Today’s scripture reading in Romans 9 & 10 talks about obeying God’s Spirit.  Our mind and our spirit may not be on the same page, but it is our spirit that is to be honored.  Our mind has many rational reasons for justifying what we do.  However, if our spirit is not in sync with our mind, we are to not do what the mind is saying.

I am in a state of learning about my spirit and relearning about my mind.  I’ve always given too little attention to my spirit.  That goes back a long ways.  I’ve said many times that I’ve always attributed my spirit to my emotions.  Emotions are what I used to define my dad and I wanted nothing about me looking like that.  My mind is what I used to determine my outcome.  I know my spirit played into this but I would not give credible attention to it.  I’m learning now to let my spirit find voice within me.  This is what is difficult–finding what the voice of my spirit is.

I wrote the last couple days about the dysfunction in my family presently and the difficulty of it.  When I was asking God to help me with it this morning I was concentrating on the hope He provides.  However, He reminded me that I must first believe in order for Hope to have root.  Hope comes from believing.  I have to first believe that God is as capable of helping my daughters as He is me and that they are capable of responding to Him.  If I believe this then I can have hope.  As soon as I heard this from God my spirit was freed.  I hadn’t been believing for a moment.

Present circumstances can truly cloud the reality of God’s work and what we believe about God’s capability to overcome any obstacle/s.  This day I am choosing to believe and to give thanks for what I don’t see but have great HOPE in what God will do and is doing that I can’t see from my human eyes.

If this speaks to any reader, I’d sure like to hear from you about it.  Sharing one each others experiences helps build the belief.  To God be all Glory.

Have you ever been at the point where you didn’t want to be on the journey any more?  The path is too tough, what you see is too difficult to see and then know that it is true for you.  This has been my recent days.  We are having two Christmas days with our kids.  Dysfunction is the reason and we accommodate it.  I know that the dysfunction of my personal family is present but I have kept blinders on to its effect–convincing myself it isn’t as bad as it might seem.  My recent circumcision has removed all blinders.  The way we are having Christmas allows me to see each one of my kids personal walk with God and how mine fits into it.  It sounds sick, but I’ve tried to let my own walk superimpose itself into my kid’s walk with God.  God has been waiting patiently for me to let Him have His own walk with all my kids and grandkids.  Keeping them exposed to God is one thing, trying to coax them into Godly living is yet another.  God is the only one who makes the personal connection for each of us.  He uses His entire team–God Himself, Christ His Son and His Holy Spirit.

Today’s scripture reading was in Romans 8.  I’ve said a few days ago that this book is all about the personal struggle and freedom of walking with God at an intimate level.  Each chapter is packed with truth that I’m finally seeing much more truthfully.  It is not easy but it is true.  Joyce Myers, present day preacher, has written the following quote in today’s Bible reading:  Romans 8:6-14, “This passage helps us understand the differences between following our fleshly desires and allowing God’s Spirit to lead us.  Any time our flesh wants to do one thing and the Spirit of God wants us to do something else, by choosing to follow the Spirit of God we need to know that our flesh will suffer.  We do not like that, but the Bible says that if we want to share Christ’s glory, we have to be willing to share His suffering.  I like to encourage those who are just beginning to walk with God that once the fleshly appetite is no longer in control, they will get to the point where it is easier to obey God.  Even if obedience is difficult they will get to the place where they actually enjoy doing it.  If you are new to the Christian faith, be encouraged!”

I’ve wanted to help my kids find what Joyce is saying here by blinding myself to their truth and thinking “I can help them.”  Well, the truth is that I’ve simply gotten more in the way.  Only God can complete His own promises for each of us.  I’d sworn when I was younger I’d never let my kids suffer life like I had to (hurt like I did).  Little did I understand that I could not replace life’s living (life’s hurt) for them.  Each must choose their own path and live out the consequences.  God will be with them as they allow Him to be.  My role is to support and be obedient to His Holy Spirit’s nudges.  God’s role is to save and guide just as He does for me.  It has taken me a long time to get to this place of understanding.  My journey is a little more clear for me.  God never wastes a moment and He certainly hasn’t wasted the moments of this Christmas season.

