I shouldn’t sulk when denying my flesh
I should take joy in suffering for Christ
Submission under God’s mighty hand is victory, not defeat
God’s plans are infinitely better than anything I could ever come up with
God is my provider; however, I need to approach Him and ask of Him expectantly
Waiting is an active process; my part is expectation and following God’s directions
Monthly Archives: October 2008
Sow What?
First off, I mean sow in the sense of reap and sow and not sow in the sense of a pig. Not the sow that rhymes with cow.
I’ve been faithfully sowing into God’s Kingdom via tithes and offerings to various things at various times. However, I am still struggling financially to even pay for my own things. I firmly believe that I need to give 10% of my firstfruits to the church. And I do that. I do it gladly and with joy.
However, I am living in a world that does not live by God’s principles. I am living in a country that is receiving the brunt of God’s judgment because this nation has been disobedient, prideful and idolatrous.
I am living by the Kingdom economy, but the world economy still has an effect on me.
So this is my way of expressing myself because America’s disobedience affects me personally. I will still continue to sow into the Kingdom. I know I am blessed and will be blessed for doing so. I am faithfully waiting to reap the fruit of my sowing.
I’ve Become What I Aspire Not To Be
I’ve become what I aspire not to be: a lax blogger.
I love surfing around and reading peoples’ blogs. It’s exciting to me to read about all the goings on in the lives of my friends.
Somewhere along the line, I got off track with updating my own blog.
I’ll be frank with you…I think it’s cheesy and cliche to not blog for a really long time and then come back and write a blog about how bad of a blogger you are. And yet, here I am doing that very thing.
It’s amusing to me that people admit things like that. People who read the blog are already aware that the person has not blogged in a long time. So why talk about it? Although, I also find it gratifying to read someone’s web apology for a lack of blogging. *shrug*
Moving on. What have I learned lately? Well, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that humility is a personal responsibility. “What’s that mean, Lindsay?” It means that humility is something that always needs to be tended. It always needs to be cultivated. It always needs to be pursued. It always needs to be monitored. It always needs attention.
To me, responsibility means all those things I listed above. Humility can’t be apathetic because apathetic humility leads to pride. A lack of care for humility leads to an excess growth of pride.
For all of my life as a commited follower of Christ, I’ve struggled with humility. I would either be totally lacking in confidence, thinking of myself as totally unworthy of anything. Or, I’d be completely overconfident and haughty. Instead of finding balance in the middle, I’d teeter and fall from one side to the other.
After I moved to TN, I started attending New Song Christian Fellowship. My pastor teaches that “humility is confidence properly placed in Christ.” So, with humility there can be confidence, but it needs to be placed in Christ. Not in the flesh.
That makes it so simple. It’s not about shoving down confidence. It’s not about bolstering confidence. It’s about placing it in the right place. When I fully realize that God is the One who will never fail and He is the only thing worthy of total faith and devotion, that brings me low. Not low in a bad way. But just lower in comparison to His awesome glory and splendor. It elevates Him above me and puts me in my place. A place of humble submission to His direction and plan. It also takes the pressure off me to portray a flawless facade.
Back to personal responsibility. My perspective of that has changed. I used to be focused on keeping up appearances or scrambling to make myself not feel worthless. Now I realize it’s my responsibility to stay humbly submitted under God’s hand.
That pretty much sums it up. I’ve learned other things, but that concept is resounding the loudest in my head. Hopefully it will create a ping in your head, too.