All God’s Stones reveals to us how we can use and apply Scripture in our everyday lives.
We need to know the Scriptures in order to grow in our relationship with God.
All God’s Stones is a two month study guide consisting of eight chapters. Each chapter ends with a reflection, an exercise to do, a verse to reflect on and a prayer.
It can be used by Churches, Bible Study Groups, youth groups and individuals.
BUY THE BOOK (E-BOOK OR PAPERBACK) http://godspromise.co.za/books.html
My parents got divorced when I was twelve years old. Between the ages of twelve and twenty-six, I saw my father six times. Thereafter, I saw him approximately once a year until two years before he died when he moved to the same town I was living in. I saw him about three or four times a month then and he would often come and stay a few days with us.
We had a very friendly relationship but there was nothing deep about it and he knew almost nothing about me other than the practical aspects of my life. I didn’t know him well enough to share anything intimate with him about my life because I had not spent enough time with him to reach the stage of being able to share deeper things with him. In the two years before he died we never really grew any closer because we just spoke about day to day things.
My relationship with my father reflects what a lot of marriages are like because we do not spend enough time with our spouses. The same can be said about our relationship with God. We will have very superficial relationships with God and our spouses if we do not set time aside to spend with them!
During the first seven years of our marriage, my husband and I grew apart because we hardly spent any time together. He was busy building up his business and I was busy with two young children and we started to live separate lives. Me with the children and him with his business. Needless to say, the marriage ran into difficulty and we eventually had to sit down together and decide to spend more time with each other. It was the only way our marriage would survive.
Too many marriages are ending in divorce nowadays because couples are not spending enough time with each other and with their children. In the majority of marriages, both parents work and the children are looked after by a caregiver. Supper is eaten in front of the television set and nobody talks to each other anymore because they are too busy on Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and whatever other social media there is out there.
A relationship is just like a garden. A garden needs to be watered and fertilized and weeds need to be pulled out on a regular basis. When you neglect to pull out the weeds in your garden they will eventually take over the whole garden, choking the life out of the other plants. In other words, if you want your garden to grow and flourish you need to put aside time to spend in it.
I know of so many couples whose marriages are dying because they have allowed weeds to take over:
Weeds of lack of communication and misunderstandings
Weeds of lack of care and consideration
Weeds of lack of time together
These weeds have taken root in the marriage and are choking it to death. A slow and painful death.
This could all be avoided if couples spent more time watering, fertilizing and weeding their marriages before they reached the stage of being overgrown with thorn trees and thickets!
My relationship with my dad was filled with weeds. My dad happened to be visiting my sister in another town when he fell ill and she brought him home from the hospital and nursed him. A week before he died I went up to visit. He was bedridden and she and I spent almost every moment beside his bed before he died. In fact, the two of us were sitting on either side of his bed holding his hands when he took his last breath and went home to be with his Lord.
During that week, I learned so much about my father. I learned that he was an incredibly gracious man, his thankfulness for everything was overwhelming. Even in dying he was comfortable with himself and with others. His dignity was immense and I witnessed first hand how strong his faith was. In fact, before he died he told us “The Lord is waiting for me. It is time to say goodbye. I am going home.”
As I have reflected on that week in the months after his death I have come to realize that if we would but only spend more time with our spouses and with God there would be far less divorces. We need to make time to grow our marriages.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:33)
By seeking God together as couples our marriages will be restored and they will start to blossom.
Originally published on Start Marriage Right
Why is it that most of us find it almost impossible to forgive ourselves and to forget the shame of our pasts and yet, with the same breath, we acknowledge that we believe that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”?1
Isn’t that incredibly hypocritical of us? Doesn’t that show a major lack of faith on our behalf? God says He forgives our sins and “will remember our sins no more”2 and yet we say we cannot forgive ourselves. How insincere is it of us then to tell other people about this amazing God when we don’t believe a word of what He says ourselves. What right do we have to call ourselves believers in Christ when we are invalidating the very essence of the Christian gospel message by refusing to forgive ourselves?
