Scripture:

“Give all your worried and cares to God, for He cares about you.” 1 Peter 5:7 NLT

“Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.” 2 Corn 7:14

” Since they thought it fullish to acknowledge God, He abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives become full of every kind of wickedness…” Rom 1: 28-29

Thought:

So this week, I battled with pride again, that sin will creep up on you without realizing. One can display pride in so many different way; you can pride in your achievements, in your culture, where you come from but pride is a sin when it is haughty (having or showing an attitude of superiority and contempt for people or things perceived to be inferior) or disdainful (full of or expressing contempt for someone or something regarded as unworthy or inferior). My experience with pride this week was definitely haughtiness towards GOD. Yup, I said it, I thought I was better than Him in the handling of my daily life. Now come on, don’t act like you haven’t done that; because if you make decisions without first consulting your creator; you have displayed the sin of haughtiness.

I woke up one morning this week with the song, “Slower I go” by SEU worship playing in my head; I figured, clearly the Lord needs to me to listen to this song. I put on my headphones and listen to it while in bed. Immediately, my eyes started to secrete this clear liquid (basically, I started crying) without my permission. Then I started to ask God what is going on; the longer I laid there thinking of what the issue could be, I also started feeling pressure of the weight of all the responsibilities I have on my shoulder because the longer I laid there the more I am getting behind on my schedule for the day but I couldn’t move and mind you, by this time, I am in full cry mode. However, in the middle of my cry, the Holy Spirit spoke oy my spirt and reminded me that the responsibilities aren’t my burden to carry and that I need to bring them to the Lord. Then it hit me, I have not been spending time in the presence of God; I have not been spending intimate time with daddy God and in that moment, it occurred to me, I am operating out of pride again. How dare I think I can control how my day goes based on my timed schedule. In moment, i understood what my pastors have been saying all this time, “You cannot live life, without connecting with God EVERY SINGLE DAY. It is IMPOSSIBLE to go on with your day without having a silent moment with just you and Him is His presence.” When you choose to not spend the 10 mins with Him because of whatever responsibilities or pleasures, you are telling God, my responsibilities are more important you and I know what I am doing. All that is pride. You have to connect with the source of life in order to live life FULLY with no lack, no burden, no pressure.

2 Chron 7:14 says, “My people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.” When you are in the family of God, you are now HIS people; He is now responsible for you. All things concerning you now also concerns Him. When you are His people, you will humble yourself. How? by praying and seeking HIS face AND turn from your wicked ways (which is to repent). When you do this, God, HIMSELF, will hear from heaven and WILL forgive your sins AND RESTORE your land. This means, when you were in your wicked ways (sinning), he couldn’t hear you and couldn’t forgive you and your land (prayers, your works) were baren. Why does this happen? It is due to wickedness against God. You are HIS person, you belong to HIM; so me choosing my responsibilities over spending time with God was pure wickedness BUT, I humbled myself, I prayed and sought the face of God. Guess what He did? He restored my land (ME) because at the end of that day, I felt so much lighter, I had an extra measure of patience with towards everything and everybody. I also had so much energy; I had to work out at 11 pm to burn some of that energy before going to go to bed.

1 Peter 5:7 says, “Give all your worried and cares to God, for He cares about you.” How can you give Him your worried and cares if you don’t take the time to talk to Him? You have to share with God all that is in your heart, that requires you to communicate; speak (pray). You can’t do that, if you are always on go or always busy with life. Remember hat saying ” stop and smell the roses” that is what time God is like.

However, in Rom 1: 28-29, the bible gives a stern warning on what happens if we choose NOT to humble ourselves, “Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, He abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done. Their lives become full of every kind of wickedness…” but in the end of verse 27 it says “… they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.” If you choose to be stubborn and not acknowledge God, (by pray, and seek His face and repent), the Lord WILL leave you to do all the things BUT there is hope; God is patient and loving; He will allow situations to happen to nudge you close to Him or bringing people into your life to plant seeds and water the seed. God is ALWAYS patiently waiting for you to pray to Him, seek Him and change from your wicked way.

Pride is something we must fight against every minute of every day and the only way we do that is by acknowledging and knowing in our heart of hearts that we NEED God and cannot do life without Him.

