November 21, 2024

Captivating: Chapter 7 – Cultivating Intimacy (pp 127-129)

February 21, 2013 by

We live in a very busy world.  I know I can personally attest to that.  We look at our schedule or our smartphone and we see “the list.”  We wonder if we will have time to get from work to appointment A on time, and then will there be time to eat before class B starts?  There is work, friends, family, ourselves…oh! and God.  Where do you put yourself on that list?  More importantly, where do you put God?

The key to enhancing your relationship with God is a simple one.  You need to spend time with Him.  Think about it, it makes perfect sense.  If you have an acquaintance you want to get to know better, what do you do?  You talk to them, hang out with them, get to know them, and possibly become friends.  If you have a man you are interested in, you date them, talk to them, learn more about them, and it can possibly lead to a more intimate relationship.  Isn’t that what we want?  Intimacy with our Lord?

What exactly is intimacy?  According to Dictionary.com intimacy is  “a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group.”  Yes!  That is what I want!  I want an affectionate, loving, personal relationship with God!  And the amazing thing is that it is ours for the taking!  He offers it freely and with no strings.  All we have to do is spend time with Him, and it’s ours.  Wait.  Spend time with Him.  Time?  Who has that to spare?  That in it’s essence is the problem.  God doesn’t deserve our “spare time.”  God deserves to be a priority.  He should be coming first on that daily to-do list.  No exceptions, no excuses.  I know…I get it…I am a single mom.  I have to-do lists as long as my arm and leg.  I run my home.  I run ministries.  I have my own business.  Trust me, I get it!

Sometimes we have to get creative with our time, and sometimes we need to get out of our comfort zones.  I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination.  But at the same time, I am exhausted by the end of the day, so I had to make a decision.  What I do is get up at 5:30 in the morning so I can have my quiet time with the Lord before I have to get my son up for school and the craziness of the day begins.  Do I LIKE getting up that early?  No.  No matter how long I have been doing it, it’s still no fun when that alarm goes off.  But is the tradeoff worth it?  Without a doubt!  That quiet time with God is what sets my day straight.  There may be a day I miss, and it may not seem like too big of a deal, but let that one morning turn into 2 or 3, or even more, and it only means trouble.  I can feel a difference.  Something will be nagging at me, or I will feel burdened and I won’t know why until I realize that it has been 4 days since I spent time with God, and then it’s like “Duh! No wonder!!”  It makes a difference.

So now I ask you to look in the mirror.  Where has God been on your list of priorities?  No matter the answer, there is a beautiful reality.  It’s ok.  Whether He has been at number one, or He has been relegated to “if I have time,” God is still there, He is still waiting for you.  He is not mad, or standing with a checklist checking off how many days you have spent with Him. He is just waiting for you to come back.  He loves you! He longs to spend that time with you, and He will delight in you the very second you return to Him.  That is so comforting to me.  If you don’t already, I hope you will set aside the time you need to spend with Your Father.  The change you will feel will be worth it.  Intimacy with Our Savior?  What could be better?

 

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LET’S PRAY:

Dear Lord, we long for an intimate relationship with You.  Please help us to clear our schedules and make the time we need to spend with You.  Sometimes it seems too hard in the craziness of life to set aside time.  Help us in our weariness, in our busyness, even in our laziness to realize that You are worth it, and that intimacy with You is timeless.  We love You, Lord, and we thank You for Your never-wavering faithfulness.  In Your Name, we pray.  Amen.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:

Share your routine for spending quiet time with the Lord.  Do you have a specific time each day?  Does it change depending on the day?  If you haven’t been spending time with Him regularly, share some strategies you can implement to make it more consistent.

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Crazy Love: Week 6 / Chapter 6: “When You’re In Love” (pp 99-101)

February 11, 2013 by

life-measured-by-love-crazy-love-francis-chan-T

I love love.

Seriously…. I really do! I love being in love, thinking about love, matching people up I know will fall in love…I love everything about LOVE!  I’m one of  those insanely passionate head-over-heels-in-love-makes-you-sick-to-your-stomach-to-watch-in-movies kind of characters who would rather DIE than be apart from my true love.

I know, I know…. it’s enough to make you vomit, but THIS is how God made me so I’ve decided to embrace it! I really am this way about anything I feel strongly about.  I’m one incredibly passionate person and THANK GOD that also translates to my love of Christ…although I have been in seasons where I am sad to say this wasn’t always the case.

As a Christian life coach, I have seen firsthand how intimacy issues here in-the-flesh on earth can greatly affect our relationship with God. Typically, if we keep people at arm’s length and not ever let them in, this also translates to how we interact with God in our relationship with Him. This causes us to not want to spend every waking moment with Him, or crave our time with Him.  But rather only to go to Him when we have no other option and then pick and choose the areas of our life we want to open up to Him.

