Tag: love

Conversations

Happy Father’s Day, God

Sarah StewartLeave a comment

Dear Papa God,

This is the time of year that we set aside to celebrate fathers so I thought I’d write you this short letter just to tell you some of the most special things to me about You, my Papa God (Abba).

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The thing you do the best is: love

I have given you plenty of reasons to be impatient and frustrated with me and really, I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you decided you’d had enough. I certainly have had enough of me and my failings. But in spite of all my failings, you haven’t ever given up on me. And, Papa God, its so much more amazing to me that every time I mess up you have always been right beside me with your hand outstretched, ready to pick me up and whisper to me as you pull me close once again. I love hearing you say, “I love you. Nothing you can ever do or say will make me love you less or any more than I already do because I love you so much, I gave up my very best just to have you with me all the time.” I love climbing up on your lap and leaning my head against your chest so I can hear your heart beat as you speak loving words of kindness, grace, truth, and instruction to me. You give me so much grace, forgiveness, and mercy – all things I don’t deserve and never earned – all because You love me. 

My favorite thing you’ve made is: kids – especially my kids

Actually, its really hard to pick just one thing out of everything you’ve ever made! The amazing sunsets and sunrises on the water are so breathtakingly beautiful – I don’t find anything like those in the store, and your hand crafts each one uniquely and perfectly beautifully. And colors all around – your paint palette is amazing! From the pink and purple night skies to the brightest flowers and greenest grass, you make the best stuff, Papa God. And then there’s the people and animals you’ve made – you are so creative! What an amazing imagination you have! And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the stars and the entire universe! But ultimately when I look at the amazing children you made, just for me and the wonderful husband you gave me, I am in such awe. From the smallest things came these two complex, beautiful, life-filled beings that only the best Creator could have ever designed and fit together so perfectly.

My favorite thing to do with you is: talk to you and listen to your stories 

I get so much joy from spending time with you, Papa God. My heart is so thrilled to hear you in our time together. I don’t always do a great job of listening to you (you speak kinda soft most of the time) but I’m learning. And every time I hear you for myself, I just want to stay in that place with you. I don’t want to go anywhere else or be with anyone else or do anything else, I just want to sit with you and listen to you and see all the mind-blowing things you want to show me. I love to hear your sweet voice. I love to see pictures you draw in my mind’s eye as you speak truth and life and love to me. And I love that you listen to me too, Papa God. I know I can go on and on and on…hahaha a little like my sweet 5 year old. But you are so loving and kind to listen to me. And when my heart is heavy and my tears come so fast over the smallest issues, you still sit with me and listen to me, and comfort me and remind me that you’re bigger and stronger than all those problems.

My favorite thing about you is: you pursue and don’t give up on me

It warms and thrills my heart to think about you dancing and singing and rejoicing over me! You are an amazing dancer and singer – I just know it! And oh how you have forgiven me and beckoned to me so many times! I don’t deserve your continued pursuit. Though I would have stopped a long time ago, you are not one to give up on any of your kids, and I’m no exception. And because of how you don’t give up on me and you continue to pursue me, I feel encouraged to approach you. I know that you won’t forget about me or special events in my life, even ones that I don’t realize are worth celebrating, you are determined to celebrate me all the time – simply because you love me. What more approval and affection could I want? I know I’ll find true, pure approval and affection from you, Papa God. How can you be so excited over any small obedience of mine? How can you be so determined to never give up on me? Yet, you are and nothing at all will stop the joy I experience in knowing that you rejoice over me.

 

Papa God, I don’t want to leave this letter; there is so much more I could and should say, though I don’t know if I can find all the words. I don’t want to stop remembering you and thinking about how good you are, and how amazing and strong you are, and how sweetly loving you are to me. I don’t want to leave this precious time with you. But I know that no matter where I am, I can always lift my head up and you are right here beside me, ready to listen to my praises and to speak lovingly to me. You are the best and only, Papa God, and I want to be with you and to be just like you.

Pick me up,Papa God? Hold me closer?

Teach me more, Papa God. Tell me more of your stories; I love the sound of your voice.

I love you, Papa God.

Happy Father’s Day, Papa God.

Conversations

Real Promises

Sarah Stewart2 Comments

For all the promises of God find their Yes in him.
That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.
And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us,
and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.
2 Corinthians 1:20-22

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As a child, I learned that promises are serious. You can’t break a promise.

