Don't Stop Believing - Search for the mountain top

Let’s face it. Life by itself is just hard. The world just makes it that way. Life as a Christian, in this world, is even harder. 

There are so many competing priorities, responsibilities and so many opportunities to fail at getting it right. It is enough to drive, even the most “got it together” person crazy; let alone someone who is just barely hanging on trying to make it through today. Which, I reckon, if we are honest with ourselves, is just about the lot of us. 

See, lately I have been in the midst of these struggles, not my own either, seems most everyone I know is facing some sort of trial or challenge in their life. They are people that I love and care about and I hate seeing them struggle. Being limited in what I can do to help doesn’t make it any easier. At the end of the day all ya can do is pray sometimes. So that is what I do. Fervently.

They are not the only people who struggle though, we all do. No one escapes struggle.

  

As I was sharing this with a friend of mine, she agreed about being around those who also were suffering but she did make mention of seeing a mountain top off in the distance. Well, that comment has been just percolating and steeping in my mind all day today. Tonight, as I was driving home I was rocking out to some Journey and it hit me.

That is it. Journey had it so right “Don’t Stop Believing”. Just don’t stop.

You can do this don’t give up on it. You will survive this.

 

Sometimes, when we are in the valleys of our lives, we need to be reminded to look up every once and awhile.  We all seem to forget that it is just that. A valley, and off in the distance is a mountain peak. It can’t be a valley if there are not peaks right? Just look up and remember that it won’t always be like this. If that is where you are at tonight/today (or whenever it is that you have stumbled across this), then I want to suggest that what your believing in or hearing, is a LIE.

It will not always be like this!

Change is certain and inevitable. Furthermore, we can drive change! Granted, sometimes it’s a little slow and painful but it is change nonetheless.    

Dream.

Dream big.

We serve the most powerful being on the planet who wants you to seek the mountaintops. 

Do you know where God lives? Really, I mean do you realize that He is not on that mountaintop? 

Nope.

Psalm 34:18 says “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” NIV

Right now... He is close to you. He lives in the valley because that is where He is needed the most. That is where we are. He wont do it for us, we have to be positively believing that good things can and will happen. Don't stop believing!

Your struggle, your challenge, whatever you are facing right now will be better or worse by what you think about it. I was told for years that it was all in my head……and ya know what. One day I realized that was true. It was all in my head. At first I thought, "Great, I’m not playing with a full deck.......my hamster wheel is in there but the hamster has gone on break"!

Here is the truth that set me free. It was in MY head. MY head, which I have 100% control over. My thoughts are my own and I can CHOOSE to think whatever I want. It is all about my perspective of my current situation. There is so much power in what I think. That is MY power. Mine. Power mind you, not weakness, not helpless but POWER. So I decided I was done with being down. I was still in a valley but I didn’t have to walk through it with my head down. I decided to look up and I saw the mountain top. You my friend, have that same POWER.

  

Don’t forget to keep looking up! Don’t stop believing!

Take time and start listening to what it is your thinking. We all have what is referred to as “self talk”, the things that constantly run through our head.  What are you saying to yourself about your situation? Is it positive or negative?

Proverbs 23:7 For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he... KJV

We believe what we tell ourselves. When we believe it, we then feel it. When we feel it we begin acting in ways that support those thoughts. It affects our behavior. It is inevitable. You can’t change that truth but you can believe and understand its principles you can use it for good. More importantly, you can stop using it to hurt yourself. 

What you think becomes what you feel and what you feel becomes your behavior.

Thoughts---------> feelings-------->behavior 

Look at Proverbs 23:7 again. What I think in my heart I become.

You have a choice. Right here and right now. You can walk away from this devotional and forget about it and continue living as you are OR you can begin to monitor your-self talk…monitor what you think and start changing it. It takes practice but you can learn to do it. 

Paul tells us how in 2^nd Corinthians 10:5 NIV

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

 

Take captive EVERY thought. Webster defines captive as “taken and held as or as if a prisoner of war”. So you first think about what you’re thinking about; you grab it (write down if you have to) and then you compare that thought with TRUTH. Jesus says, in John 14:6 that HE IS THE TRUTH. So hold that thought up to the light of Christ, compare it to what God says about you. Is what your thinking the truth? I bet for a lot of you, if you’re like me, you just might find you have a bunch of bogus thoughts floating around in your head. 

It is time to clean house. 

