the life I’ve found…the beauty…the happiness! Words are too limited for me to express the intensity and beauty of what it felt like to be forgiven. To know Him who loved me before I even knew Him and who gave Himself for me (Romans 5:8). IT CHANGED EVERYTHING. No one could ever do for me what Christ did! This world has nothing for me anymore. I found what I was looking for and it made me so satisfied! Oh, the joy I found!!! If you’re reading this and you don’t know Jesus Christ, please don’t miss out anymore on the life that He offers! It’s too good to pass up! SO GOOD. But don’t take my word for it, open your heart to His love and watch it change you from the inside out! You’ll NEVER be the same again! Satan will try to do anything to keep you from finding the truth, but NOTHING can separate you from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39)!!! NOT EVEN SATAN. If you’re reading this and you know Jesus Christ, please don’t allow satan to rob you of the happiness, vitality, and life that are found in Christ alone! Too many of us get so caught up in the traps of the enemy that we end up forgetting what He did for us! That’s precisely satan’s strategy. Having a relationship with God and walking with Him is NOT boring or tiresome, it’s exciting and refreshing! Don’t allow satan to take your eyes off of Jesus and direct them towards yourself! You didn’t do anything to get to where you are today! CHRIST DID. Don’t let pride take control of your heart! God gives grace to the humble, but He opposes the proud (James 4:6). So be humble that you may walk in the power of His grace! We were saved by grace through faith to a life that’s vibrant and real (Ephesians 2:8). Not a life that’s dull and without desire. It’s so easy to lose focus and look inside yourself for strength and peace. Look to God! You were saved by His grace, walk in this grace! Live in it, breathe in it, sleep in it, wake up in it, be always abiding in His grace and He will empower you to walk in the Spirit rather than your own flesh. If our mind is focused on our own flesh- we will find nothing but death, but if we focus our mind on the things of the Spirit, we can be sure of finding life and peace (Romans 8:6). Only Christ can empower you to live a life filled with strength and hope. A life of happiness and rest. Be still and remember what He’s done for you! You did nothing to deserve it so stop striving, you’re hindering the Spirit of God from doing His work in you and missing the whole point of grace- something you didn’t deserve but received anyways! Grace is God’s undeserved gift. It changes the way you relate to God. And He is the very same God today- the God that forgave you and restored you, the same God that gave you a new heart. He is EVERYTHING and all that we are is a fruit of His real and passionate love. GOD DID IT! Don’t ever forget that! This is what God spoke through the prophet Isaiah about Christ. This prophecy was fulfilled in us and we are sons and daughters of this beautiful and life-changing promise. I simply love these verses because they’re so true! I’ve come to live them out and the truth they reveal brought me such true happiness!

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed. He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord’s favor has come, and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies. To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the Lord has planted for his own glory.

Isaiah 61:1-3 (NLT)

He is the God of comfort and freedom! He is our defender and our justice! He is our joy and our hope! And we are His workmanship, especially designed for His glory (Ephesians 2:10)! We need to look to Him because those who look to Him are radiant and their faces are never covered with shame (Psalm 34:5). Ever. They radiate His brilliant light! God is not a distant being, too proud to make Himself known to us. Rather, He is a Person to be known and loved in the most intimate way possible! It’s hard not to fall in love with Him when you finally get to know Him for who He really is. He took my breath away and that’s why I love Him so much! This is what the Gospel is all about. It’s TOO good to pass up…WHY WOULD YOU?

Love letter.

 God’s heart burns with passion for you.

Beloved, you let so many things distract you from seeking Me. I watch you from the time that you open your eyes in the morning to the time when you close them in exhaustion. I watch you even through the night and think about the glorious plans that I have for your life. I desire to give you dreams as you sleep, but your thoughts and worries take over your mind and you either dream of things that are not from Me, or you don’t dream at all. I wish I could show you something, even the smallest glimpse of what I have for you might make you trust Me, desire me. I wait for you as you awake and I long for you to speak to Me. I can give you the wisdom you need as you search frantically for truth in a world that is empty. I have everything you need, yet you rush through your morning like a mad man. Oh, beloved. If only you knew that if you rose up early to spend time with Me, I would multiply your time and you would have a different outcome to your day. But no, you choose to do things on your own. Beloved, it hurts so much to see you live life so blindly! You need to understand that you can’t see the reality of your spirit without My help. Everything springs up from the Spirit, and if your inner life is not overflowing and it lacks- your outward life will reflect that. My child, you wonder why life is so hard and confusing and you become angry with Me for your difficulties, yet you fail to understand the most important thing. I don’t like bringing hardship into your life because I suffer along with you, but I know that this is the only way for Me to get your attention. Sadly, you turn away from Me even more instead of seeking Me and running towards Me. You listen to the voice of the enemy and the voice of your deceitful heart, but I speak to you also and I do it often. It hurts Me so much to feel your rejection. You are not paying attention to Me at all! I want to bless you and give you abundance of life, but I cannot do so unless you are fully Mine. Please, seek me! THERE IS SO MUCH AT STAKE. Can’t you see how much you need Me? When did you forget that I am your first love? When did you forget that you promised to serve Me and to love Me all your days? You’ve forgotten everything I’ve done for you so quickly! Your heart is so absent during the limited amount of time you spend with Me! I watch you open My Word out of obligation and routine. You don’t even speak to Me enough in prayer! You don’t realize that there are things I desire for you to understand, and you can only do so by spending time with Me. I want you to read My Word with excitement and live it out that you may find life and peace. If only you believed how powerful My Word really is and that it is alive- you would hold it in your hands for the treasure that it is and you would never want to put it down! Beloved, if only you made time for Me! Did it ever occur to you that I long to hear your voice? I long for us to speak as someone longs to hear the voice of their lover. Will you make time for me and not just let days pass you by without seeking Me? Yes, the world you live in is fast and restless, but I made your heart for rest and fulfillment. YOU NEED ME. Draw near to Me! Before you’ll make the first step in getting close, I’ll be closer to you than ever before! There are things I need you to change that I may replace them with My Truth and righteousness, but you need me in order to know what you need to do. Beloved, life is meant to be challenging, yet breath-taking at the same time and I want you to experience the thrill of hope as I help you overcome this world. Even as I help you overcome yourself. Only through Me you can overcome! My mercy has no end and My love for you is bigger than the sky you see above and all around you. I’ll be waiting. Every single day of your life, but don’t make the tragic mistake of not coming to Me now! You’re robbing yourself of so much. I DON’T WANT YOU TO MISS OUT ON LIFE. There is a love story waiting for you! Come..I LOVE YOU.