Especially not a pinky-promise!

But as I got older and more acquainted with “real life” I learned more and more just how un-true that is. As an adult, I’ve learned that not even promises in writing are always honored and even signed contracts can, and have been broken. I think sometimes maybe I am even worse about keeping my promises to God than I am with someone else.

“Oh Lord! I promise I’m going to be better at [fill in the blank]!” How many times have I fallen short of my promises to Him! Or even convinced myself that I didn’t think that all the way through, or made justifications about how God didn’t really want me to make that promise because of reason, reason, reason……

“Lord, I was planning on giving some of this money to the church, but surely you don’t want me to do it now that I have more debt than I did when I made that promise.”

“Lord, I know I said I’d start talking to more people about you but they really look like they want to be alone and I’m sure I’d say the wrong thing or just make them uncomfortable. Besides, someone else is far more qualified than I am to talk to them.”

None of this is new to the Father though. He has always known this is how I tend to think. My Good Father doesn’t just stop at knowing that I tend to think this way though. And He doesn’t write off my failed promise keeping as “Well, there she goes again, breaking yet another promise. I guess we’re going to go for the thousandth time with this lesson before I can bless her since she broke another promise.”

No. that would be far too much like me and not at all like the Father. God knew that there was no way I could be good on my own, I’ve proven to keep my promises less than fifty percent of the time! But that doesn’t keep Him from keeping all of His promises to me anyway.

God’s promises are never broken. The passage here in 2 Corinthians is saying just that: “all the promises of God find their ‘Yes’ in Him.” God keeps His promises, and He keeps them perfectly, and He keeps them always. In fact, the biggest promise God made has been proven and played out in Jesus – in His birth, death, and resurrection. God’s biggest promise has been to love me with a love that is so big, so undying that nothing would ever be able to separate me from it, not even my own unfaithfulness or evil. (Ro. 8:38-39)

What an amazing thought! God has kept every single one of His promises and the proof of that fact is His very own Son, Jesus. And as if it weren’t enough for Him to prove how He keeps His promises to me, He takes it up a notch and gives me even more. He gives me a guarantee (the Holy Spirit) for all of the promises yet to be kept and then He even gives me the ability to do great things because of Jesus and the kingdom I am part of.

“So let me get this straight, God. You know I’m a screw up and I definitely haven’t proven that I can keep any promise worth keeping – but you make a promise to me anyway? And not just any old promise like ‘I promise to buy you ice cream if you’re good today.’ but like a real promise – a huge promise. You promise to love me so much that you died for me just so you and I could be in the same place together. Just so I could actually be in your presence. Just so I could have a meaningful, personal, loving relationship with you. Even though that is the last thing I deserve…And then, you did it. You kept your promise to me…

And what’s that you’re telling me? You have even more planned for me? You mean this huge promise to love me doesn’t stop with what was done already in Jesus? You’re telling me that I haven’t even seen the other promises you are going to keep….”

Mind. Blown. Seriously.

Who does that?!?

God does that.

The Good Father. My Good Daddy. Your Good Daddy.

He’s here to stay. He’s my Daddy, and yours too. And not because of some court order or feeling of obligation. Nope. The Father is your Father because of His promise to love you. And He doesn’t turn that promise into a “No” because of anything you did or didn’t do, or because of some loop hole clause in a contract. In fact, He already kept His promise. He paid a price no one could afford to pay in order to adopt you and show you exactly how much He loves you. That is how much you mean to Him and how much He honors and keeps His promises.

His “Yes” to His promises has always been worth trusting and it is no less a “Yes” today than yesterday. This is a real promise that will never be broken. Stronger than any promise ever made by a human.

Even stronger than a pinky-promise.

Would you trust Him today? It doesn’t cost you anything – it only cost Him everything. What do you have to loose? A life of discouragement perhaps? A life without love, joy, and peace?

He promises that will never be true when He’s your Father. And He proves it. He’s done it before. He’s doing it now. He’ll always do it. He keeps His promises. They are always “Yes”, proven and backed by Jesus.

And when we see Him keep His promises, how can we not praise Him, watching this amazing glory fulfilled in our undeserving lives?