Happy Birthday Jesus & Merry Christmas to you.  Today we celebrate the HOPE of the world.  I am so glad we are able to do this.  Without hope, we would endlessly be caught in the bondage of sin:  sins very grip on us.  Jesus came and broke that grip and released the chains for us.  Our assignment is to first accept that HE broke our chains, we can’t do it.  Secondly, accept the Gift He Gave us–HIS VERY HOLY SPIRIT.  With the Holy Spirit comes tenderness, patience, kindness and more–the gifts of the Spirit.  Also with this comes our own ability to see sin as it really is:  bondage.  I don’t care how rich or poor we are, if we do not have Christ in our heart, we have the bondage of sin within us.

The birth of Jesus leads us to the celebration of just four months from now:  Easter.  It took 33 years for Easter to come in the Biblical times.  However, we live in the time where we only reflect on all of this.  The HOPE we know of Christ’s birth was thought to be a fleshly hope–one that brought peace from the bondage of another government, from man.  God, on the other hand, had a much richer peace to offer–the HOPE of eternal life with Him through His Son Jesus.  Spiritual freedom is very different from earthly freedom.

The birth we celebrate today ended in a death (earthly death) which brought the HOPE of Eternal Life–spiritual life.  As I reflect today on this, I rejoice.  As I look at the lost world around me I could easily get weighted down with grief.  I shared this with God this morning.  He reminded me that He is still the Savior of the world.  His free Gift:  The Holy Spirit is still the same GIFT.  I am to do what He instills in me to do and He will take care of the reason He came in the first place.  He will still be the Savior of the world.  We all come to Him one at a time.  I commit to do my part in only acting on the nudges The Holy Spirit gives me and to not act on the nudges my fleshly Earnie gives me.  Those nudges I surrender to God my Father.  Thank you Jesus.

Today is the eve of the most significant day this world has ever experienced or known.  Yet, this very day starts like all others.  It is dark outside, coffee is made, furnace is running due to the cold of outside, Kathy is still snuggled in bed and I’ve finished my devotions and ready to write this blog.  Yet, what is truly different is what makes tomorrow so significant.  We see an earthly king with pomp and circumstance.  Christ came with none.  His Kingdom is Spiritual.  Only man wanted it to be earthly.  His pomp and circumstance is personal.  The freedom He gives is internal and not external.  His laws and control are provided by a gift provided within us–The Holy Spirit who leads and guides from a “still small voice”.

This morning’s Bible reading is Romans 5.  This is the chapter that has always started the guilt trips for me in the past.  Even the first verse has always made me question my relationship with God.  The “right standing” it talks about is one I always saw as a hope rather than a reality.  Little did I understand that until I let the circumcision of the veil I used to hide behind be cut away, I could never know the right standing with God my Father.  The promise of peace and freedom which man celebrates as a human for our country’s leader/s is all intrinsic with our spiritual leadership from God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit.  The “peace of reconciliation” still spoken in verse 1 was also just a hope for me until of late.  I could have a momentary belief that the truth of this reconciliation and right standing were possible for me.  Yet, hours later I’d be convinced that, no, this just couldn’t be.  I had too many lies screaming in my head.

This morning, I am not momentarily free.  I am free indeed as is stated in John 8:36.  Romans was never written to be a hope of a relationship with God.  It was written by Paul the apostle as a template for clarifying how this walk is possible.  Now I am able to accept what Paul is saying as true also for me.  I also know that it is true for you.  Lets believe it together.  The Christ who set us free is being celebrated the world over.  Lets join this celebration knowing the Prince of Peace (peace that passeth all understanding) is HERE.  (This makes me tear up).  How I love and adore Him.  Thank You Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Yesterday I told you I was starting the book of Romans in my Bible reading.  I mentioned that this book always has troubled me somewhat because it went into living the Christian life in ways I just couldn’t seem to comprehend or live.  An amazing thing is happening however as I read day one and day two of this remarkable book.  Yesterday, God showed me about circumcision.  He showed me the old, unneeded flesh that I still struggled to have Him cut away.  This flesh being removed, today He showed me how His Son Jesus paid the price once and for all for what that old flesh was covering.  In Christ so doing this I was a new creation.  I was no longer bound by the grips of this sin.  Along with the truth that I was no longer bound by the sin, I could have it exposed and still hold my head high.  Exposing it made it a testimony for God to use assisting others with their own bondage.