When you find a bad thought or belief about yourself, you need to replace it with an opposite truth. Don't leave a void. Remove the bad, replace it with good. For example, for years, I felt that I was not worthy because of weakness. Therefore, when I would catch myself thinking something along those lines I quickly replaced it with this verse:

2 Timothy 1:7 NIV

For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.

I replaced the tape that played in my head. See how it is specific and targeted directly against the lie that I was believing. I felt weak and not worthy. That wasn’t true. God made me with a spirit of POWER and self-discipline.It just takes practice and time. 

You can do this. 

Check out 2^nd Corinthians 10:3-7 from The Message. 

The world is unprincipled. It’s dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity.   

God has given you tools to fight with; don’t stop believing. Look up.

I have one last truth to share with you. 

You are free from whatever chains have bound you. You are free. It has  power over you no more.

One of the lies that Satan wants to constantly reinforce is that you are still bound. He wants you to think you are still a prisoner. It works like this. 

You know how they say when someone loses a limb they still can feel it, not only can they still sense it is there but it hurts. They experience pain. Phantom limb syndrome exists in 60-80% of individuals who have lost any body part. This includes arms, legs, breasts, eyes, and even teeth.

Consider this as well. Divorcees still, on occasion reach out in the middle of the night for their spouse, years after they have left. Now, I don’t experience any phantom limb issues but I can attest to this one. It has happened to me a couple times. It is not always a conscious thing but I do it.

Take these two concepts about sensing something that is gone but we think it is there. Let’s talk about the truth of our freedom. Do we live in it or do we still sense the chains?

 

 In Galatians 5:1 NIV Paul reminds us:

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

So were once prisoners. We were once judged, persecuted, and found guilty by Satan and He decided that we deserved to be bound. Not literally right, no one is walking around bound physically right. But spiritually where we can’t see it, we are. It manifests itself in our lives in all kinds of ways. He has attacked our hearts.

Depression, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, lack of self-confidence, obesity, health issues, mental issues, addiction and etc… These are all things that bind us and keep us from living in our freedom. As Paul would put it, these are the things that burden us in a yoke of slavery.  

I firmly believe that Christ’s death and resurrection was a battle against the dark forces that rule this world, those same forces that chained our hearts. What Christ did was take the keys of the chains that bind us and use them to unlock the locks on our chains. But many of us suffer from symptoms like that of Phantom limb syndrome, we suffer from phantom chain syndrome. We still feel trapped and bound by our thoughts. 

I’m excited to remind of the truth. You are FREE! You no longer are a captive.

Raise up child of God and let the chains of whatever it is that holds you fall down to your ankles and then step out of them. It all starts with your thoughts. This is the first TRUTH you can fall back on. You are free because of what Christ did on the cross.

 

1 John 4:1-6 NIV

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

I know I have covered a lot here but this is so important for you to understand. These are the basic building blocks you need to overcome the things that grip you right now. You don’t have to stay where you are. You do have the power and capability to begin a new journey. 

Don’t stop believing, look up, and take control of your thoughts. You are no longer a slave bound by the judgments of this world. You are new creation, made in the glory of the image of God and you have been set free. Speak it aloud. I am free!

It is the desire of my heart that you find the freedom that is already yours. Let God start restoring your wounded, unbound heart today.

 

Hope - Isaiah 40:28-31

28Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God,

the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He will not grow tired or weary,

and his understanding no one can fathom.

29He gives strength to the weary

and increases the power of the weak.

30Even youths grow tired and weary,

and young men stumble and fall;

31but those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

I love how this verse starts off…… hey man, didn’t you hear? You mean you don’t know? Whoa, let me tell you about our God. He is everlasting, yeah, that’s right; the energizer bunny doesn’t have anything on our God. He doesn’t get tired. He doesn’t get weary. He is God and “God’s got this”. 

Make no mistake; those are physical attributes associated with our human condition. He is not human, he doesn’t get tired or weary. He doesn’t need to take a break and catch his breath. He doesn’t need a moment of silence in order to wrap his head around what we just did. No one can fathom his understanding.

He is our Lord and He is well equipped to take care of us. 

It brings me comfort to know that God doesn’t get weary of my mistakes or my feeble attempts to live within His will. I fail time and time again at “being good”. It is a good thing that the ability to “be good” isn’t one of the boxes that needs a check mark next to it on the admittance to heaven application.  

