Who I Am In Christ Devotionals

“As many as I love, I rebuke and discipline. So be zealous and repent.”  Revelation 3:19 Some Christians say that God does not discipline believers.  And I get where they are coming from.  They are wanting people to come freely to Jesus without fear. So they present God as only being nice. Arms out. Hugs. Everything is happy. So lets say that someone buys this idea that God does not discipline his children. Now, something bad happens.  Something so bad that the believer is miserable for a long, long time. Now what do we have? The answer from the people who say God does not discipline his Children is that God didn’t do that to the person; Satan did it.  Now, we have a bigger problem I think. Now we have an almighty God that supposedly loves me, but he can’t keep something miserable from happening to me.  How about this: God loves me. And he disciplines me.  He disciplines me because He loves me. He saved me, sure. And that is marvelous. But now that I am His, He molds me. He works on me

For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves. In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Colossians 1:9-14 *I learned how to do this from Donald Whitney’s Book Praying the Bible . I am a man who can easily pray shallow prayers. Over and over. Snore.  And it’s not that they should be filled with poetry and King James language like I used to hear in my youth when people pray

I cry aloud to the Lord ; I plead aloud to the Lord for mercy. I pour out my complaint before him; I reveal my trouble to him.  Psalm 142:1-2 (CSB) The Lord expects me to seek Him out. And He knows I’m not an avid seeker. He knows He needs to poke me sometimes to get me moving. And these pokes come in the form of everything that happens in the tapestry of time and space. Everything that happens is directly a part of His plan.  Sometimes things feel so incredibly bad. In this Psalm, David is hiding in a cave. Now, let’s remember the history. Samuel the prophet anointed David while Saul was still king. And God began to bless David. It seemed like everything David put his hand to turned out right. He killed the giant. He was victorious in battle . (See 1 Samuel) Then, things went incredibly bad. And Saul, the still reigning king, started to hunt David down to kill him.  David hid out in caves with his mighty men. And he got depressed. The prophet had told him he would reign, and here he i