As dangerous as this is for our in-the-flesh people relationships, this will 100% keep you from the type of intimate relationship God calls us to through being a Christ Follower. He calls us to Crazy Love. In my passionate life, I have held things I “loved” in 2 categories…

1. Reverence

  • A feeling of profound awe and respect and often love; veneration.

2. Intimate

  • Marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity. Relating to, or indicative of, one’s deepest nature: intimate prayers. Essential.

This week’s chapter is all about examining the love we have for God.  I really like this thought-provoking quote from John Piper that Chan shared in today’s lesson:

“The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this:

If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth,

and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed,

and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted,

and no human conflict or any natural disasters,

could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ was not there?” 

Well, could you?

This certainly has the potential to be a very convicting question for us to ask ourselves….

Blessings,

Megan 🙂

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Let’s Pray:

Lord, help us today to yearn to be with You as often as we can and not ever want to live without You! Some of us are struggling with obtaining this passion love for You, Father, but we do want it! We need Your help and we thank You in advance for wooing us closer to You and helping us to finally be free of anything that is keeping us from having this deep passion for You! We thank You in advance for all You will do. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen <3

You’re Assignment:

Balance in our relationship with God is important so that we don’t “humanize” God to the point that we infer the failures of humans on God.  How often do you think of God as more of a concept rather than a real person?  Which is more of a struggle for you:  intimacy with God or reverence for God?

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If you are interested in joining this amazing online Bible study for Crazy Love, click HERE to sign up. Once you are registered, you will receive an email with further details.

If you would like to email a private message to Megan in regards to this blog, please email her at: megan@girlfriendscoffeehour.com

Filed Under: Women's Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Crazy Love: Week 3 / Chapter 3- dad and DAD

January 21, 2013 by

 

Who’s your DADDY?????

Really….. I want to hear all about him.

Wether you have the world’s greatest earthly father or not, God entrusted you to him for a reason and I would love to know not only what he is like, but what your relationship with him is like.

My dad is a hoot!!! He’s a big old hot mess, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love him. Have you ever seen that movie “Big Fish” about the dad who tells the outlandish stories about his extraordinary life and drives his son crazy? Well, that’s MY dad…. but he doesn;t drive me crazy. I Love it and I know I learned how to communicate effectively with other people and how to have great relationships because of him and what an amazing “people person” he is. He has this incredible ability to make a new acquaintance feel like a long-lost best friend…. and it makes my heart happy to see it in action!

Growing up, my dad worked a lot. My mom would have dinner on the table when he got home from work. We would eat together then he would settle in his man-chair for the night and nap until he went to bed. We would sometimes do things together on the weekends, and I really enjoyed that a lot. Some of my best memories are with him at college basketball games or when he would hang out with my friends and I when I had some people over and he would tell them all his wild (TRUE) stories. My dad is a great man… but I never really went to him if I had a problem or needed help. I don’t know why I didn’t, but I always tried to handle everything on my own and really didn’t communicate much of anything about “me”  to my parents unless I really HAD to.

I KNOW I brought this to my relationship with the Lord. I could bring the prayer requests of others to Him like nobody’s business, but I kept feeling God impress into my spirit the question: “What about you?”

YIKES….. I was the one that everyone always came to for help and guidance and I learned at a young age not to share my burdens with my friends because it would always freak them out a bit and they didn’t know what to do. So, I just began to stuff it all down and try to deal with everything on my own. This caused me to not let God into many deep dark places inside me for way too many years. Until I finally let Him in, I wasn’t able to truly live how He called me to and fulfill His purposes on this earth that He intended for me to do. He was begging for me to cry out to him on my own behalf…… he needed me to need Him….<3 And then He helped me heal.

You see, it was a trust issue…. and as Chan says on page 56 “God is more worthy of trust than anyone else, yet for so long I questioned His love and doubted His care and provision for me.”

Matthew 7:11

11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,

how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

People of this earth and even your earthly father will fail you…. but your Heavenly Father never will. We need to immediately stop putting earthly hang-ups on our Great Creator! He alone is perfect and His love never fails!

Let’s pray:

Lord, help us see the areas where we are putting flawed human traits onto You. Open our eyes to this, Lord, and help us repent. We want to give all of ourselves to YOU whole and complete! Heal us of our earthly relationship hurts so we can fully begin to understand the depth of your love for us. Help us to trust and give you everything. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen <3

Your Assignment:

What hurts or hang ups are you still hanging onto from your relationship with your earthly father that you need to stop putting on your relationship with God? We want to pray along with you for healing in this area <3

Blessings,

Megan 🙂

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If you are interested in joining this amazing online Bible study for Crazy Love, click HERE to sign up. Once you are registered, you will receive an email with further details.

If you would like to email a private message to Megan in regards to this blog, please email her at: megan@girlfriendscoffeehour.com

 

 

Filed Under: Women's Ministry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,