God “gave you a share in the very life of Christ, for He forgave all your sins, and blotted out the charges proved against you, the list of His commandments which you had not obeyed. He took this list of sins and destroyed it by nailing it to Christ’s cross. In this way God took away Satan’s power to accuse you of sin, and God openly displayed to the whole world Christ’s triumph at the cross where your sins were all taken away”.3
Do I have faith in what Jesus Christ has done? “When I turn to God and by belief accept what God has done, the miraculous atonement by the Cross of Christ instantly places me into a right relationship with God. And as a result of the supernatural miracle of God’s grace I stand justified, not because I am sorry for my sin, or because I have repented, but because of what Jesus has done”4
If I continually feel guilty about the sins I have committed, ashamed about the things I have done, upset about the hurt I may have caused others even after I have asked God to forgive me and made restitution where possible, what kind of witness am I for God? If I am trapped in the sins of the past how do I explain to someone that once they accept Christ as their Saviour they will be set free from sin, the benefits they will reap leads to holiness and the end result is eternal life.5
We need to ask, as the apostles did, Lord “increase our faith”,6 and then start living in God’s grace. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.”7
Once a woman who thought she was having visions from God went to the bishop for advice. He told her that the next time God appeared to her she was to perform a test by which to know that it really was God. She was to ask God what the personal and private sins of the bishop were. A month later she was back and she told the bishop she had done what he had asked.
God had replied “Go tell the bishop that I’ve forgotten all his sins”.8
1 1 John 1:9, The Holy Bible, NIV
2 Hebrews 8:12, The Holy Bible, NIV
3 Colossians 2:13 – 15, Life Application Bible
4 Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, October 28th
5 Romans 6 (paraphrased), The Holy Bible, NIV
6 Luke 17:5, The Holy Bible, NIV
7 Ephesians 2:8 – 9
8 Methods and Practices of Anthony de Mello, Praying Body and Soul
“I have prayed for you…that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32)
….remember to take good care of your faith, for faith is the only way to obtain God’s blessings. Prayer alone cannot bring answers down from His throne, because it is the earnest prayer of one who believes that leads to answers.
Faith is the communication link between heaven and earth. It is on this link of faith that God’s messages of love travel so quickly that even before we ask, He answers. and while we are still speaking, “He hears us” (1 John 5:14).
Faith honours God, and God honours faith.
– Charles H. Spurgeon
I have a friend who is an atheist. We have been friends for close on two decades and during this time we have had many, many discussions about the existence of God. A few years ago we were driving home late at night from a function, and as we turned a corner, there was a car coming straight towards us in our lane. I managed to swerve and avoid a collision and my friend cried out involuntarily “O God, God!!” I parked on the side of the road, turned to her and said “So let me get this straight – you profess that you do not believe in the existence of God and yet when your life is in danger, He is the first person you call out too?”
She jokingly replied “Well, I thought I was about to meet Him face to face!”
This friend has known me long enough to know that my faith is not based on a religion but based on a relationship with the risen Lord, Jesus Christ. God is alive and well and lives in our home and in my life! She was once present when a group of ladies met for tea at my house. One of the subjects of conversation was “who wears the pants in our homes?” The wife or the husband? Who is the actual head of the home?
Bear in mind that, apart from my friend, the rest of us were all Believers so Biblically speaking our husbands should be the head of the home! Amy, who was six at the time, happened to be passing through the kitchen where we were sitting and one of the ladies turned to her and asked “Amy, who is the boss in your house?” (Personally, I thought this was a horrible question to ask a six year old but relaxed when I heard Amy’s reply).
She paused on her way out of the kitchen, answered “God!” and carried on going.
It was a revelation to me to know that our children acknowledged God as a reality in their lives. My ongoing prayer for them is that as they grow older they will always know God as a reality.
This friend has often said to me “I wish I could believe in God like you do. I wish I had someone that I could talk to like you talk to Jesus”. There is a longing in her heart for something more and it is a longing that was placed there by God Himself before time began.
For me C.S. Lewis sums it up beautifully! He wrote, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men (and woman I might add!) feel sexual desire: well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
Dallas Willard said that the four great questions humans must answer are:
What is reality? What is the good life? Who is a good person? And, how do you become a good person?