As I write this I am thinking that anyone reading this would think I’m talking about a past time in my life.  I’ve written about all this in different ways for the past few years and in my book.  Well, the actual bondage that has still had its grip on me is that of homosexuality.  Yes, I was used this way for 12+ years.  Along with this my dad called me “Hazel” and said I’d make a good wife for someone someday.  He belittled all the manly characteristics within me.  These acts of man did their number on me and what I’ve believed about me.  Today, however, God did His final weed pulling.  He got to the end of the root on this false belief I’ve struggled with and tried to hide behind.  Little did I understand that this would be what the old flesh I had God cut away yesterday would expose.  Yet today, God said it was time for me to have FAITH in what Christ did for me so many years ago.  The veil of darkness from this haunting past is finally “rent in twain”.  This ugly belief I was left with is gone.  I’m sure Satan will try to replant it in days to come.  When he does, I have a new response for him which now for the first time–I believe to be true.  I will tell him he is a liar and I am a born again child of the King.  I am a new creation.  He has no place in me.

Being the gardener that I am, this whole thing makes me think of 18 years ago when Kathy and I first moved into our present home.  It was February of 1998.  The 1+ acre we purchased had been a cow pasture prior to this but hadn’t been used as such for several years.  It was nothing but a weed patch.  When I planted my first garden here I was stunned by all the morning glory that was growing everywhere strangling out everything I’d planted.  In order to dispose of it I had to literally kill everything I’d planted and focus only on killing the morning glory.  I cringed the day I went out and sprayed the entire garden knowing there would be no harvest the rest of the season.  However, each garden since has been a great crop of vegetables and berries able to be shared with many.

Today I feel like God has removed the last of the morning glory which Satan had planted so many years ago when this older man was a young boy.  There are so many song phrases going through my head right now.  The one I want to type here is:  Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee, How Great Thou Art–How Great Thou Art! 

The start of today’s journey had me reading the first chapters of Romans.  I had finished Acts yesterday.  I always tremble slightly when I’m going to read Romans knowing this book challenges my daily living with Christ and usually leaves me wishing I were stronger and more capable.  Reading the Bible for the first time in the Amplified Version is bringing some insights I hadn’t had before.  As I got to the end of chapter 2, it states:  “…and true circumcision is of the heart, a spiritual and not a literal matter.  His praise is not from men but from God.”  I asked God to help me understand this spiritual circumcision and boy did I get filled with new information!  I googled spiritual circumcision and the first post was a writing by Steve Highlander called, “Understanding the Principle of Spiritual Circumcision.”  As I began to read it I became clearer and clearer as to this journey God is taking me through.

We all know that circumcision is the cutting away of flesh.  In the spiritual sense, God is cutting away my old flesh that I have used to “protect” me.  He wants me to be fully exposed, not so that I’m naked in body, but that I’m naked in spirit.  If God’s Holy Spirit is going to be free to use me fully, I need to be sold out to God’s purposes.  When I said yesterday I wanted to use my strength fully to share my story, I’ve done this at times using my own strength/determination.  This was particularly true as I first started telling my testimony in Celebrate Recovery.  The strength and courage to tell is not something I do to gain glory from God, it is something I do out of faith.  This faith is in God.  God uses my story and He uses your story to shed His love and grace.  The people around us wouldn’t know about this grace if we keep our story protected by “old flesh”.

I know there is much God is wanting me to learn about His spiritual circumcision, but the one thing I’ve already learned is that He does His work kindly and respectfully.  Yes, there is pain in surgery, but He always waits until we are ready for the next piece of flesh to be pared away.  How I love God for His sensitivity.

I always start this blog by typing the title–The Journey Continues.  As I do this it focuses me on the reality that another day is here and this day connects to the journey of life, my life.  I spent so much of my life guarding it with every ounce of strength I had and now I do just the opposite–I try to use every ounce of strength to make it known for the sake of helping anyone needing assurance that our past does not need to own us.

Today is a much more relaxing day for me.  I enjoy a day like this without deadlines to meet.  My oldest living brother is in the hospital having had a tumor removed from a kidney.  At first they thought they’d need to remove the kidney but they were able to complete the tumor’s removal and reroute “the tubing”.  I don’t know the medical names, but he is doing well.  I’m going to see him this morning and then tonight is Celebrate Recovery.  In between these I will dabble with little things.