Conversations

I Forgive You

Sarah StewartLeave a comment

“…Mercy triumphs over judgment.” – James 2:13b

“Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.’ ” – Matthew 18:21-22

“For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:6

Three tiny words. They are easy to speak with our tongue – often hard to live with our heart, but its at the heart-level that it is vital. Forgiving those who’ve sinned against us is vital for our very lives. Each and every one of us are not without some sin, but God who is fully, completely, and perfectly without sin has forgiven us. James 2 reminds us that if we break only one law (it doesn’t matter which one!) we become “lawbreakers”. And so since we have all broken at least one of God’s laws, we’re all lawbreakers. And if we’re honest, we’ve all broken more than just one and each of the laws we’ve broken, we’ve broken more than once. I certainly have.

But even though we have continually sinned against God, His mercy has been shown to us and it is His mercy that has won us and won the victory for us. God has not won our hearts nor the battle against sin by condemning us to what we deserve for sinning. Our Savior won our hearts because of His great love for us. He won our hearts because of His mercy. And also, in reverse, it is not a sacrifice that we made, nor anything we’ve done to triumph over our own sin or justify ourselves (remember – the first law we broke, we were done for) – it is the mercy and forgiveness of God that has saved, rescued, triumphed, redeemed, and is restoring us.

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So, if God has shown mercy and given us forgiveness that we didn’t earn and certainly don’t deserve (we have given more grief to God than we ever get from one another), then we have no business withholding mercy and forgiveness from someone who has mistreated, hurt, or in any way sinned against us. Jesus makes this very clear in Matthew 18 when He explains that if we fail to forgive and show mercy to one another, we will no longer be recipients of God’s mercy and forgiveness.

Yikes. Does that motivate your heart? It does mine.

One of the things I astronomically appreciate about God and my relationship with Him is that He has shown me great, completely unmerited mercy! There is no way I want to give that up, especially not because of some human being that was unkind to me and holds nothing on my eternal life with The Father. I don’t want to throw away the mercy and forgiveness of God for me because of someone who is not my Heavenly Father, is not the Creator of the Universe, and has no ability to adopt me as the daughter of an Eternal King.

When I hold the light of God’s mercy for me on the things that have happened and the ways that I’ve been hurt, my heart is softened so much more. I was ready to forgive before, but now, considering my great need for His mercy, I’m so much more ready! In fact, my heart is heavier and more saddened as I think about the difficulty their sin has caused for their own lives and I’m thankful on their behalf that God has the same mercy and forgiveness for them as He has had for me.

To the one who left: I wholeheartedly forgive you for being driven toward your own agenda instead of listening to wise counsel around you. And I am sorry that you are having to learn the hard way that comes from pride and your own self-determination to get things done the way you think they should be done instead of in the greater blessing that comes from humbly waiting on God to develop that leadership and influence in you. I forgive you for driving yourself away from all of us by acting like Jacob when he stole Esau’s birthright due to a prophecy and then had to run away to save his skin. I am sorry that you are having to walk through more waiting and uncertainty as you learn the lessons God is walking you through. I forgive you for making the leadership mistake Solomon’s son made in not accepting the counsel of wiser and older people around you over the opinions of younger and more inexperienced people and I pray that instead of great demise like what happened to Rehoboam, that you will understand the benefit of humility and learning from the ones God has placed with wisdom around you. I pray that you would have a greater leadership impact like Jesus who did not consider equality with God to be His for the taking yet had the biggest, most lasting impact on the world of any man who had come before or has been since.

To the one who has struggled with depression and self-image: I wholeheartedly forgive you for being so consumed with what has happened to you that you have succumbed to your own weaknesses and done wrong to those who’ve held you in high regard. I forgive you for running away in the face of conflict and I pray that you will grow stronger as the people around you who love you help you to stand firm. I forgive you for taking credit for all those years for the things that others did behind the scenes that made you look good in the spotlight. I forgive you for taking your queues from poor, prideful, and controlling leadership that came before you instead of investing your strength and efforts into bettering yourself and your leadership potential to pour back into the people you have led. I pray that you will surround yourself with people who you will allow to be honest with you, even if it feels uncomfortable and confrontational. I pray that you will have great courage to listen to their loving wisdom and do the things that they suggest weighed against the wisdom of God. And I pray that you will give more credit to those that God has blessed with gifts different from those he has blessed you with. That as you stand in the spotlight, you will increasingly, more and more pull out your mirror to reflect that light back on the glory of God and His hand at work in the people around you.

