Today Our Daily Bread Psalm 95 & John 1:14

Remember to scroll down and click on Lena's Journalin' link if you can't read this form well.
Love u & Merry Christmas!

Psalm 95:1-11
1 Come, let us sing to the LORD! Let us give a joyous shout to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving. Let us sing him psalms of praise.
3 For the LORD is a great God, the great King above all gods.
4 He owns the depths of the earth, and even the mightiest mountains are his.
5 The sea belongs to him, for he made it. His hands formed the dry land, too.
6 Come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the LORD our maker,
7 for he is our God. We are the people he watches over, the sheep under his care.
Oh, that you would listen to his voice today!
8 The LORD says, "Don't harden your hearts as Israel did at Meribah, as they did at Massah in the wilderness.
9 For there your ancestors tried my patience; they courted my wrath though they had seen my many miracles.
10 For forty years I was angry with them, and I said, 'They are a people whose hearts turn away from me. They refuse to do what I tell them.'
11 So in my anger I made a vow: 'They will never enter my place of rest.'"
Lena's Journalin'
This psalm gives us instruction vital to the succes of our faithwalk and then brings correction where it is needed if we get a bit off course.
Christians in America need to realize any time the Lord instructs or corrects us it is for our benefit and because of His love. If life is a journey and we are travelers on our walk of faith, would we not want a road map, explanation of direction and helpful hints about obstacles etc? Literally, if someone loved us and desires us to get safely from point A to points B-C-D, etc, they will help tell us where to go.
There is such a spirit of rejection in our society, and guess who the author is? The spirit of rebellion & pride, the spirit of the age, the serpent satan. If he can lie to us and convince us that any corretive or instructive word is a word of rejection and is a personal insult to our character, he can have a heyday with us. We will never get on the right road and we will never go anywhere. He may even decieve us to think that if we intend to walk the path we are walking the path, but unless we go somewhere, we're not walking. The only way to go and to know where and how to go is to listen to God's word and do it. Obedience is the only answer to a disobedient curse on the earth.
So, can the Lord instruct us without us listening to the lies of God's enemy, telling us the reason He's instructed us is because He hates us, hates how we are, doesn't like anything we do or think etc? If we listen to that, what happens is we resist God's word and its instruction and the enemy has had his way, because we don't move at all. This is why it is SO important to get the understanding of God's love, how great His love is. When He instructs or corrects it is not about judging your character or rejecting you. It's about helping you get from A to Z without a huge amount of pain and sorrow. It's to show us the way and lead us there safely!
This is also why it is so important to go to the cross daily and lay down unforgivenesses and hurts we've recieved from others. We must go on, and all of that keeps us from doing so. It is meant by God's enemy to stop us in our tracks, hold us and keep us back. The Lord will always take us in a forward motion bring our future up before us, the enemy wants to hold us in our past and help keep us there. Let Go and Go on. Old things have got to be passed away, all old things, both good and bad, the future is all God.
In order to hear God's voice we've got to come out of the world and come into His presence. We've got to take time away from the world and give what time it calls for, to God. If there is no "time" we must make it. We have to, it is essential to our spiritual survival. We will spiritually die or lose being able to hear Him if we do not make time.
One awesome way to make time is to worship Him. There we will hear His voice. Come in and Thank Him, praise Him, for who He is, not what He can give us or what He can do for us. As is said , seek His face and His heart, not His hand. Here we show our Lord, our lover that we want Him, we love Him, we care about being with Him, we want to know Him and His ideas. If and when we regularly go to and get to that place, we will find His love and find it is so easy to do His heart and what is in his heart for us to do, It will become almost automatic with us, just by being there, the struggle will fall away in His presence.
The hardening of the heart comes from having heard His voice and not doing what He's asked us to trust Him to help us do. Everytime we do not do what we've heard God say to do, we bring an outer layer of plaster over our hearts. If our hearts had ears, we would not be able to hear through that wall that we've erected. In that hardened walled up state, we sometimes pray, "Lord, where are You? I can't even hear You anymore". He's trying to tell us, but we canot hear Him and will not be able to hear Him till we tear down that wall. The only way to do that is to go back to when the wall 1st started to be built, and obey His voice. Doing the last words He spoke to you. You may have to ask the Holy Spirit's help to even remember what it may have been or one of the many things it could be. Once we start to obey Him at His words, we will see walls come tumbling down, almost like magic.
Let me give you an example- For years I felt the Lord gently nudge me towards reading His word daily. I did not stand up and blatently say, no I don't have time, etc. I just didn't do it everyday, in fact I pretty much only did it when I was assigned to, either by a suggestion at church or a Bible school class or whatever. Then one time I was really convictingly prompted by the Lord of the importance of what He'd asked of me. I still did not feel it was so bad. I mean I went to church regularly, I fellowshiped with Christians, I read a bit here and there, I loved God, a lot. I was taking His word to me as a geat suggestion, but not a command that I should heed, a matter of obedience or disobedience. Many many times I wondered why God was not speaking to me, and would ask Him, why I was not hearing His voice. I could not even hear the answer.
One day, when I had this great idea to start reading the word everyday and made it more than an idea, I began to put it into practice- I heard the voice of the Lord, in fact the floodgates of heaven began to be opened to me, it was like lost time was being made up! In my rejoicing I heard a quiet thought from the Lord- "welcome into the place where I'm speaking, I'm so glad you're here." He didn't beat me up, tell me how sad it was I'd not been there all of these years etc, No, He just started speaking to me. I cried because I had no idea what I'd been missing and how much I'd missed out on it. I'd open the word to read a chapter and could hardly get past the first verse because I was hearing so much and so clearly.
Go back and ask the Lord what it was He'd wanted you to do that you've not yet done. Was it reading His word, being faithful to connect with other Christians, or be in church enough to be able to be counted on by God and others? Or was it a character thing, like being more loving, or on time, or could it be a habit He's told you to get rid of and fully trust Him to fill in the empty spaces it would try to leave in your life? Was it coming into daily worship and quiet time with Him? Could it be to spiritually clean your house and remove all traces of remembrances of the old life you lived when you did not regularly obey Him? Could it be tht old relationships need to be severed at least for a time, till you are stronger and they don't take your newfound strength away/ Or that you still feed on no-Christian sources for your comfort and strength? Whatever it is, do it, do it all to and for the glory of God with His grace and mercy and watch out, the heavens are about to be opened because the walls you've built are about to be knocked down.
John 1:14
So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. F1 And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father.