I’ve already done a good deal of Christmas reflecting this morning.  How fortunate I am to have a family who respects God and loves Him.  Now, do all serve Him to their fullness?  I guess we all work with this.  The one thing I rest assured in is that God loves us dearly.  The days of fearing His judgment are gone.  He has replaced those fears of my past with His loving grace.  I pray His Grace upon you today.  He is a magnificent Father!

Maybe all mankind is self-centered and I just haven’t taken time to notice it as significantly as I should.  God, however, is wanting me to not only see it in all of mankind, but He is truly wanting me to see it within myself.  Yesterday was a good day in that I got done all the detail items I had on my mental list. I was feeling good about this but this morning I was checked about the good feeling when I realized everything on the list was about me and my wants.  I was far more interested in gratifying my wants than I was with fulfilling God’s. I was originally to spend the day in another part of the state with a school district.  They contacted me asking to reschedule.  This allowed me to use the day to get a number of little items done.  The nudges I’d had to make contacts with ones during the day didn’t happen.  These are the men God has placed in my life for support of one another.  I contacted none of them.  I simply went about doing “my” business.  God pointed out to me this morning that if I’m going to “love Him with all my heart, soul and mind….” (Matthew 22:37-39), I need to address these selfish priorities of mine.  I already know for a fact that the details of my day are never left dangling when God’s priorities are done first.  He doesn’t see my needs as trite, but, He knows His priorities are spiritual and mine are simply human.

Today, I surrender this self-centeredness.  I want God’s priorities to be mine first and foremost.  To God be all Glory.

The Hope of Jesus was delivered last night to the teens at the correctional center.  It was done in song and in word.  It was prayed that The Holy Spirit would be fully free.  This morning I prayed that the message would linger in the hearts of these kids.  When I spoke to them a couple months ago there were about 35 in attendance.  Last night there must have been about 60 of them.  They were being given cookies and milk during the program so more of them showed.  It seemed to go well.

As I started my journaling this morning I started to write:  “Thank you Father for  helping me to….”  At this point I was checked.  I was about to thank my Father God for helping me do my part so I could feel good about it.  I wanted to feel good for serving God so I could be important to Him.  This is that selfish side of me–man.  None of this was done for me, I was doing this for God’s kids.  There is nothing wrong with feeling good about it, but I had brought the entire event into my court this morning wanting to make it all for my benefit.  I truly don’t want it that way.  However, this is what the old Earnie would need in order to feel good about replacing the story of his past.  God is still teaching me that the new me has a value already that doesn’t need to be proven.  Those days are gone.

My daughter just called me interrupting my finishing this morning’s entry.  She wanted me to know she’d given my book to a lady she met a year or so ago who has a very troubling past.  In a conversation the two of them had last summer the lady informed my daughter that when she died she did NOT want the song Amazing Grace sung.  She hated that song.  I understand that hatred towards that message.  However, now I can pray for her time of healing just like God has given me.  The day will come when she will say–Wow, this Amazing Grace is for me too!  This is what I pray for the teens present last night.  The hopelessness man creates can be replaced with the HOPE of Christmas–The Amazing Grace story.  Join me in praying for these lost ones.

This morning God brought me to a real point of understanding which I want to tell you about.  All of it started yesterday morning as our quartet was practicing.  At one point I became overwhelmed with the emotional crisis of meeting with the teens tonight at the correctional center bringing them the HOPE of Christmas.  I wept.  This morning as I asked God to make this clear for me, He said the following: “Tonight you are bringing your helpless past face to face with the helpless past of all these teens.  Each of them has a past of abuse similar or identical to your own.  You are going there with this past in front of you at this point.  Your past is not what you are bring them however.  Tonight you are bringing them the starting point of My Redemption through My Son Jesus Christ.  You are giving them the Hope of Eternity through song and testimony.  Your past is what you have in common and now you give them the chance to have the HOPE of Jesus Christ in common with you.  Do all of this in MY NAME.”

Yesterday was a difficult day emotionally. I couldn’t bring clarity to this emotional crisis I was sensing.  Yet, this message of this morning made it all perfectly clear.  For a day I was allowing Satan to cloud my thinking with my past, bringing it to my front.  He wanted me to believe I was still as lost in it as I had always been in my earlier years.  This is not the case as God made clear this morning.  I bring these kids the most precious Gift they will ever be offered–THE LOVE of JESUS CHRIST.  With this being true I feel free to go and offer them this most precious opportunity–THE HOPE of CHRISTMAS.  How I love our Father God.