Tag: regrets

Make the Right Choice

On By Judy GlasserIn MarchLeave a comment

Time is the great leveler – we all have 24 hours in a day.  You and I choose how we’re going to spend these 24 hours.  What are we going to do?  How are we spending the majority of our time?  Using a Biblical term, I would say that you and I are ‘serving’ whatever or whomever takes up the most of each of our 24 hours.

A lot of us serve ourselves.  Looking out for #1.  Do I like it?  Does it benefit me?  Do I wanna do it?  Do I feel like doing it?  What’s in for me?  Oh, yeah.  These questions come pretty easy because we use them a lot.  We may not say them out loud but we use them in our decision-making.

Many of serve our debts.  We have to work extra hours or extra jobs to pay for all of the stuff we already have.  We’re upside down on cars and houses.  When we’re not working, we’re worrying about paying the bills.  The best wisdom about our money I’ve ever heard is – “The secret in managing your money correctly is not in how much you make.  The secret is in how much you spend.”  Truth.

Some of us serve our hobbies –  like sports or exercising or shopping.  While we’re shopping today we’re planning about the next time we can go shopping.  Or we’re not happy unless we’re biking or walking or running or working out.  Or before the game we’re watching on TV is over, we’re flipping to the next channel for the next game and then the next game and then the next.

We all choose who or what we will serve.

Joshua makes this very clear to the Israelites as he throws down a challenge.  “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24:15.

You and I need to make a conscious choice, not just roll through our lives spending our precious time on things that have no eternal value.  We don’t want to get to the end of our lives with hearts full of regrets and emptiness, realizing we never made a choice – we just let the world push us to a place we never wanted to be.  Or maybe we get there and realize looking in the rear view mirror that we made a lot of choices – but they were the wrong ones.

I have made my choice and I know to the bottom of my soul that it’s the right one.  I have laid down any ‘idols’ I was serving at the feet of the One, True, Living God and now it’s all about him.

How about you?  If you have any doubts about the choices you have made in how to spend your short dash between birth and death here on earth, there is no better time than right now to start a new chapter in your life labelled, “The most important thing in my life: my love relationship with my Father God”.  Notice I didn’t say anything about religion.  Religion to me means all the manmade traditions and rules.  That’s not what I’m about.

Make a decision today to put God first in your life.  You won’t regret it.

I choose you, Abba Father.

The Accuser

On By Judy GlasserIn January2 Comments

I hear him.

Do you hear him?

The Accuser.  Satan is called the Accuser right in the beginning of the book of Job.  Satan is also called the Father of Lies in the Bible because he is a professional liar.

He whispers lies into my ears, accusing me of bad things I have done.  He accuses me of the wrong and hurtful things I have said.  Yes, I did those things and I said those things.

But  I know – and Satan knows – that all of these bad things I’ve done and said in the past, present and future are forgiven.  I was forgiven for everything when I accepted the free gift of grace offered by God through the death of Jesus on the Cross.  Jesus paid the price.  It’s done.

Why does Satan keep trying to make me forget that?  Why does he continually try to get me to live in guilt instead of the freedom that God gave me because I believe and trust in Jesus?

Why?  Because Satan doesn’t like my freedom in Christ.  He doesn’t like the fact that the Holy Spirit helps me ignore him.

So Satan whispers his lies….

hoping that I will listen and put myself in chains of regret, bitterness, unforgiveness and guilt.  Jesus died to release me from those chains.  That’s the truth.  So I’m not listening to the Accuser.

I am committed to listening to the words of my Father whose voice, when I listen, overpowers the whispers of the evil one.  My Father speaks to me with love…

and patience,

and grace.

I listen to him and I know the truth.  When I know the truth, I can live in the truth.

The Accuser can just go somewhere else with his lies.  No one is listening here.

Thank you, Abba Father.

 

Call It What It Is

On By Judy GlasserIn JuneLeave a comment

Today, as we read chapter 5, Isaiah looks us in the eye and says:

‘Trouble is coming to you who play with sin, acting like it’s not sin.

You’re deceiving yourselves.June 23 2014 Too Comfortable

You say that you don’t know what God, the Holy One of Israel, wants from you.”

(If Isaiah was in my livingroom right now, he would point at the Bible on my lap and tell me that I know 98% of what God wants me to know.  I just need to do it and God will tell me the rest as I go).

Isaiah says, ” You’re going to regret it whenever you call evil good.” ( we have a name for this – rationalization.)

“You will have trouble every time you say that darkness is light, every time you say that something bitter is actually sweet.

And you will regret every time you think you are wise and clever when the truth is – you’re not.”

Please help us stop the rationalizations, dear Father.