I do get weary, I do get weak. I’m there right now as a matter of a fact. Having spent the last week recovering from minor throat surgery I find myself weary of the pain that each swallow brings. It is a pain that just doesn’t want to go away and is worse each morning. Yeah, I have some pain medication that dulls the pain but wow. I was not prepared for this at all. I am not myself anymore, no, not until I can eat, speak and drink as I used to. I’m tired and probably dehydrated. My mind is weary.  

I’m not alone this week either, my best friend is working his way through some issues right now too. Yeah, he has been suffering to say the least. We all have been there right? At the bottom, at the end, with nowhere to go. So we just want to quit. We want to walk away from our life, even if only for a moment. I am so proud of him. He just doesn’t want to fake it anymore and is looking to make a stand and make some much needed changes in his life.   

Another new friend is surrounded by death. This past week she found out that her dog has terminal lung cancer. There is no money right now for treatment. Her cat, who has lived to an amazing 17 years has stopped eating and is also close to the end of her days. Her car is also in the shop. She isn’t even driving her own vehicle right now. She has a loner. Yet, she still hopeful. She knows God is with her. She knows that her hope is set in something solid.

This is enough to drag anyone down right? Geesh, life can be so hard and so unforgiving. Here is the thing though, if you asked any of us if we had any hope left at all you would hear a resounding YES! 

We are down but yet we walk with a quiet confident hope that God is working in all these issues.  

Even though our lives have been flipped upside down at this time and we are unsure what will come next we all share one thing. We all have HOPE. 

Not just a general hope either. We don’t sigh and think….well…….maybe……things will work out for the best. We do not resign ourselves to some glib idea that just maybe, if the stars align, things will get better. 

No way, we have a confident hope that our God is working out all things to our benefit. ALL THINGS. Even our mistakes. It is true. 

The rest of today’s passage covers that right? Read it again.  

29He gives strength to the weary

and increases the power of the weak.

30Even youths grow tired and weary,

and young men stumble and fall;

31but those who hope in the Lord

will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

There it is, did you see it? Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

We all get weary from doing life. We all make mistakes and we all fall short of “being good”. If we let it, if we let him, Satan will accuse us and persecute us in these areas. Make a stand. Don’t believe his lies. 

You are a child of God and as such, you have direct access to the source…..

Access to the strength to get by……..

Access to the ability to get up again…….

Access to walk and not be faint……..

Access to run and not be weary…….

Friend, I know your life just doesn’t make sense sometimes. I get it. I am here, as I said, facing today I am a bit lost and a definitely a bit weary. I am tired of hurting and am tired of watching those around me hurt and struggle. But here is the thing.   

I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else with anyone else. This passage is so so true friends. We must maintain our hope. It is essential for us. To live without hope is to not live at all. We do have so much to live for, even in our misery, even in our valleys, even when the odds seem to be stacked against us. We are all capable of having hope. 

Put your hope in the Lord. It will be a sustaining hope.

Living in the NOW.

This cartoon has been hanging on my refrigerator since the fall of 2011. I love the simplicity of the truth it reveals. How true is it that a dog’s favorite time is always now? Sometimes dogs can provide a great example of how we should behave in our faith. I know we are a bit more complex than a dog but come on, look closer, don’t you think that God had some purpose in creating man’s best friend with some specific traits. 

Do you see dogs sitting around concerned about what happened to them when they were a puppy or what is going to happen to them tomorrow? There are no doggie support groups or kennels focused on overcoming fear. They are always living in the moment but yet so dependent on their owners.

How much more should we depend on God in the same way? 

Dogs don’t ever worry about tomorrow and they really don’t care about what just happened. They truly live in the now. Isn’t this what Christ was talking about?

Matthew 6:34 Message - "Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.”

Today, be content with where you are in your walk. Trust in the now of this moment. Trust that God’s promises are true, trust that He is ever continuing His work, in your life. Most of all, don’t ever let go of the HOPE that we all have in Him. 

God’s got this.   

Everyone loves an underdog.

Although the Easter Holiday has become filled with pastels and little cute bunnies the image above displays the real truth behind what happened in history on Good Friday.

The Easter story is a story we all know. Christ was betrayed, beaten, mocked, humiliated and finally crucified; all in front of his followers, his close friends, and even his family.  Three days later, He emerges from His grave free from deaths grip. He has risen!

