When I was trying to live a life of juggling my faith along with being a wife, mom, and an office manager, I was sent by my employers to many seminars that touted positive mental attitude—PMA, it was called back in those days. PMA was something I readily embraced because it was a philosophy full of words like “self-empowerment”, “mind-over-matter,” and other self-controlling platitudes. The problem was that juggled faith is as powerless as no faith at all.
Even though Christ had empowered me as a young teen trying to leave behind an abusive childhood, like the Israelites in the book of Hebrews, my faith was unraveling fast. Aside from my grocery store check list of things I believed, I added to that list anything that sounded like faith. But faith that comes from any source other than the Word of God is counterfeit. Building life upon that kind of faith is like building your life over a trap door—and all the while the enemy is slipping a noose of lies over your head.
To leave behind the past, something that the Hebrews needed to learn, takes letting go of it so that you can free up your hands to be full of things that Christ has placed in them. The first thing we need is the Person of Jesus Christ and then His Word. The Hebrews waned because, like their ancestors in the wilderness, they quickly forgot the promises that God had given them. They wanted to return to the Mosaic covenants that had been replaced by a whole new covenant, one signed in blood by the Son of God.
Hebrews 2 tells us exactly what to do with God’s Word:
• Pay close attention to it
• It is unalterable (God said it; no man or principality can change it)
• It came to us spoken through the Lord
• and Heb. 4:12—it discovers our condition!
If only I had known this early in my faith walk! When I think about my stumbling and running blindly into walls all because I did not have the light of God’s Word fully formed inside of me, I am filled with regret. But it is also God’s Word that reminds me that what the moth and locust has eaten, God will restore.
Some of us are set on the path, shining like stars from the beginning; then others of us, like me, are more like new moons found much later when the Son is finally able to fall on us because we have come out of hiding to let our lives be fully exposed and placed in orbit as God intended.
Even though Christ had empowered me as a young teen trying to leave behind an abusive childhood, like the Israelites in the book of Hebrews, my faith was unraveling fast. Aside from my grocery store check list of things I believed, I added to that list anything that sounded like faith. But faith that comes from any source other than the Word of God is counterfeit. Building life upon that kind of faith is like building your life over a trap door—and all the while the enemy is slipping a noose of lies over your head.
To leave behind the past, something that the Hebrews needed to learn, takes letting go of it so that you can free up your hands to be full of things that Christ has placed in them. The first thing we need is the Person of Jesus Christ and then His Word. The Hebrews waned because, like their ancestors in the wilderness, they quickly forgot the promises that God had given them. They wanted to return to the Mosaic covenants that had been replaced by a whole new covenant, one signed in blood by the Son of God.
Hebrews 2 tells us exactly what to do with God’s Word:
• Pay close attention to it
• It is unalterable (God said it; no man or principality can change it)
• It came to us spoken through the Lord
• and Heb. 4:12—it discovers our condition!
If only I had known this early in my faith walk! When I think about my stumbling and running blindly into walls all because I did not have the light of God’s Word fully formed inside of me, I am filled with regret. But it is also God’s Word that reminds me that what the moth and locust has eaten, God will restore.
Some of us are set on the path, shining like stars from the beginning; then others of us, like me, are more like new moons found much later when the Son is finally able to fall on us because we have come out of hiding to let our lives be fully exposed and placed in orbit as God intended.
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