Scripture: “Let us not grow weary or become discouraged in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap, if we do not give in”- Galatians 6:9

Quote: “Passion often looks like sacrifice for those who aren’t in love”- Kris Vallotton

Definition: “Weary- exhausted in strength, endurance, vigor, or freshness; having one’s patience, tolerance, or pleasure exhausted” -Merriam- Webster.com

Have you ever gotten to a point where you were tired of doing good; you just grew weary and exhausted. Like everything about life and your daily task/responsibilities just started becoming to much. It’s never ending; you have to do you daily devotions, read your bible, go to the gym, take care of your family, go to work, go to school, clean the house, cook, do laundry, fold clothes, serve at church, be a mentor, be a mentee, be a present for your parents and be present for your friends- you have to wear a lot of hats. It all starts to weigh on you; you feel like you are always on go and at some point you just want it all to stop. Then you start thinking when can I get a break from doing all these things. When can I just be…. me and breathe without worrying about the next thing I must do or the next place I must be or the next thing I must complete or turn in (don’t get me wrong, you might just need a vacation but there are times life’s responsibilities start to get overwhelming). Now all those feeling and emotions are valid but with said emotion comes the silent sin that enters in; first pride, then judgement, then selfishness.

In moments like that, what do you do? Pray ok… After that then what? I can tell you from experience…(I literally mean my experience from the last few weeks) that all those things aren’t enough. I cried out to God for understanding and clarity, then I got tired, so I tried to avoid the whole thing by drowning myself in African movies or the gym to distract me but at the end of the day I still felt weighed down, tired and just wanted to run away to a remote island (and maybe never return lol).

Moment of transparency: these past two months, I have been feeling weighed down and tired of doing everything and being everywhere. I felt like I don’t have time for anything else…. Life wasn’t just lifing it was kicking my butt and wearing me out. I didn’t know what to do so I cried for almost 2 weeks. But then I started to separate myself from responsibilities (my house started looking a mess, my child started looking pretty crazy -because I hadn’t down her hair in 3 weeks). Then I got sick, finally I thought I can rest NOPE!!! My daughter got sick and only wanted mommy, then 2 days later…. you guessed it… hubby got sick too. Now I am back to feeling overwhelmed and tired because mommy has to take care of us. Finally, I went back to God and got really honest, like “Lord I do not what is going on inside of me but I do not want to do anything at all, and if I am honest, I don’t even want to speak to you but I do not know of anything else to do.” God then placed two women in my life that I never would have otherwise express my emotions to, they prayed with me and for me. I decided to take a break from ministry for a bit and then started a calendar to help keep me on track with daily tasks but then that started becoming to much for me.

I was listened to a sermon by Kris Vallotton from maybe 10 yrs ago and he said this “passion often looks like sacrifice for for who are in love.” This morning the Holy Spirit reminded me of that and it occurred to me at some point in my walk with Christ, I stopped loving and was just doing. I no longer found nor had the passion for the things of God. I would say I do but I honestly didn’t anymore. I started to question, where did my passion go? What happened to it? I realized, I allowed all my responsibilities and all the weight of everything to lay on my back and my shoulders. I no longer craved, desired or lusted to be with Christ; I was no longer doing the walk with Christ, I was now walking alone because of the mentally “Its ok, I got” . The Holy spirit showed me that once I allowed pride to creep in, I was no longer going to Jesus for strength. Then I started looking at other people with judgement in my heart instead of trying to see how I can serve them.

How did I deal with this? well ,I repented. I didn’t ask God to take the feeling away, rather I asked Him to reveal to me what is going on, show me the root of this emotion because I noticed that these emotions were actually causing me to separate from the body of Christ; God did not call us to separate from the body but to join in community.

As Christians we somehow believed the lie “if I do the right things or good things, then good things will happen to me or around me.” That theology isn’t wrong but it also isn’t truth and that is what causes us to believe the lie. The Lord was not present when you were doing good because He wasn’t invited in your time of “well doing” at work, home, school, ministry, parenting, or caregiving. Anything done outside of Christ is done in vain and on your own strength. It is important to know Christ is the center of everything, anything done outside of Him is just vanity and will give room for sin to creep in.

