Need to begin with prayer today!
Dear Lord, thank You for all Your encouraging and uplifting words that tell us of Your great love for us! It truly is amazing to me! I come to you acknowledging my struggle to simply believe Your words. I repent of this, Lord! I so want it to be my constant confession that I am only AND completely what You have formed and made me to be. Please cause your words to carve new patterns into my mind…patterns of joy and peace and quiet confidence that ‘I am who God says I am!’ Help me, Lord, to intentionally choose to speak these words of life over myself…knowing that You have already done so! May my mind be renewed and transformed to line up with Your perfect will. Thank You for all that You are working and bringing to pass in my life…and for my sisters, Lord, I pray the same. In Jesus’ powerful Name. Amen.
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Oh, I am SO determined to get this Truth into my heart!!! (Anyone else choosing to do so? Do I hear your ‘amen!’) I was convicted, as I read this chapter (five times, don’t you know!)
Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the Head…Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor….
Ephesians 4:15-25 excerpts
By God’s grace, (and His revelation to my heart through His Holy Spirit), I have never understood this beautiful section of the Book of Ephesians in the way I do now! I now realize that I am to ‘speak the Truth in love’ and ‘speak the Truth with <my> neighbor TO M.Y.S.E.L.F.!!! Truly what a revelation! Perhaps you have already understood this…but to me and my little heart this is revolutionary! And I am so thankful! I can ‘be renewed in the spirit of <my> mind…and put on <my> new self!’
So, will you make a stand along with me! Together can we choose the Truth and be intentional in our trust and believing of God’s Word! “I am what God says I am” by God’s grace, and compassion, and lovingkindness towards me…I am getting it! (Thank You, Lord!!!!!)
