Reduce me to love (Chapter 1)

I am reading this book called “Reduce me to love”. It has a lot of really good points about love and what we are really searching for. Here are some foot notes I made from the first chapter.

~Love is the energy of life. It is what motivates people to get up each day and keep going.

~Love gives people purpose and meaning. The world is looking for love, but they are really looking for God, because God is love.

~People look for fulfillment in life in different ways that may seem good at first, but often leave them feeling frustrated, disapointed and empty. Only by walking in love (putting love into action by continually reaching out to other and making an effort to show them love through various acts of kindness) can they find the true fulfillment they are so desperately seeking.

~Love is the trademark of the Christian

~True power and success is love

~ We must have our minds renewed to what love really is. It is not a feeling we have; it is a decision we make…a decision to treat people the way Jesus would treat them.

~1 Corinthians 14

¹EAGERLY PURSUE and seek to acquire [this] love [make it your aim, your great quest]; and earnestly desire and cultivate the spiritual endowments (gifts), especially that you may prophesy (^[a]interpret the divine will and purpose in inspired preaching and teaching).

~All of us must not only learn about love but also seek, pursue & acquire it, because God word bodly tells us that without it we are totally nothing.

~love is the universal language; everyone understands it. Even though the people of a remote village in india or Africa may not understand the language of the missionary who is sent to the, they can understand kindness, warmth and a caring attitude.

~Love never fails….(1corinthians 13:8)

~love can melt the hardest heart, it can heal the wounds of the broken heart and it can quiet the fears of the anxious heart.

~It is impossible to give to others something you do not have yourself.

Well that is all for the first chapter. You think my footnotes are good? The book is EVEN better! I wanted to put the whole chapter on here lol. Well I hope you all enjoyed! Come back for chapter 2 tomorrow. 

random thought

Wouldn’t it be nice if God wrote me a letter and told me everything he wanted me to do with my life? I hate playing the guessing game sometimes. God does make things clear to me a lot of times, and then sometimes I have wax in my ears and it’s hard to hear him! All I can do is pray for Gods will to be done in my life and know that He is on my side! Dessions….dessions…..*sigh*

Sick days

Man it is so hard being sick!   I love the snow but I HATE cold weather!! Does anyone else have to deal with pain during the winter time? I have arthritis from my jaws all the way down to my toes and I just have been having such a hard time moving in the morning and at night with this weather.  And it’s not only the weather, One day I had bleeding for no reason at all…I was just bleeding out of my hands and arm and I could not find the reason why! I hate when weird things happen like that and  never get an answer why.

I know a lot of people see my strong side but everyone needs to know I DO have a weak side to me!! lol…  Here you can see part of that weak side…

 I am so tired of having to wait on disability!! I am so tired of always being sick!! I am so tired of Doctors looking at me like if I make things up, I am so tired of not being able to do things and people think I am just pretending to be sick to get out of things but at the same time I am tired of everyone putting that lable on me as the sick person. I am so tired of everyone reminding me that I am sick! I am so tired of not being able to move and grab things when I want to, I am so tired of not being able to  see out of my right eye, I am so tired of walking and then all of a sudden I lose the use of my legs, I am so tired of not being able to go to sleep because my spine hurts, I am so tired of not being able to drive and get to places by myself!! I am so tired of having DR BILLS!!! I am so tired of pain in every inch of my body, I am so tired of having 12different meds to take!! I am so tired of not being able to work and NEVER HAVING MONEY!!, I am so tired of not being able to be the kind of housewife I want to be, I am so tired of watching everyone move right along with their life and I AM NOT ABLE TO! I am so tired of watching people waste their life away for no reason and I CANT move on with life!!  I am so tired!!!!!! ALL THE TIME I AM TIRED!!!!! 

 Okay, there you have it…I am tired….but I am so glad I have a God that is always there for me and he knows what I am going through, just like he knows what you are going through. He can help us with anything if we just let him take control of our lives! He loves us no matter what we think. We go through things for a reason and we have to remember to praise God in those storms!! It’s so much easier to praise him through easy times in our life, but its harder to praise him through storms like my storm above. We are here on this earth to praise him, we aren’t even here to have the perfect life. If everything was perfect all the time why would we need him?? I know that sounds bad but its the truth! If you are having a hard time in your life please praise the Lord, If you are having good times in your life Praise the Lord!! Have faith that he is going to take care of us. Thats why I am able to wake up everyday and get out of bed…even though it takes me like 5hours to move without pain! I know God is there through it all!! And he is never going to leave me!    

Stay alert to satan’s seductions and to the songs in his town squares

I have been doing the “Daniel” study with Beth Moore, and it is so awesome!!! I dont feel like this study is only for woman, I would love to see men study this as well!!  

 If you read Revelation 17-18 You will see they are talking about babylon and how seductive babylon (this world)  is.

Even our music is seductive!!!  Did you know that they play a certin way a certin tune to make that song get stuck in your head, have you ever noticed that you didn’t like a song but find it getting stuck in your head anyway!!  And sometimes you end up liking  the stupid song…..Thats because of this suductive world we live in!!!  Notice that Kohls ALWAYS has sales…hmm….if they were really having all these sales they wouldn’t be making any money…what they do is bump up the prices “mark it down” (to the real price) and call it a sale!! There it is again…the suductive babylon world! 