It is the single most important moment in our faith. It separates the Christian faith from all the other faiths that are or have been in the world. We worship a RISEN Lord. He is alive. All the other faiths are…..well… are based on dead guys. But that is another topic for another day. Today let us focus on two main points in this story. 

The Battle and The Victory.   

This battle was not fantasy

 If you have read the account of Christ’s death maybe you missed the battle. That is OK, I did, and even those who were there did. You can read it again in Mathew 27: 45-53 by clicking here: https://www.youversion.com/bible/111/mat.27.niv

Those who were watching must have been devastated and confused at His death. After all, they believed that He was the Messiah. The Messiah whom the bible foretold, that was going to come and free the Jews. Of course, they expected freedom from the tyrannical reign of the Roman Empire. The fight that was coming, in their eyes, was going to be a physical battle. It didn’t turn out that way did it? I wonder what they thought when Christ died….seemingly without a fight. 

If you were there what would have heard? Maybe it would have sounded something like this.

 “What? He is dead? The Messiah was going to free us! He did not even fight his persecutors. He didn’t even argue with them. Did he speak up for his innocence? Did he fight for his own freedom? Nope, he never argued; no, instead He prayed for them asking God to forgive them. I cannot believe it is over, I cannot believe we lost, I cannot believe we lost this way. There was no fight. There was no battle. He just gave up on us. Oh no, what do we do now?” 

Being crushed by the seeming finality of the defeat they did what most of us would have done. They all ran from the scene, they went home to lick their wounds and hide from what was the most devastating blow to their faith. Their messiah failed. They must have been questioning everything they had learned in those three years of his ministry. 

Hold on though, hold the phone, not so fast. They didn’t recognize the battle, it was only reaching its climax as Christ was drawing closer to giving up His life. Let us take a look at three events that occurred as Christ hung on the cross between those two thieves. 

1. The eclipse  

2. Christ cries out in a loud voice

3. The Earthquake   

1) The eclipse - there was darkness that came over all the land mentioned in verse 45 was first prophesied hundreds of years before. 

Isaiah in 50:10 Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.

Matthew’s Commentary has this to say about the eclipse.

"When earth denied him a drop of cold water, heaven denied him a beam of light; having to deliver us from utter darkness, he did himself, in the depth of his sufferings, walk in darkness, and had no light. During the three hours that this darkness continued, we do not find that he said one word, but passed this time in a silent retirement into his own soul, which was now in agony, wrestling with the powers of darkness, and taking in the impressions of his Father’s displeasure, not against himself, but the sin of man, which he was now making his soul an offering for."
 

Christ, who came to free the captives (us), had to free them from someone right? While the Jews of the time believed that this freedom would be from the Romans, Christ was really freeing us from Satan. He was the force of evil that held the keys and he was not alone. Remember he took 1/3 of the Angels with him when he fell to earth. Paul referred to them in Ephesians 6:12 as…… the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

In this 3-hour period Christ does not speak. Not even a word. It could be that there was a fierce battle being fought, being fought in the darkness. God may have darkened the world to make for a more illustrious battle by giving Satan the opportunity to fight on his own turf. In essence, God could have given Satan the home field advantage so he could be even more than the conqueror. 

2) Christ cries out in a load voice - just before He does give up his last breath Christ “cries out in a loud voice” (v.46) "My God, My God why have you forsaken me"? This, while a cry from Jesus, about His suffering from bearing our sins was also more than that. By this point He was beaten brutally and fatigued from hanging on the cross. Most men, when they are on deaths door do not have the kind of energy or even the physical capability to speak. Let alone cry out in a loud voice. Is it possible that this was a WAR CRY? Meant to send us and Satan a message that Christ was still yet full of strength and that His life in him now was still fully whole. Demonstrating that Christ was fully giving up His life on his own accord.

3) The earthquake. So powerful and violent that it tore the curtain/veil in the temple, it split rocks in half, and it broke open the tombs of many of the holy people. This must have been one mighty blow to the powers of evil. Could it have been the final blow that put Satan down for the count? A hit so hard even the rocks, one of the hardest things on the planet actually split in two.

These three events fill me with excitement about how the battle with Satan was a foot. When Christ was dying on the cross in the flesh, He was fully engaged in battle in the spiritual realm. The whole time he was fully in control and doing everything just as predicted hundreds of years before. He was the ultimate underdog in the eyes of His people. They just didn’t know it yet. Perhaps the most interesting and incredible part of this battle came in the time from His death to the time of His resurrection.

