Just One Thought

Sin begins with one thought.  Yes,  just one thought.  We Christians recognize that something is not right the second we are faced with it.  As soon as we are faced with a situation,  the Holy Spirit living inside of us alerts us to the fact that it is wrong and we should not do it.  However,  there is this moment,  the split second when you wonder,  what would it be like if I did it? The seed has been planted. 

You see,  for the true Christian,  the devil can't just say to us "do it"  because we have the Holy Spirit guiding us and saying "don't do it".  Instead,  he has to make us feel comfortable with doing the thing that we shouldn't.  So,  in the back of our minds,  the thought comes.  Of course,  at first,  you dismiss it because you know better. But the thought comes again,  and again and again until you don't realize that you are spending the entire day thinking about this thing that you know that you should not do. 

Let's use a big example, something that we all frown upon (the "big" sin).  Over the years I've always wondered how a genuine Christian man or woman finds himself/herself entwined in adultery.  I realized  that it starts with one moment when somebody other than your spouse looks a little nicer than normal one day.  You pay them a compliment and the two of you smile and leave it at that.  The devil notices the opportunity and plants the thought.  You dismiss it immediately.  The next day,  you see the person and you smile at them from across the room,  noticing how attractive they are.  Before you know it,  your mind is stewing over that attractiveness, over and over.  If you don't recognize what is happening and nip the thought at the source you have already started sliding towards the point of no return.  Slowly,  you're becoming desensitized to the fact that what you are thinking is wrong. Justification statements like "they're just my friend" slowly start to follow the thoughts that you know that you should be rebuking.  Slowly,  more thoughts, slowly,  more justification until one day,  you're not quite so comfortable but having lunch with this person that you're thinking about all the time doesn't seem like such a bad thing and of course it only goes downhill from there. 

Not all of us will find ourselves faced with a situation where we may cheat on our spouses,  however we all will be faced with situations where sin is justified in our heads long before we actually do it.  No genuine Christian actually wants to sin.  Every genuine Christian wants to live a holy life that is pleasing and acceptable to God.  However,  our enemy wants anything but that.  We are to be wise concerning his devices,  plots and plans and be ready to deal with them as they come. 

Just about every sin begins with a single errant thought.  Let's learn to recognize them and stop them at the source.  Let's learn to take control of our minds and our thought life and make it subject to the will of God and not that of the enemy. 

Have a blessed and thought controlled day. 

Devotions like this one and others can be found in the Soul Food Series in Kindle or paperback format. 

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Get Up!

It can be pretty difficult to move on passed heartache of any kind.  Emotional scars tend to run deep and each new one seems to reach further into the soul,  making recovery harder and harder and harder. But recovery isn't impossible.  

One thing I've learned though is that recovery will only happen if you want it to.  Depression has a way of getting worse the longer you stay in it. The more you cry, the more you sit around doing nothing and the more you stay away from the world, the worse it gets. It just hurts more to sit there and think about why you're hurting. 

People always say "get up,  shake yourself off" to others in such situations and of course it's very annoying to the person who is hurting but I've learned that as cliché as that is,  it's the only way to start the healing process. 

Of course,  there's more to healing than just forgetting your problems.  As a matter of fact, you'll run into bigger issues if you just bury stuff away,  but you can't dwell on them forever. You will only recover if you want to recover. YOU should be your own motivation.  You must want your life to improve for it to happen. You must want to move on for it to happen. You must want change for it to happen. 

My encouragement today for all us is to be your own motivation.  Be determined to rise above,  to move forward,  to grow and to change. 

Devotions like this one and others can be found in the Soul Food Series in Kindle or paperback format. 

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Tenure Vs Maturity

After many years spent doing anything, one gains valuable experience. Experience usually breeds skill and take us to the point where we can do something without even thinking about it sometimes. Experience is important and in the secular world, length of service (tenure) is valuable and comes with all sorts of perks.


However, in the Christian world, tenure or length of service as a Christian can lead to complacency and make us comfortable with our current state.  Save for the fact that we have had the opportunity to make more mistakes and therefore have a bit more experience correcting them,  tenure does not make us better off than a newborn babe. 

Sometimes,  with all those years come some pretty bad habits and the refusal to change.  Some of us have spent a lot of years getting away with certain things and even though it's not consciously done,  we feel like we can continue to get away with those things.

Today,  I realized that,  by not knowing what I know now when I started my walk 17 years ago,  I developed some pretty bad habits that are difficult to let go of.  Whilst in my head I know there are a lot of things that I have not done or are not doing right,  it's hard to make the changes because I have been doing it this way for so long.

I had the opportunity to speak to a friend recently who has been a Christian for almost as long as I have. We were at a social gathering and were having fun catching up on old times when did something in my presence. I remarked casually in joking fashion "girl, you haven't changed one bit". Her response shocked me into silence. She said "no, I haven't and I won't change for anybody." What was just a casual conversation between friends suddenly became a stark realization in my head and I almost couldn't continue our conversation. It was then I realized that length of service sometimes brings us to a point where we simply refuse to change our bad habits. We become so comfortable with ourselves just the way we are that we fail to realize that Christianity is all about change. It is about waking up daily and saying Lord, those things that are still in me that need to be changed, please, continue to work on it. Christianity is about recognizing where we are wrong and making a conscious decision to be different. The only way to be like Christ is to be less like ourselves, and we can't do that by becoming comfortable with where we are.

So this is one disadvantage of tenure.  We sometimes think of Romans 12:1 - 2 as advice for the young Christian to learn to renew their minds,  but I'm learning that the renewal of the mind must be constant.  We never stop growing and because we are always living,  there will always be a necessity for change.  Transformation is not an overnight thing,  it is a process that will never end simply because our sinful nature will never go away.