Are you unhappy?

Complete surrender is the key to finding the life you’ve been looking for.

I can vividly remember the day when I experienced salvation. The day when I died to myself and was resurrected to life in Christ Jesus. The day when I lost my life in order to find it. It was the day when the old was made new, completely new! On that day, I realized how filthy I was and how much I needed His salvation. I needed to be forgiven, to feel the freedom that comes from it surging through my veins! Oh, how beautiful that day was! To have the weight of the sin I was carrying taken off my shoulders!!! To surrender all that I was to the One who carried the cross in my place and who was made sin so that I might become His righteousness! I could have never done on my own what Christ did for me on that cross! I will never be able to fully understand the beauty and mystery of it and I want to keep the memory close to my heart forever! This life is like an ocean, with waves hitting against the shore of our heart in magnificent force. Sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the midst of it all; to overlook what Christ has done on our behalf and the life that we found in Him. It was through complete surrender that we found life in the first place, yet we don’t live lives completely surrendered to Christ anymore. The world around us has a way of making us “numb” to the effect of the cross. It’s not that the cross is of no effect anymore, because the power of it is stronger than anything else in this world! It’s just that we often become part of the world instead of letting God change the world through us. I’ve noticed that we can become a little too “comfortable” in our salvation and instead of living in it every day of our lives, we can so easily let sin creep in. This can take the form of a worldly mindset that shouts to us and begs us to focus all our attention and time on us instead of on Christ and what He wants to do in our lives. Instead of conforming ourselves to the image of Christ, we tend to conform ourselves to the image of this world. I’ve seen this happen in my own life and it happens in a very subtle way. If we don’t immerse ourselves in the Word of God and spend time in His presence through prayer, how can we constantly renew our hearts and minds in order to allow the Spirit of God to lead us on the path that we should follow? We wonder why we don’t feel as close to God as we used to feel in the beginning. Our focus has shifted. It used to be God, but now it’s become so many other things. We try to fit God in our lives, instead of giving Him full control and building our lives around Him. He is not our first love anymore. He just isn’t! Look at the way we spend our time and what consumes us. Are we devoted to God or ourselves? Are we starving our flesh or are we feeding it? If we feed our sinful nature, we starve the spirit; it’s just the way it works. When we sin, do we confess our sins and repent of them while turning away or do we let sin over sin accumulate in our lives until our sensitivity to the truth fades more and more? Do we allow Christ to be Lord over our hearts or are we serving our own desires and ambitions? We need to let Him renew our hearts and minds. Like a book that’s been long-forgotten on an old library shelf, so have we forgotten about our hearts and what the finger of God wrote on the pages of our life. We have forgotten that the hands of the One who wrote the story of the universe picked up the old and dusty book of our lives and with a gentle blow He dusted us off of our sinfulness and filled us with life. He erased everything and rewrote the story of our life. The pages of our heart became white and new. God wants to keep it that way. Let’s allow God to make our hearts new and pure again! There is nothing in this life that is as strong and powerful as the power of Christ to forgive sin and make everything new! God longs to be close to you and He’s been waiting for you to surrender your heart completely to Him in the same way that you surrendered when you first accepted Christ as Lord over your life. You found your life by losing it and the true Christian life is lived in a constant and complete abandon to God. We are focused on so many different things, when our sole focus should be our God! We try to make life work on our own and become so frustrated when we find out that we can’t make it work, yet we still don’t realize that everything we need will be given to us if we seek Him FIRST- with our whole heart. Give God everything! Your time, energy, dreams, all that you are! Life, freedom, fullness, blessing, joy, peace, stability, balance, wholeness, and true fulfillment will be yours.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 (NLT)