So my lesson of the day, week, month and years is check you heart posture daily for pride because it will creep in like a silent sin and not realize what is going on. Understand this, pride brings about judgment which then carries with it selfishness. Be careful to guard your heart and check you spirit whilst you are “doing good, for at the proper time we will reap, if we do not give in.” Gal 6:9

Hey guys, this post isn’t about a revelation of the word nor understanding of a thought; its just about me being open and vulnerable about something I have been going through which requires *drumroll please* trust and faith.

Not to get into my what is going on but the past 4 months have been hard for me. The Lord has really been stretching and milking this trust and faith stuff lol (when you ask God to refine you, purify you and sanctify you; please be careful what you ask for because you will NOT like it when HE actually puts you in the furnace to be refined and purified). Anyways, in this space, there are a lot of things that have been coming up that I did not realize had deeper roots (I’ve been out here pruning the branches on trees instead of pulling them up from its roots). Spiritually I have been breaking generational curses and casting out generational demonic spirts; just to mention a few: anger, poverty, broken marriages, and co-dependency masked as love. I find myself constantly having to remind myself to choose to stand on the word and promises of God. Believe me it is not easy, especially after month two but here we are in month four still choosing to have faith and trust God; for HIS word does not return void.

So, this post is just to remind me and you; don’t give up, stick to it, continue to trust God, continue to have faith in His word; continue to rely on Him, because once this season of sowing is over, there will be a season of harvest and storing. So here it is my suggestion to us; stay under the wing under the almighty as you continue to be refined and purified.

Judgement prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.– Wayne Dyer

Hey guys,

Hope you had a good and productive week and if not, I hope it was filled with learning materials as Lauryn Hill once said, life is about learning and mastership.

This week, I wanted to talk about judgment; I know it is a pretty touchy and heavy subject because people will either think or say, “I don’t judge” or have said “I am not judging but I am just saying” or the next thought is probably the viral challenge “we listen, and we don’t judge.” The reality is WE DO… we judge… it doesn’t matter if it is about how someone is dressed, or what they’ve said, or pictures they’ve posted, even the way they comb their hair’ we judge it, we judge ALL THE TIME. I believe the reason why we judge is to compare our level of success in whatever to another person.

I know what you are going to say, “but the bible tells us to judge them by their fruits”. Now, judging a persons fruits and judging who they are; isn’t that same thing. Let us first define what judging means; according to brother Google (lol), Judging is to form an opinion or conclusion about someone. Lets make the difference:

Judging fruits

In Matt 7:16-20 Jesus states ” you will know them by their fruits.”, this passage was intended to help discern false teacher and prophets. As believers we are to be careful the people we listen to or read about to determine if they are sheep’s in wolves clothing or the real deal.

Judging others

However, judging people is based on judging the person as they are and their circumstances; THAT is what God says no no no to.

In several passages (a few of them I will mentioned as we go on) we are warned against judging others. A perfect example of judging a person would be Snoop Dog; we all know who he is, what he does and his raps songs but what we didn’t know is that he ALWAYS had a desire to make a gospel album but because of who he is and what he has rapped about; he KNEW the Christian world would judge him and condemn Christian artist that worked with him. A few years back, he finally made his dream a reality and fulfilled that desire. Why do I bring this up? We formed an opinion about him that he is a lost cause; we drew conclusion of him that he can’t possibly love God nor know who He is. When in reality he had this hidden desire in his heart to sing praise to God. Due to his fear of judgement from the Christian world, he felt shame, and felt rejected; I can only imagine that he felt he wasn’t good enough to sing praises to God or pure at all to lift God’s name up. This fear of judgement delayed him from experiencing an encounter with God. Where is he now??? I have no idea but, I do know we need to keep him and his family in prayer so God may continue to encounter him and fill him up with the Holy Spirit. We keep forgetting that when the bible tells you to come as you are, God truly means COME AS YOU ARE… because radical changes happens from inside out, not outside in. Jesus will change your heart first before he changes your habits. Our judgement of people causes them to feel dejected, rejected, ashamed, abandoned, neglected, alienated and more. Jesus died on the cross for the lost and broken; so it is our assignment to point them to Jesus. (Sorry, went on a bit of a tangent).