He sought to answer those questions and to actually live the answers.
He believed, as I do, that no-one has ever answered those questions as well as Jesus did.
His definition of a disciple was “anyone whose ultimate goal is to live as Jesus would live if he were in their place.”
I can speak to Jesus as a friend because He states in John 15 “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” Jesus laid down His life for me. He goes on to say “I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you”.
My prayer for my friend is that one day soon she will meet and accept my friend, Jesus, as her friend.
The Bible is as relevant today as it was when it was first written!
All God’s Stones is a two month study guide consisting of eight chapters. Each chapter ends with a reflection, an exercise to do, a verse to reflect on and a prayer.
It can be used by Churches, Bible Study Groups, youth groups and individuals.
“Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person to-day and to-morrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine,
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!(From Letters & Papers from Prison)
I have always identified with the above verse in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem “Who am I?”
When I doubt myself, when I am fearful or worried, when I feel like a hypocrite and behave in a way that is unacceptable – this verse echoes in my mind.
Paul says almost the same thing in his letter to the church in Rome!
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (Romans 7)
Ever felt like that? That you are at war with yourself?
You want to love God with all your heart but you are afraid to trust Him
You want to grow into the person God created you to be but you doubt that will ever happen in this lifetime
You want to give up drinking but don’t
You want to stop gambling but continue
You want to stop being a comfort eater but are always putting food in your mouth
You want to be able to control your temper but are always ‘losing’ it
In the end it comes down to a matter of faith – either I believe what God says about me or I don’t. If I don’t my destructive behavior will continue.
God says: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death…the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace”.
Are you fleeing from a victory that God has already achieved in your life?
In the end only we can make the decision to set our minds on Christ, to want Him more than our doubts and fears.
God does not expect us to do this by ourselves…”the Spirit helps us in our weakness…the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will”.
And then there is the incredible knowledge “that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. For those God foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son”. (Romans 8)
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God…we were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.”
Marianne Williamson
How I feel about turning 18
A poem by Amy Curry
There are many reasons I don’t want to turn 18.
One, turning 18 means becoming an adult and I don’t like the way adults seem to look without seeing, inhale without breathing and hear without listening.
Two, I don’t want to finish high school and go to university, to be honest, I never wanted to even start high school and people are expecting me to go and study after years of this repetitive, uniformed stale air in my life where all my choices were dictated to me.
Three, I don’t actually want my own choices, take them back. I don’t want to make the wrong decision, I don’t want people to depend on me like a tree depends on the strength of the soil and the nest depends on the strength of the branch and the bird depends on…
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With reference to my blog of yesterday https://noelene2014.com/2015/06/04/stop-drop/
This morning we arrived at the ‘STOP & DROP’ zone to find a car parked in the middle of two parking spaces which meant that one could not park at the back or the front of the car! No driver in sight!
I thought God was giving me a chance to redeem myself so I mentioned that I was going to park and wait for the driver to come out and then ‘politely’ ask them whether they could read and did they know that the sign said ‘STOP & DROP’ and would they like me to explain to them exactly what that entailed? My older daughter was horrified. I informed her I was being facetious but that I was going to wait and inform the person it was a ‘STOP & DROP’ zone. I would be polite.
She informed me that there…
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Sometimes the words of my mouth and my behaviour are totally incompatible!
This fact was highlighted, yet again, this morning. We have three daughters, ranging in ages from thirteen to nineteen, therefore this is my thirteenth consecutive year at the same primary school. Just outside the main school gates there is a ‘Stop & Drop’ zone. You stop in this area just long enough for your child to kiss you goodbye, get out the car, take her suitcase out of the boot, give you a little wave, turn and walk into the school and then you drive off. For thirteen years I, along with other parents, have been receiving notices from the school, on a regular basis, highlighting this fact. There are few things more frustrating then arriving outside the school to find cars parked in this area. You then have to drive a distance away to find a safe parking spot…
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UNDER A JUNIPER TREE 