Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever…Give thanks to the God of Heaven. His love endures forever.” – Psalm 136:1, 26
Today is a day we set aside to give thanks, to fill our hearts with gratitude and take the time to appreciate our family, friends and all that we have. Despite the ups and downs of this past year, we pause and take a moment to remember that God is good. Even through the hardships we are currently facing, God is still good. He is with you and will uphold you with His love.
We give thanks because His love for us endures always. He is God yesterday, today and forever. He has made us in His image and we are His children. His faithfulness to us never ends. His love for us started at the beginning of time, it broke into the world the night that Jesus was born, and He demonstrated His love for us when His son Jesus went to the cross.
Not only did He love us then, He loves us now, and He will love us tomorrow. His love endures forever. His love lasts, it remains firm, it is unyielding. In a world where love seems to come and go with no real certainty, knowing this kind of secure love from God brings us so much peace and joy. Romans 8:38-39 says in Christ, there is absolutely nothing that can separate us from God’s love.
As we reflect on this past year, we can see the many ways God has shown us His love through the people in our lives, His blessings and provision, through answered prayers, and even unanswered ones. We can look back and see His loving touch in so many details of our lives.
Thank you God for loving us with an unending love. It is hard to grasp “forever”, but we are thankful for your love that is both ancient and new every morning. As we reflect on the ways you show your love to us each and every day, we give you thanks. In Christ, Amen.
Do you ever find it hard to be grateful this time of year? Not that you aren’t sincerely thankful deep down, but experiencing the emotion of gratitude in a real way can be challenging during this busy season. Especially when the pressure is on to do all of the holiday things, while keeping your sanity and trying to live #blessed.
“There is so much to be grateful for” echoes in my mind as I engineer the schedule to fit school conferences, work meetings and planning sessions. At the last minute I might throw caution to the wind and schedule a coffee date because miraculously, I still have friends who get me and my weird life.
I am sincerely, truly grateful, but I’m also kinda tired. When the day to day wears me out, it is all too easy to drift into self-preservation mode. It’s hard to be thankful, because my blessings also make me want to take a nap.
I was recently reading in Matthew 14:13-21 about the miracle of Jesus feeding a crowd of five thousand people. While many may be familiar with this story, something I hadn’t noticed is what happens right before it. Jesus gets word that his cousin, John the Baptist, was dead, cruelly executed by King Herod. Jesus slips away to a solitary place, no doubt to pray and grieve and regroup, but before His boat even lands at his destination, the crowds that had been following Him, caught up and were pressing in on all sides, desperate for Jesus to speak to them and heal them.
As the day turns to evening, the crowd grows hungry. The disciples’ resources are few and their inclination is, understandably, to send the people away. After all, they only have five loaves of bread and two fish, there’s not a lot of daylight left, and they are out in the middle of nowhere.
And then there’s Jesus.
When He sees all the people before Him, He has compassion. He sees past the inconvenience and the overwhelming logistics, straight to their hearts. In the middle of His own grief and fatigue, Jesus loves them and heals them.
It would have been understandable if He didn’t feel up to the task, but Jesus saw things from an eternal perspective. He regularly spent time alone with God the Father and knew the Source of His strength and perseverance. Because of this, instead of being overwhelmed, burned out and ineffective, Jesus had the strength and power He needed in that very moment.
While the disciples fret about what they lack, Jesus prepares to do miraculous work and invites the disciples to be a part of it. Jesus asks them what they do have and instructs them to bring it to Him. He takes their meager offering, looks up toward heaven and gives thanks to God. Then Jesus multiplies their resources to bless and sustain the people in the crowd: physically by feeding all of them (with leftovers to spare) and spiritually, by building up their faith in God and all that He is capable of doing.
Sometimes, when we feel like we’re a few loaves and fishes short of a miracle, it’s easy to start thinking that what we have isn’t enough for God to do anything meaningful with. But what if instead of stressing about what we lack, we brought what we do have to the One who is infinitely more creative and resourceful? I can imagine Jesus looking toward heaven, thanking God for our meager offering and then using it to do exponentially more than we could ever have imagined.
And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.”
Colossians 2:6-8 NLT
Just like the disciples who followed Jesus, we cannot multiply loaves and fishes on our own. But we can stay close to the One who can. Jesus continued to spend time regularly with the Father, being filled and replenished so that He could continue His work on earth. We too must spend time regularly with the Father and continue to follow Jesus so that our roots can grow deep and we can be filled. We can build our lives on Christ and in doing so, our faith is built up as we witness God at work (even in our craziness of life). We will then overflow with thankfulness out of the fullness of our hearts. What a thought to be overwhelmed not by life’s pressures and stress, but with genuine gratitude as Jesus works in us and through us!
So as the calendar fills up and you feel spread thin, my question to you is this: What do you have? What can you bring to Jesus? Bring Him whatever you got! When you follow close to Him, and build your life on the unwavering foundation of Christ, He can use even the most unlikely of things to do amazing miracles!
