Dear Gracefilled Lillies,
Sometimes you stumble across an old bookmark or a card with a scripture on it and God uses it to stir something new in your heart.
I created a free bookmark when I first opened my Gracelilly group on Facebook over a year ago. I printed it for myself and popped it in my Bible. This year in February, I came across it again. The scripture on it was Psalm 145:8. It is all about God's grace for us and expresses His character in stark contrast to our own. A scripture about Compassion.
My dad who is also my spiritual father, pointed out lately that He is so glad that God is not an old man with a wip standing behind you with a stern face waiting for you to mess up so He can punish you. Today I watched a little video Jospeh Prince shared on the Holy Communion and also a clip on His latest sermon series releasing soon and it is about winning the fight against the enemy. He starts out to say that the enemy's greatest achievement is to get the world to believe he doesn't exist. He is a sly "devil"...pun fully intended. He works on our minds so we believe he is not out there (while he actually is and targeting believers intensely). He wants us to doubt God too. If we doubt God and we doubt ourselves, we are limp and powerless. It is all however a smokescreen. We need to understand and know the Word and we need to speak it and pray it over our lives and protect our hearts and minds with it.
My fight against the enemy is real and I sometimes feel like I am losing the fight, but I know that God has won the battle for me. I may not be perfect and fail all the time, but as Joseph Prince pointed out in his latest video about he Holy Communion, the Israelites where just as terrified and scared while they were living through the first Passover. Joseph Prince explained so eloquently. What stuck with me was the visual that they might have wailed in agony and fear (just as the Egyptians probably did), but what protected them was the blood of the "Lamb" on the door posts. Today we may sometimes "wail" and fall apart over the challenges in our lives. Afterwards we may feel like our doubts and fears have really broken our relationship with God and that at some point He will get fed-up with our up-&-down faith.
But the good news is that in this Psalm we see God's character revealed to us. He is not a man. He doesn't function like us and I am so glad about that. He is loving and kind and so full of Grace...something that I focus on because of the meaning of my name. I want to live gracefilled and gracefully and pore grace into the lives of those He sends my way. Today He reminds me that it is so important to know my place in His heart and to know that it is never about my abilities, my power, how much I do or give or am perfect and perfectly follow through on everything. I probably wont. I am small and I realize how small in comparison to such a big and awesome God. There are no words to describe how I feel about this deep in my spirit. I can just say that it is really comforting to know that I don't have to be perfect for God's love to cover me and because of the sacrifice of His Son on the Cross, I can live in freedom without fear of judgement. I can live in the shadow of His wings, knowing that it covers all my iniquities and faults and mistakes and sin and everything I might feel like I am failing Him.
You see, the enemy wants us to stand in shame and doubt and fear and that will destroy our faith. He wants to isolate us too. Isolate us from community.
As an introvert, that is not hard to accomplish. We tend to live disconnected to others in general. Social anxiety and the fear of failing others, or not fitting in or just not wanting to engage because of the emotional load of others, makes us shy and not engage when we actually need to. When the enemy sees a gap here, he will take it and isolate us even more with his lies. If you read here today, don't you believe his lies!
Jesus wants a full life for us all and living "connected" with others in harmony and piece, is important and I believe something He wants for all of us as His children.
Remember that God's compassion covers us always. Live under that compassion. Breathe it in and breathe it out. Let it give you wings to fly all the way to where He wants for you to go.
For those of you just discovering this blog and you haven't yet found us on Youtube, here is a little video we shared on the Ivytree Studio chanel there about this Scripture.
About the art:
I created this little artwork together with some other little girls last year. I am working on a
#Faithgirl collection and all them will form part of the full collection.
As always this collection will have a devotional kit and it will be available in both English and Afrikaans as well. I will do Print&Play kits and physical kits for this collection.
I am taking my time with it, because I want it to be really special.
I will keep you posted here.
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| Available now |
'Till next time
Buy some of our pretty paper here
Share your Ivytree Studio layouts with us here
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Thank you for your comment. - GraceLilly