HAPPY NEW YEARRRRR !!!!!!
Looooool ! I am absolutely aware of the date, thank you very much. But you all know I am 1000% that person to keep up with this greeting until maybe March, for as long as it’s our first interaction. Soooo, how is your NEW YEAR? Your 2022? Is it amazeballs? bleh? Or highly unpleasant?
However it feels, I’m glad you’re here reading, thinking, digesting these words and thoughts I’m about to share. My prayer is that they will strike a nerve within you and trigger even the tiniest of positive change in the trajectory of your new year.
Okay, so jumping right into our text for today, The Fearful Christian. *shivers* Everything in me tells me that title is a juxtaposition that should absolutely not be! Fear is an identity that directly clashes with our inheritance as a legitimate child of God. God confirms this by telling us “Fear Not!” 365 times in the bible, can you believe it?! A reminder for every day of our lives!
The devious thing is that the devil, our enemy, absolutely knows this fact also. That is the fact that ‘Fear, even a tiny bit, when chosen has the power to bankrupt the manifestation of the inheritance God ordained for us as his kids.’
Now I want you to pause and think about the status of your life currently. Check in with yourself, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, professionally, academically, financially, etc. Check in with your whole self. If you were to assess your current self in these different areas against what the inheritance of a child of God is, where would your current life stack up?
So for example, compare your current emotional self with the verse, “The joy of the Lord is my strength!” Or compare your current financial self with the verse, “You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous on every occasion, and through us your generosity will result in thanksgiving to God.”
And for that last verse, I already hear some thoughts saying, “Well if God would actually make me rich, maybe I would be generous on every occasion -_-” But you see that’s just it! You just helped me segue into my point perfectly. Isn’t fear the root of the voice that says, you barely make enough for yourself, how on earth can you afford to pay your tithe for every income you earn or to give that friend a gift to celebrate them? Because fear says, if you give, you’ll have none left. Faith? Faith says “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
[I’m rounding up, I promise]. Our actual bible text today will be from Nehemiah 6:5-9. Sanballat kept pestering Nehemiah to “come.” Nehe refused. In the true fashion of “persistence,” Sanballat didn’t budge, rather he sent the message a FIFTH time, this time with a straight up lying letter to convince Nehe to leave the will of God he was pursuing and come to him. Look at Nehe’s response in vs 8, he said, we BOTH know dasalie! And in vs 9, Nehe says, Sanballat is only doing this to make us afraid. Key in on that. As a human on this earth, you absolutely can and will feel fear, but in every moment, you will absolutely have a choice to either choose that feeling of fear or reject it!
Think about this, the enemy knows for himself and also knows that you know that God has called you to where you are. YETTT, he still spends so much time, energy and resources to repeat lying messages to you. Why?! Because he understands the power of persistence. He knows that if he can say “you’re incompetent,” “you’re too broken,” “you’re too weak,” “that was too great a sin,” enough times to you, he can sow a seed of fear. And a seed of fear is all he needs to sabotage your entire life and generations to come after you.
As a human on this earth, you absolutely can and will feel fear, but in every moment, you will absolutely have a choice to either choose that feeling of fear or reject it!
There’s much more to unpack in Nehemiah 6, but I’ll save that for our post in February. Before bidding you adieu today though, I want to leave you with this,
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” 2 Timothy 1:7.
This right here is just another inheritance that belongs to you as a legitimate child of God. Chew on it. Sit with it. Study what that means for you. My charge to you as you leave this first month of the year is to write out the areas you are struggling or lacking and is putting a damper on your year. After doing that, scour the Word of God for what your life should actually look like in these areas, as a child of God. Feel free to use google: look up sermons related to these areas, look up bible verses related to these areas. Pray with them. Meditate with them: sit with it, recall them at random times during the day and ask yourself, what does this look like for me? Ask God, what do these promises look like in my life? What changes am I to make? What prayers am I to pray? Welcome the Holy Spirit in to fill you up. Because only through him can we take hold of all the inheritance we have from God in Christ Jesus.
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8
That’s it folks! Happy New Year! 😉
Stay blessed and a blessing, Dami ❤
CRAVINGHISLIFESTYLE 
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