The past several weeks we have been taking a bit of a deep dive into the topic of shame, and how it can alter our perception of who we are and how we walk around in the world. There is so much more to talk about than what we can cover in a few short articles, but hopefully we can at least begin a journey together of leaving shame behind.
Today, we are going to talk about the source of shame that could possibly be the hardest to let go of, the shame of our own mistakes and bad choices. We can be our own worst critics to begin with, but throw in an actual, real-life-consequences-type of mistake, and we can get sucked down into shame before we even realize it.
In our first article we drew the distinction between guilt and shame, and I think it’s important to visit that again in this context.
Guilt is a healthy emotion that serves to show us where we are wrong and prompt us to take steps to fix the problem. Shame works in a loop, where we relive our mistakes over and over with no hope of ever fixing it. Shame redefines our identity by those mistakes, whereas guilt can spur us on to overcome them, without changing our overall value as a person.
If we want to truly experience the love of God, we have to look at how our own “shame-filter” clouds how we see God, ourselves and others.
When shame takes hold, we wind up placing our identity, our value, our worth in our mistakes and failings. It slowly erodes the truth that we are first and foremost, God’s beloved daughters.
The unclouded truth is that we are His handiwork, a masterpiece, created by God to be in relationship with Him. He is proud to be seen with you. He delights in showing mercy. He pursues you, calling you by name.
And while we might be able to acknowledge in our minds that these things are true, it all feels like a platitude if we don’t also acknowledge that we cannot simply banish shame on our own. We cannot move forward just because we “ought to”. Growth does not come from heaping shame upon shame. It comes from compassion. We need Jesus and we need each other.
Look at how Jesus treats the woman caught in adultery in John 8:1-11. The Bible says she was caught in the act (yikes!) and dragged before the church leaders to be publicly shamed. Because of the law at the time, her punishment would almost certainly be death.
The religious leaders at the time were threatened by Jesus’ teachings and growing popularity. They asked him what they should do, with the intention of trying to trap him in the “wrong” answer. Jesus instead starts to write something in the dirt in front of them. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus wrote, much to my dismay.
The justice warrior in me loves to imagine that it was the hypocritical leaders’ own dirty little secrets. Maybe it was a powerful scripture that convicted their hearts or confounded them in such a way that they relinquished claim over this woman’s life, and walked away. They all just left.
Pretty soon it was just Jesus and the woman. He tells her that he will not condemn her to death, but tells her with loving authority, to leave her life of sin. He grants mercy and calls her to a better life. He commands her to leave the identity of sin and shame behind, and step into a brand new identity.
Our theme verse for this series has been Psalm 34:5 “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.
As much as I want to know what Jesus wrote in the dirt that day, I want even more to see the look on this woman’s face after being in the presence of Jesus.
Jesus held her accountable for her actions, he didn’t let her off the hook, but neither did he define her by it. She was first and foremost a human, created in God’s image and made for so much more.
I can picture her transformation from fear and shame to pure radiance the moment she looked into the face of Jesus and was forgiven. No longer was she defined by her past. She wasn’t “that girl” anymore. She was given a clean slate and a new beginning by the One whose opinion ultimately mattered the most.
My sweet friend, we are given the very same forgiveness and redemption. Even if you haven’t been dragged into the public square with all your bad choices on display, chances are there are things you wish you could undo. Maybe you’ve said or done things that you wish you could go back and erase. Maybe you feel like your whole life has just been one big mistake.
Please hear me in the depths of your soul and let this truth settle into every corner of your heart:
In Jesus’ eyes, you are not a mistake, you are a masterpiece.
Even in the middle of your mess, Jesus sees you as beautiful.
Just like a beautiful work of art, your worth is determined by the artist who created you and the price willing to be paid for you. When Jesus went to the cross, he paid the ultimate price. He didn’t just take our mistakes and bad choices, he also took our shame. When Jesus died and rose again, He not only conquered sin, he defeated shame too.
This business of kicking shame to the curb is not just a one time deal. It is a wash-rinse-repeat kind of thing. As human beings, we will continue to make mistakes. We must continue to look into the face of Jesus and remember His unconditional redemption, mercy and love.
The woman in the story would likely struggle with the old identity of shame trying to creep back in and take over. Maybe other people in her life made it hard to forget, while others helped her remember the truth of God’s love. She would have to be intentional about going back to that moment when she was face to face with Jesus, so that God could continually renew her strength and remind her of who she really was.
Time spent with Jesus, in community, in God’s Word, and in prayer & worship builds a foundation for an identity in Christ that is unshakable and grounded in truth. It sustains us and encourages us until we can see Him face-to-face again. It reminds us of who we truly are: daughters of the King, radiant and unashamed.
Lift up your head, step out into the light and feel the sunshine on your face. You are loved, you are forgiven and you are free.
“The cross has spoken, I am forgiven The King of Kings calls me His own Beautiful Savior, I’m yours forever Jesus Christ, my living Hope” -Phil Wickham, Living Hope