Tenure cannot be traded for Christian maturity.  Maturity requires action.  Tenure is only an existence.  If you never do anything,  you will still have tenure but you will never mature. 

Today, my encouragement to all of us to remember that Christianity is about change, growth and maturity. Let us not become comfortable with our bad habits or simply make a decision to stay the way we are. Let us remember that no matter how many years we have been Christians, we can still be immature.

May we change, grow and mature together.

Devotions like this one and others can be found in the Soul Food Series in Kindle or paperback format. 

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The Emergency Fund

We all have an "emergency fund" - a safety net in the event that we fall sick or have an accident or need to fix a leaky roof etc. The emergency fund is not only a bank account - it could comprise of family members and friends who provide emotional support, a good job, a country with a good economy, a university education and more.  If you're honest with yourself, your stress levels are way lower when you have something to lean on in the case of an emergency. It's common sense. You feel that if something were to happen to you, then you'd at least have the money to take care of yourself, people to help take care of you etc. An emergency fund is a good thing - a great thing really, but it becomes a problem when we trust the emergency fund more that we trust God.


What do I mean by that?

You see, I've been noticing some thing about myself, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one. As a chronic worrier (yes, I know, that needs to change), when I have nothing or no one to fall back on, I go into panic mode. My human nature needs something that I can see to make me feel safe. However, as a child of God, my hope, trust and confidence should be in God, not what I can see. In other words, my automatic reaction should be faith (Hebrews 11:1) and not panic.

So here's where the emergency fund gets us in trouble. Whilst it is an excellent thing to have (and we should all be working on one), when we have it, we tend to lose sight of the fact that God is our provider - He's our source and everything comes from him. We lose sight of the fact that we don't provide for ourselves, God does. Our faith level drops a little bit because we feel that if something happens we'll be fine. We don't remember that it is God who gave the emergency fund in the first place and He loses a little bit of his significance in our lives. That is why, when our emergency fund is depleted, we go into panic mode.

I believe that faith is like a muscle. It must be exercised or it will deteriorate. If we don't learn to have faith even in the good times, when times become desperate it is going to be difficult to wrap our heads around that fact that God can and WILL take care of us.

So what's the message of today's post? As children of a living God, we must remember to put our faith not in the material things that we have, or the persons that we may have around us, or the jobs that we currently hold or the current state of the economy of the country that we live in. Our faith should ALWAYS be in God. He has given us wisdom and has taught us to save for the future, to educate ourselves, to work diligently at whatever job we have and invest in the future. However, let us not let that "emergency fund" distract us from have total faith in our ultimate source.

Be blessed and have a great day.

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Serving One Another in Love

We all know Christianity means following Christ, i.e. living our lives patterned after the way he lived here on earth and doing the things he taught. One of the biggest things I've noticed about Christ's life is his ministry. When I say ministry, I'm not referring to the noun the way we all use it these days, rather, I refer to it as a verb.

According to www.dictionary.com Ministry is: a) the profession or duties of a minister of religion and b) the performance of these duties. Hmm... interesting. Does it mean then that as ministers we are required to do something?


You see, I say this because we live in an age where people are obsessed with titles and positions. We call ourselves ministers because we hold certain positions within our local church assembly, but are we really doing ministry?

When Christ walked on planet earth, he healed the sick, the blind, the broken and fed the hungry, both spirituality and physically. He didn't look down on sinners, nor did he cast them aside. He didn't regard the church officials as higher than the regular folk on the street. Rather, he spent more time working with these people, eating in their homes, allowing them to wash his feet and teaching them the errors of their ways in love; showing them that there was a better way to live.

So why then, did our ministry evolve to singing in church to church-folk who already know Jesus and treating others who don't or who are struggling as outcasts? Why do we create tiny cliques of other ministers as "sophisticated" as ourselves to associate with and ignore the plight of everyone else?

See, now I have to be careful with today's posts because I can certainly see a lot of my friends and associates getting mad at me for it because a lot of us fit into these descriptions. However, we must be aware of our mistakes as Christians and this is one of them.

Ministry means helping our fellow man. It means serving those entrusted to our care. It means understanding their plight. It means not being too "stoosh"* to reach down to them in their situations and lend a helping hand. It means leaving the comfort of our church pews sometimes and going next-door to the old lady's house and helping her get rid of the weeds that have over-run her yard. It means, befriending that girl who was just raped and walking her through her recovery process- it does not mean telling her that everything will be alright and then moving on.

Ministry does not mean an exquisitely cut suit with salon-perfect hair and nails and the perfect shoes. We are not called to "look the part" of ministry, we are called to live it. Let's stop being oblivious to the hurt of people around us. There are people in our everyday lives who are in desperate need of help but are afraid to ask us because they fear that we will look down on them. They are afraid that we will offer them only a few church cliches in our best "ministry voice" and then leave them to the wolves to fend for themselves.

Christians, fellow brothers and sisters, our Christianity must be tangible and identifiable. The people we are called to serve need to know that we are accessible and not judgmental or else they will never come to us for their help that they need. If that is the case, then our mission will never be accomplished and Christ's love will never be shown as it should. I'm sure we all agree that we are God's hands here on earth. He does things in the lives of people but it is through other people. If we are too distracted by our church services and our new "ministry suits" then we won't see those who are hurting and who need help.

Let us stop acting the part of ministry and let us learn to live it.

* Stoosh is a term used in the Caribbean to refer to those who are "fresh" or look down on others whom they don't consider to be part of their clique, clan or class. 

Devotions like this one and others can be found in the Soul Food Series in Kindle or paperback format. 

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