The reason, I brought this subject up because I expressed judgement. So during Resurrection Sunday, an old friend of mine sent a GIF to a group chat that I am on; it was a rabbit sitting on eggs smoking a carrot stick. I got so annoyed and YES, I JUDGED her. I was on the phone with my sister when the message came through, I told my sister what the message was about and proceeded to say, “How can you say you believe in Jesus, but you also believe in smoking weed for recreational purposes especially on resurrection Sunday” (Please do not judge me, in Eden, it is a safe space, just let me make it to the end). So my wonderful sister said to me, everyone has their own walk and timing with God; just because you are in a different space with God doesn’t mean she is any less saved nor a believer; instead of being annoyed with her and the post, why not pray for her. Ooooohhhhhhh, that hit my chest like a ton of bricks at that moment but guess what? I completely forgot about that moment once it past, until the Lord brought it back to my memory last week Saturday; I was talking with that same old friend and reminiscing about our younger days. The Lord reminded me of what my sister said, the sin I committed and that I need to repent (I have not repented yet, I am literally doing that as I type).

In the bible, there are about 37 passages that warn against judging others and the curse associated with it, just to mention a few examples:

• Matt 7:1-5 Do not judge or you too will be judged… by the same measure you judged…

• James 4: 11-12 … Anyone who speaks a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgement on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you- who are you to judge your neighbor.

• Rom 2:1 You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgement do the same things.

• Rom 2:3 So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

• Rom 14:10-13 You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. It is written: ” As surely as I live” says the Lord, “every knee will acknowledge God.” So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. Therefore, let us STOP PASSING JUDGEMENT on one another.

• I Cor 4:5 Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.

In just the few passages, we see that the common theme is do not judge others because

1. God will judge you based on the level of judgement you passed on others.
2. If you speak against your brother or sister you are judging the law which mean you- yourself are not keeping the law. How dare you judge your neighbor for not keeping a law when you can’t keep it either.
3. When you judge others, you are condemning yourself.
   • To condemn mean to pronounce a sentence of punishment; can you imagine pronouncing a sentence of punishment on yourself when Jesus died on the cross just so you escape sentencing and punishment for ALL your sins (smh, scary).
4. You will give an account of yourself to God.
   • EVERY single thing you’ve done and said you will (not have to but WILL) give an account for.
5. Do not judge anything because ONLY God knows and sees everything. In its right time, He will expose what is hidden.

All these passages show me that, forming an opinion about someone is so easy to do especially in the world we live in that is ALWAYS asking you for your opinion about other people. We are not called to form opinions and come to conclusions about people, we were called to serve, give and pray for them. How do we stop judging others?

1. Die to self everyday.
   • Jesus, more of you; less of me.
2. Put on the armor of God everyday.
   • Eph 6:11-18
3. When you have a thought or an opinion about someone; literally say or think “that is not my thought”
   • When you do that, you’ve taken the thought captive and now laid it at the feet of Jesus.
4. Repeat

My prayer of repentance:

My Lord, my God, I come before you in humble prostration thanking you for sending your Son to die on the cross in my stead. He took the judgement and punishment for me so I wouldn’t have to. I come before you to repent and ask for forgiveness; Lord please forgive me for judging my friend, it is not my place to form a conclusion of her walk with you but Lord I thank you for placing me in close proximity to her to know her and see her and bring her to you in prayer. Father, I ask for forgiveness for grieving the Holy spirit by being disobedient in my delay to repent. Father, I think you for Your forgiveness and Your love. I bring my friend before you tonight; I ask that You shower her with Your love and Your presence that is so undeniable that will cause her to fall so deep in love with You, she will want nothing more then to dwell in your presence in Eden. Let her experience You in such a way that reminds her You are Abba Father, her closest friend. Father, I asked that you continue to fill me up and reveal to me areas in my life, my heart and my soul I need to lay down before You; I thank you for a continuation of refinement and I also ask for the discipline and strength to remain in the state of refinement; Father my heart cries for less of me and more of you. In the name of Jesus I pray, Amen.