To the one who lied: I wholeheartedly forgive you for the deep wounds you have caused so many who put such great, deep trust in you. I am sorry that you allowed yourself to be separated from true accountability and that the Enemy dragged you off by yourself for so long that you began to believe all the lies were actually truth and that you continued in them as a result. I forgive you for betraying our trust that was almost child-like as one has for their parent. I forgive you for starting so many good things that we now loose because of the consequences of your sin. I am thankful on your behalf that the truth finally came to light because I can’t imagine what more mire and muck you were headed for in that dark blackness of lies all alone. I am sorry that so many have been hurt so deeply, in life altering ways because of your dishonesty and I pray that each one is able to come to forgive you from their heart as well. I pray that as God already had blessing, healing, and freedom planned ever since the garden and all the way through the Old Testament, that God would speak also directly to you His specific mercy, freedom, healing, and blessing waiting for you. I am sorry that you have to live with the weight of all of this but I am thankful that you do and pray that it will bring you truthfully deeper and closer to God and that the next time we hear from you, it will be nothing but truth and all to the glory of God, humbly accepting nothing other than our love and forgiveness for you.

Conversations

Sweet, Sweeter, Sweetest

Sarah StewartLeave a comment

How sweet are your words to my taste,
    sweeter than honey to my mouth!
–Psalm 119: 103

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Many Christians (myself included) often begin January with a kind of “reset” – a specific re-focusing on our individual relationship with God through renewed or increased prayer accompanied by fasting of some kind. Some go all out and do a “Daniel’s Fast” or further still some fast solid foods for a couple of weeks (so far the Holy Spirit hasn’t led me to do that one!). Usually I look forward to the beginning of the year reset and fast time. Usually I have a fresh excitement about giving the first-fruits of my entire year to God. Usually I ask the Lord a couple of weeks prior to the start of our “21 days” about what I should be praying about and focusing on and sacrificing as a constant reminder to talk to Him. This year however had a very different start. I don’t really know why (I haven’t given my very analytical brain the space to dive deep into that question), but I ended up not sacrificing anything and really justifying not fasting anything at all for the first 10 days of our 21 day fast. I had my quiet time with the Lord every morning and almost every morning would question what I should fast and if I even should fast. I wound up having full discussions with myself going back and forth: “To fast or not to fast? That is the question.” … My justification not to fast was that the only thing I seemed to be able to come up with doing was to fast sugar and I thought that was “too easy” and it felt more like a diet than a reminder to stop and talk to God. So I didn’t do anything.

But God, with the grace and perfect love for me that He has, continued speaking to my heart and one Sunday morning His voice was a little louder. Our pastor was talking about fasting just for a couple of minutes and mentioned something along the lines of “…if its so easy, why not just do it?” It was so brief and that wasn’t even the topic of his message. It was one of those God-voice things and I immediately latched on to it.

The next morning during my quiet time the Holy Spirit reminded me again “If its so easy, what is holding you back from doing this fast? What will it hurt to fast sugar in favor of extra time listening to The Father? Do you think He cares whether or not you started on the ‘right’ day?” (another of my justifications for not doing the fast) “He cares for your attention. Just start.”

So I did. I gave up sugar for the remainder of the 21 days. It didn’t all the sudden become hard, nor did I have huge, earth-shattering moments and even the temptation for sugar wasn’t that bad. But I did experience something different – a different sweetness.

The week that I gave up sugar, I was reflecting on the choice to fast sugar and again feeling like “Why am I doing this specific fast? Does it even mean anything?”

God is so good. His love is so tender. … and sweet.

As I was reflecting and reading, the Holy Spirit whispered to me that God Himself is the sweetness that I long for.

The name of Jesus is the sweetest name. His Word is sweet, “sweeter than the honeycomb”.

I gave up sugar, a physical sweetness, and then I saw even more all around me the sweetness of God. And He took me further and showed me that He wants me to be sweeter, just like He (my heavenly “Daddy”) is. He wants me to be sweeter towards others – to use kinder, more gentle words, to consider others before myself, to have more patience with my children and co-workers and family, to brighten someone’s day with a sweet smile, to speak life and hope and love – those sweet things that we all need to hear.

Throughout the rest of my sugar fast I was reminded again and again of the sweetest Name, the sweetest One, the sweetest Word, the sweetest Gift. And each time I reflected on my fast, I was warmed by the sweetest Love of God for me and also challenged to be the sweetness of Christ to the people around me.