Tag: christianity

A Date With Destiny

Merciful

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Micah 7:19

Lord, you will have mercy on us again. You will throw away all our sins into the deepest sea.

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Mercy is an attribute which comes easily for you. You have been blessed by both giving and receiving mercy.

You understand the mercy of God because you have received it abundantly.

While you may sometimes fail to make the right choices, your decision to accept God’s mercy for the wrong ones, is always the best choice you can make.

You are grateful for the opportunities you see to offer mercy to others.

While it is human nature to be concerned about the risks of being merciful, you believe there is a much greater risk to the human soul when one opts to become merciless.

You are grateful for the mercy of God which provides healing and restoration. Not only does He show mercy to the offender, He offers forgiveness for the wrong and cancelation of the debt. You find relief in the God’s promise that the entire ordeal is dropped into the depths of the sea. 

Like your Creator, you do not keep score. The mercy and forgiveness you learned from Him, enables you to wipe the slate clean and give everyone a fresh start.

Your appreciation for the mercy you have received is best displayed by your willingness to show it to others.

It is your gift of mercy that creates a firm  foundation for successful relationships.  It is also the defining force of your Christian walk, for only those who give and receive mercy can ever truly know the heart of God. 

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Tetelestai Recovery

The Great Exchange

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The work of Christ was miraculous and supernatural. His wholeness could not be explained or understood. What was broken became whole and what was missing began to appear. The void was no longer an empty vacuum demanding to be filled. We had living water to relieve the spiritual thirst which once drove us to the bottle. We derived pleasure and relief from the intoxication of the Holy Spirit which far exceeded the effects and duration of our former chemical concoctions.

As we received this shalom of our Savior and trusted that He refused to leave us broken or misplaced, we understood that this was what scripture defines as the gift of salvation.

We are not the broken people we once were. We need not fear that anyone will discover our inadequacies, for we have everything that we need. The proof is not always there, but the truth is. We bring our faith and our doubts to Him, and in return, He offers us shalom.

We enter a new realm of confidence in Christ. To our brokenness and emptiness, a strong clear voice declares from the cross and echoes into our void, “Tetelestai!”

Tetelestai Recovery, Chapter 6 Shalom https://a.co/d/fa0vnYg

Tetelestai Recovery

Post-Traumatic Strength and Stability

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And the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10

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This came as a shock to those of us who grew up in the psycho-babble era, where therapists were gods who slung letter-label disorders at us like lightning bolts. Most of us had been zapped by at least one label or another which altered our identity. Sadly, that movement brought such a self-defeated attitude; many of us doubted the power of the cross over our disorders.

Thankfully, after receiving the message of Christ’s finished work, we concluded that our dysfunctional labels need not remain our identity.

  • We claimed the powerful promise from Romans 8:37 concerning our sense of powerlessness:

In all these things we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us.

We subjected our past trauma to the truth found in Romans 8:28:

We know that all things work together for the good of those who love Christ, who have been called according to His purpose.

Paul didn’t write ‘some things’ or ‘the good things’. No, he said that all things, even the least expected or most traumatic things, will work together for our good and for the Kingdom’s expansion project.

We realized that it wouldn’t benefit the Kingdom if its soldiers and ambassadors were traumatized, weak, and frail (either mentally or physically). No military unit would succeed with a platoon of disabled soldiers charging in to take a hill. Fighters in poor condition would be counter-productive to the cause. When charging into enemy territory, only the healthiest, strongest, and well-trained are called up to active duty.

Knowing that God has called us up to active duty, we also trust that He has given us health, strength, and solid training. We have discovered the spiritual law of the Kingdom where trauma turns to triumph and frailty turns to strength.

Chapter 4 / Post-Traumatic Strength and Stability

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