Lessons learned, relearned and...well... relearned again! ;)

Pastor Walters message last night was really good and something I really needed to hear! It has been getting difficult lately to want to keep fighting against my flesh, because it seems like I never get the victory! ... but the Lord has been really encouraging me through several things. First off, through a really good song that I had never heard before, but found, and has just become my life song! ;) I shared it with a few of you and I think you agree that the words are really powerful! The next thing that really encouraged me was Pastor Walters message last night. He reminded me that the battle here on earth NEVER ends until death! The devil blinds us, accuses us, tempts us, afflicts us, lays traps for us and tries to destroy us! He WANTS us to get discouraged, he wants us to gossip, lie, be ukind, etc. so that we will bring reproach to the name of Christ. I liked how Pastor pointed out too that only way that we can get any kind of victory against the devil is to, first of all, submit to God! Ok, so that sounds so basic, but for some reason that tends to slip my mind. We have to submit to God and allow Him to work through us and then with His power we will be able to resist the devil and he WILL flee from you! We CAN'T resist him on our own. Ok, the third thing that really encouraged me was through 1 Peter quizzing. Mr. Stauffer was talking about how it can be so easy to let ourselves get tired of fighting the same things day in and day out and we allow ourselves to think that God must be getting sick of hearing us apologize for the same things over and over. We start to think that God must think we aren't being genuine in our repentance and we become really discouraged. But what we don't realize is that, when we are doing that, we are in a sense, limiting God. He commands us to forgive one another 70 x 7! Thats 490 times! (yes, I can multiply! ;) If God wants us to forgive each other, that many times, don't you think He is more than willing to forgive us that many times and more??!! Ok, the fourth thing that the Lord used to help me was an assignment we are doing for the bible study I am in. We were talking about how important it is to know verses when it comes to facing temptations. (And as Pastor pointed out last night, all three times that Christ was tempted, he refuted the devil with scripture) And I was thinking to myself "Ok, I pretty much have that area covered. I know a lot of scripture that can help me". And then I looked at the assignment and was proved wrong. For one thing, how many times do I actually quote scripture to myself when I am going through a rough time? Secondly, how well do I know certain verses to help me out when I am facing a certain trial? Our assignment was to take about 15-20 minutes to see how many verses (parts of verses) we could think of that would go along with a specific word such as lying or witnessing etc. We were to write down the words in King James - in other words, word for word from the Bible - and not paraphrase. The point of it was for us to see how well we knew our Bible. If we were tempted would we be able to quote from the Bible, verses to help us resist that sin? After we finished, we had to take the same list and use our Bible to look up verses that we had written down and see how accurate we were with them. I didn't think it would be that hard, but call me stupid....it was!! I found out that I didn't know the verses as well as I thought I did and for some of the categories I had a really hard time coming up with some verses. It was really eye opening for me. I would strongly recommend you to try it too and see how you do. The categories that we did are...

1. Obedience

2. Selfishness

3. Pride

4. Lying

5. Forgiving

6. Purity

7. Witnessing

8. Contentment

9. Music

10. Laziness

Try it and if youre anything like me, you will find out that youre not as smart as you thought you were! ;) Anyways, these are the things the Lord has been using to help me. I love it when I start to struggle with something and the Lord just shows me over and over, through many different places and things, that He has the answer! Ok, I know this post isn't exactly the most organized in thought and pretty much just lists a bunch of stuff that has been helping me but its what I have been relearning, so thats what I have to share! ;) 1 Peter 2:1-3

Chrystal