There are not any specific verses in the bible that tells us what happened in that period so we have to speculate. This has lead to a lot of speculation among scholars. You will need to research that on your own, diving a little deeper, and coming up with your own opinion. Let me leave you though, with a piece of scripture that may hold a clue or a reference.

1^st Peter 3:18-20

18For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. 19After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits— 20to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built…….

I think he went to Hell and took the keys off that defeated warden and I praise Him for that.

It is in Him that we have the victory! Thank you Lord Jesus for fighting for my life, despite the fact that I am sinner.

The Victory:

Christ’s death and resurrection can be summed up in one word:

FREEDOM!

Webster defines freedom as the quality or state of being free: as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.

Christ died and rose again so we are no longer constrained in our choice or action.

To put this into perspective let us take a quick moment and look at how people were “forgiven for their sins” before Jesus was crucified. Prior to His sacrifice, the Jewish people had to atone for their sins through the act of animal sacrifice. It happened on the Passover and many times throughout the year.

In particular, one day of the year was set aside. The Day of Atonement established by God and described in Leviticus Chapter 16; was a national holiday for the Jewish people and was not a celebration but rather a day of repentance. God tells Moses that if Aaron enters the room behind the curtain or veil whenever he wants he will die! He then proceeded to give him a list of requirements to meet before he does. No one, other than the high priest (Aaron) could enter the room behind the curtain/veil and only he could do it once a year. The people of the Old Testament did not have direct access to God. They were constrained, almost to the point of death.

Lev 16:2 The Lord said to Moses: “Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come whenever he chooses into the Most Holy Place behind the curtain in front of the atonement cover on the ark, or else he will die. For I will appear in the cloud over the atonement cover.

The curtain used in the tabernacle was not what we typically think of when we think of a curtain. It was massive and acted as a divider or a shield between the holiness of God and sinful man. The curtain was over 6o feet tall and 30 feet wide and was an astonishing three to four inches thick.

Luke 23:45…and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

When Christ died that huge massive curtain which was meant to separate us from God was torn from top to bottom. It was ripped from above. His death gave us access direct access to God!

This is a very exciting time of year for us! Christ’s work on the cross freed us from our bondage, freed us from the limitations and constraints that had existed before His coming. It is worth mentioning again! His death tore the curtain from the ceiling to the floor thus removing the separation between God and us. We can now approach God on His throne. We don’t have to sleek up to the throne in a timid way, with our tail between our legs. No. We can approach God boldly and with confidence. 

Through this act, through this ultimate sacrifice God is sending us in invitation to come to Him.

He loves you. He wants to be in relationship with you. You don’t have to clean up, you don’t have to wear special clothes, you don’t even have to “get it right” before you come. He accepts you where you are right now. Broken. Messy. Hurt. Abandoned. Angry.

Friends, He does not care how you come to Him. He loves you. He will meet you wherever you are. He is knocking. Can you hear Him? Let Him in. 

Now do not think He will leave you there. He loves you WAY TOO MUCH for that. He will want to heal you, He will want change you, and He will ask you to do tough things. He wants to transform you. To make you WHOLE again. He wants to help you find your heart, please let Him. Answer the door, it just might change your life.  

Most importantly, and what moves me the most about our Lord is He will FAITHFULLY LOVE YOU. He does not give up on you, He never leaves you, He never turns from you, and He never, ever, ever, stops loving you. Even when you fail, even when you fall short and make mistakes, even when the whole world seems to have turned their back on you He is there friend.

If you want to dig even deeper I have listed several bible verses below for you to read. I pray that God opens your heart and reveals Himself to you as you read more about Him and His love for YOU! You can check out these versus on His faithfulness and His promises to you. 

Check them out in your bible or online at www.youversion.com  If you don’t own a bible and want one let us know. We can get you a free copy.

God’s Faithfulness to you

Deuteronomy 7:9

1 Corinthians 1:9

Matthew 24:35

Psalm 33:4

Psalm 86:15

John 16:33

1 John 1:9

Romans 5:1-5

1 Thessalonians 5:23

Proverbs 18:24

Hebrews 12:1-2

Malachi 3:17

God’s Promises to you

Jeremiah 29:11

Matthew 11:28-29

Isaiah 40:29-31

Philippians 4:19

Romans 8:37-39

John 14:27

Romans 10:9

Romans 6:23