A daily devotional moment by Chris Garcia
The Lord is asking you, “Can I have just a moment with you?” Some of you haven’t been giving Him that moment. In the back of your head, you know that you need to give Him a moment. But you are rushed, hurried, and running around. You wonder why you cannot develop a deep prayer life. You are fighting so much guilt and so much personal condemnation. But what you don’t realize is that you can have a moment by moment by moment, moments with Him all throughout your day. So try not to put Him into a legalistic box. Most of all, do not put yourself in any unnecessary guilt trips. Some of you feel so very distant from the Lord because you have not given that time of ministry to Him. Now when I say ministry I am not referring to ministering to others. I am talking about ministering to Him. You feel like you can’t come any closer because of this callousness that has developed in your heart. In your heart, you have built a case against yourself when God has not condemned you. Jesus the lover of your soul wants to give you that sweet refreshment that your soul craves. He simply says, "Come to Me." Come with all of your burdens. "Come to Me, you that are heavy laden and I’ll give you rest for your soul." Sometimes coming to Him is a moment-by-moment encounter. Don’t put yourself in a religious box where you say, "If I don’t pray from this time to that time I have missed it." Or "If I don’t worship from this time to that time that I then miss the anointing for the day." Dear sister, and brother, don’t you know that if you are a believer, which you are, if you are here, that you are joined to the Lord. The word join is likened to being thoroughly mixed. It is like taking two half glasses filled with liquid and merging them into one. You simply cannot separate the two. Some of you have to change your perspective, so that you become more aware of His perspective and of His Presence. Some of you need a good dose of grace. Some of you have fallen so far that you don't know what to do. You feel trapped and are caught up between a rock and a hard place.
This question has come up several times, so I am going to address it here. The question is “How do I come back to my first love?” Many of you have asked this question. There is a moment in which you feel that you are overwhelmed with these thoughts of the past. Where you are caught up with the “I remember when…” Focusing on how your previous relationship or experience with the Lord was. I remember when my time with Jesus was so sweet. "I remember when it was like this, or that," and so on. I felt so close, I remember when I use to hear His voice and now I feel so far. You think, "Now I don’t hear His voice at all." Questioning yourself you ask, "Did I do something wrong?" You have become discouraged. The scripture says hope deferred makes the heart sick. What does that mean? It means simply that you are hoping for something to happen. You are hoping to experience God in a new and fresh way. But you keep getting disappointed with unmet expectations, and so your hope keeps getting deferred. And then what ends up happening to you is that your heart gets sick. This is not a physical heart issue that I am referring to. It is a spiritual condition of your heart. Where your hope feels like it keeps getting differed, then there are these moments where you feel bad for thinking thoughts of anger or resentment towards the Lord. Because hope is being differed so much in your life, you feel like you are stuck in a spiritual rut. You want to move forward but are unable to. You are simply stuck. Many of you are in that predicament with your spiritual walk with God. This is a place I am personally familiar with for I have been there many times. So many times I have sensed that in my own walk, where it is like you are stuck and you cannot move forward. Your thought reflects back to the moments of the past. I remember when this, or I remember when that. How do we get out of that? What do we do? First of all, we have got to go to the word of God and see what the Lord says about that situation or predicament. In the video, we will go deeper into the Word starting in Revelation 2.
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