 Gross excess catapults us so far into our wants that we cease to reconginze needs! 

 Beth Moore brought this passage that Eugene Perterson wrote….

“We try to get <joy> through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of anothers imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture.  Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal. But that kind of joy never penetrates our lives, never changes our basic constitution. The effects are extremely temporary-a few minutes, a few hours, a few days at most. When we run out of money, the joy trickles away.”

And he is sooooo right about all of that!!  We really need to repent and ask God to forgive us for falling for this spell these “merchants” has cast on us. We need to ask God to open our eyes to it and to give us the wisdom and the strength to cope with this world we live in according to HIS will and not the will of this world.

Beth Moore “From Satan’s first entrance on the stage of the earth in Genesis 3, he’s tried to convince believers that God is holding out on them. Cheating them. Satan tries to suggest that this life is all we can be sure of: live is sacrificially and we’ve lost it all. He mocks , “how gullible- how stupid- could you be? live it up while you’ve got a chance!” As we walk up and down the sidewalks of our present babylons, stay alert to his seductions and to the songs in his town squares. In reality, Satan is the cheater and babylon is his queen, offering false fulfillment for any taker. Buyer beware.”

update

Hey everyone,

  I know it’s been a long while since I have wrote a blog…SORRY!!  It’s not that I ran out of things to talk about, I NEVER DO THAT haha. I have just been pondering a lot of things lately…ya know those times when you have so much going on in your head that you really need to sort through them before you actually talk about them so that it all come’s out right. Well I am still in the middle of doing some sorting but I thought I would write everyone an update on things that have been going on.

  God had blessed me and my husband this weekend by making a way for us to go to an awesome leadership converence. We left Thusday afternoon and got back on Sat evening and we were not ready to come back home! God really spoke to us and narrowed down the path he wants us to take. We are going to serve in our church for however long God wants us there, as Youth/Sunday School/Nursery leaders and eventually make it into the mission field. That has been on our hearts for a really long time and we really didn’t make an effort to go because I have been sick…. But we are believing  God is going to heal me very soon and we will be able to go.  We are just asking for prayers that we wont lose focus and we can just do Gods will in our lives.

  Well I have had a pretty long day today, and I have to get up early to go to the doctor (fun fun)…So Im going to go ahead and end this now. I hope everyone has a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving!!!!!!!  *eat LOTS of turkey!!!*

Words from “The Husband” kinda,

Here’s some plagiarism for ya, it should get you spiritual juices going.

Appropriate Response to the Emerging Church Movement

© By David Kowalski

Looking out of the windows of our homes we respond indifferently to the presence of dirt on the ground. Should that dirt makes its way into our homes, however, our feelings change and we proceed to sweep it out because it does not belong there. In John 2:14-16 [1] , after passing passively through the streets of Jerusalem, Jesus’ passivity gave way to angry expression as he proceeded to sweep clean the house of God. John says in verse 15 that when Jesus saw the money changers “He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple.” It seems that while God opposes all error and sin, he is especially passionate about expressing this opposition when error and sin come into his house and when his children are affected. In Galatians 5:12 Paul models the heart and actions of a servant of God responding to an internal corruption of the church as he says “I wish that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.” The intensity of his response is dictated by his zeal for God and his love of the Church. Servants of God feel the inappropriateness of God’s house being defiled. God’s shepherds feel responsible for guarding the flock. This divinely inspired, holy passion compels an appropriate response when God’s house is trashed and his people are deceived.

Unfortunately, many evangelical shepherds, who have passed from a prophetic to a professional model of ministry too readily welcome wolves into God’s flock if those wolves are decked out in the latest, trendiest garb. The cutting-edge heresy that is being welcomed by many Evangelicals today is known as the Emerging Church movement. While many participants in this movement undoubtedly know and love Christ, and while many of their criticisms of evangelical tendencies are well founded, their concessions to relativism inevitably lead them downward to serious doctrinal and moral deviations that they bring into the household of God.

In the Arms of Jesus

I am sure you are all wondering why my main blog title is “In The Arms Of Jesus”. Well… When I was like 9 years old I had a dream. In that dream I was walking in the desert and I looked really sick and Jesus came and picked me up and he held me in his arms and we started to walk towards some people. They looked rough and you could tell they needed Jesus in their life. Jesus put me down and I walked over to the crowd of people and grabbed someone’s hand and walked them over to the Lords side. I was still really sickly looking and then Jesus picked me up, and I saw the same thing happen over and over again, but each time it was a different person.

I have been sick with Sarcoidosis since I was born. I had always seen it as a stronghold in my life and I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do or the things I felt like the Lord had called me to be/do. As I got older the Lord reminded me of that dream a couple of times. Then I started to notice a little pattern!! No, Sarcoidosis is not who I am, and it is not a stronghold in my life either!! I do know I have this disease for a reason and I want to glorify the Lord in ALL things!! Including this awful disease. I know through this disease God will use me to bring people to him.

My soul finds rest in God alone; my salvation comes from Him. He alone is my rock and my salvation; He is my fortress, I will never be shaken. (Psalm 62:1-2)