Steve to Earth - Encouraging you the way I like to be encouraged.

Navigation

Categories

My Photos on flickr

Posts Tagged ‘weakness’

A broken heart with a gaping hole

Father of divine transformations –

I’m waving the white flag, and I’m laying down my arms. I’m disabling my defense systems, and I’m letting down the drawbridge of my defeated heart. I surrender, Father.

I’m weary of holding up the facades … hiding behind the masks … and pretending that I am strong in hopes of deflecting the attention of others away from my wounded, insecure heart.

I’m collapsing at Your feet, Lord … not as one bearing expensive gifts and multiplied talents … but as a defeated soldier … a fallen star … a hunter caught in his own net.

I am naked … bare … and devastated. My kingdoms are destroyed … my high places are leveled. I come simply bringing a broken heart with a gaping hole … my perennial weakness. I am bankrupt of confidence … and ravaged by the lusts that vainly promise to fill the cavity and hide its ugliness … only to further the damage and intensify the pain.

Save me from the destruction of my soul and from the debilitating sin that controls me when I resist Your call and Your companionship. Forgive me, Father, and heal me. I need Your mercy. I need Your grace. I need Your Son to fill the Christ-shaped canyon in my heart. Complete me, Father, in Jesus.

Teach me to embrace my crumbled confidence so that in my weakness Your power may be perfected. Give me grace to resist the enticement of false confidence, and fill me with true confidence that flows only from You. As You convert me … as You make me new … create in me the attitude … the actions … and the words that will give courage to the wounded hearts I encounter each day. Through my weakness, please bless them with strength.

Father, please make my deepest weakness the source of my greatest ministry. I trust You with my complete transformation. I lift this prayer to You through Jesus. Please let these things be so. Amen.

~s

Growing closer to Jesus in Tulsa

I love vacation days … learning … and being encouraged to strengthen my relationship with Jesus. I really love it when those three things come together as they did last week. I spent three days at a workshop in Oklahoma, and the following is a just a sprinkling of teachings I heard that made a lasting impression on my heart.

» Salvation isn’t just about solving my spiritual legal problems and getting to Heaven. It’s about learning to live like Jesus here and now.

» Jesus was faithful to His Father while being in sync with the prevailing culture of His time. To truly be like Jesus, I need to do the same.

» If I am struggling with temptation and sin, and I have God in my life, imagine how much those who do not have God are struggling.

» Jesus put me here to heal hurts. If hurting people don’t break my heart, something’s wrong.

» Life is hard. Hard is normal. If courage required the absence of difficulties, none of us would live boldly.

» Every day that I’m alive is a special occasion.

» People repeatedly reject a message of good news if they don’t trust the messenger.

» Being real is not denying my struggles and my weaknesses but owning them and learning how to deal with them. Real church is a place where being me is okay as I struggle to become like Him. It’s a place where I admit who I am while I am on the way to who I am going to become.

» I can impress people from a distance, but I can only have a positive influence on them up close.

» Weakness creates unity, compassion and interdependence in the body of Christ. Arrogance creates competition.

» God has incredible dreams and plans for people that they’ve never heard of. I have to create an environment where those dreams can come true.

» My sin is what’s keeping the church from being what it’s supposed to be.

~s

 

Search For:

Special Entries

Support

friend

favorite