Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"...the trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. I don't really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead I do what I hate...I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can't. I want to do what is good, but I don't. I don't want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway...I have discovered this principle of life - that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong...Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord..." ~ Romans 7 v 14-25

I can definitely relate to Paul's struggles here. I often find the same thoughts going round and round my head: I know what I do is wrong, but I carry on doing it anyway. I feel at the moment that God is really showing me how much of a wretched sinner I am. This might seem like an unloving thing for God to do but I am starting to realise how infinitely important it is that He is doing this for me. How can I understand fully the huge-ness of the sacrifice that Jesus made for me without recognising the full extent of my sin - my need for him? Yes, it's important not to dwell on our faults, Jesus has freed us from our sin and he "no longer counts people's sins against them" (2 Corinthians 5 v 19) - but, it is important to understand how small we are to understand God's greatness and to realise his truly amazing love for us! Mark 2 v 17 says "Healthy people don't need a doctor - sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners." I was in massive need of a Saviour - and I received Him!

A friend sent me a sermon from 1844 spoken by a man called Charles Finney called "Blessed are the poor in spirit". Finney speaks so honestly and beautifully about the struggles with sin. Here is the last paragraph, which encouraged me so much:

"These seasons of spiritual poverty are indispensable to holding on to Christ. See a young convert--young converts know little of themselves or of Christ. They run well for a time, but they must be taught more of Christ, and this they can learn only by learning more of themselves. Well, Christ begins the work in a soul. The convert was all joy, but his countenance falls. Poor child! do not scold him. He is sad; he dares hardly indulge a hope. What is the matter? He desponds. You encourage him to trust in Christ and rejoice in him. But no, that will not serve the turn, that does not remove the load. Christ has undertaken a work with him--has set about revealing him to himself, and the work will cost the poor soul many prayers, and tears, and groans, and searchings and loathings of heart. He prayed before for sanctification and he is astonished out of measure. He receives any thing in the world but sanctification. He prayed for the Baptism of the Holy Ghost, and he verily expected some beatific sight. He thought he should see the heavens opened as Stephen did. But instead of this, what a state! He seems given over to the tender mercies of sin. Every appetite and lust is clamorous as a fiend; his passions get the mastery; he frets, and grieves, and vexes himself, and repents and sins again; he is shocked, ashamed of himself, afraid to look up, is ashamed and confounded. Poor thing! he prayed to be sanctified, and he expected Christ would smile right through the darkness, and light up his soul with unutterable joy. But no! it is all confusion and darkness. He is stumbling, and sliding, and floundering, and plunging headlong into the mire, till his own clothes abhor him, and he is brought to cry--"Lord, O Lord, have mercy on me!" He expected--O what a fairy land! and he finds--what a desert--barren, dark, full of traps, and gins, and pitfalls; as it were the very earth conspiring with all things else, to ruin him. Child, be not disheartened; Christ is answering your prayer. Cold professors may discourage you, but be not discouraged; you may weep and groan, but you are going through a necessary process. To know Christ, you must know yourself; to have Christ come in, you must be emptied of yourself. How will he so this for you? If you would but let go of self--if you would but believe all that God says of you, and renounce yourself at first and at once, you might be spared many a fall; but you will not, you will believe only upon experience, and hence that experience Christ makes sure that you shall have to the full. And now, mark: whoever expects to be sanctified without a full and clear and heart-sickening revelation of his own loathsomeness, without being first shown how much he needs it, is very much mistaken. Till you have learned that, nothing you can do can avail aught; you are not prepared to receive Christ as he is offered in the gospel."

Pizza and Grace

I had dinner with a good friend on Wednesday night (Pizza Express - yum!) and we very quickly started talking about deeper things; the things that matter. I just love being able to do that with friends! 

Anyway, it soon became clear that we were both struggling with feeling like we weren't doing enough for God - we weren't reading our Bibles enough, we had little desire to go forth and spread the Good News, we sinned and knew we were sinning and carried on sinning. We just felt we were failing God. 

Together though we began to work things out. We started talking about grace. Then later on that evening we watched a DVD by Louie Giglio called 'Fruitcake and Ice-cream' (I'd definitely recommend it!) and we were just reminded again about God's amazing grace! 

So Louie Giglio directed us to 2 Corinthians 5:21: "For God made Christ who had no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Then he said, "What did YOU do in that passage?..."

"...Absolutely nothing!"

It is only by grace we have been saved!

Home.

There's no place like home.

I've had an odd couple of weeks at uni. Maybe an odd couple of months. It's left me feeling exhausted and emotionally (and physically) unwell. It's difficult to put my finger on what's making me feel low but whatever it is, God is teaching me so many things through this time.

God has blessed me with gifts that I want to use for His glory and not for my own. I am so grateful to Him for giving me these gifts, but I know I often use them wrongly. I often use them so that people will like me. I often use them so that the world will think I'm a "good" person and won't see the goodness of our God. I even use them in such a way that it actually does me more harm than good. How can I be effective in using my gifts to bless people and glorify His name if I'm making myself unwell in the process?

I know I probably sound really vague here; I hope I will soon be able to look back at this time, when the fog has lifted, and understand what's wrong with me. My mind has been in a vague state for a while now. I can't make sense of my thoughts. I'm not coherant. I often just feel utterly helpless and want to give up.

And then God speaks words of encouragement to me. Just a few hours ago, a good friend of mine pointed me towards Hebrews 10 v 23: "Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep His promise." What a faithful God we serve! I may feel like I've lost hope, like I don't know where God is in my circumstances. But "God can be trusted to keep His promise!" He has promised that He will come again and rescue us from our present troubles. He has promised His Holy Spirit to rest among us, giving us strength and building us up in Him. He has promised that He holds us close and will never let go.

And now I've come home and can just rest. What a blessing! Thank you God for my family!

Testimony.

So, I was asked to say my testimony at the student group at my church and so I thought I'd write it on here too - hopefully it will encourage and edify people...

The thought of telling my testimony to other people often grips me with fear. I think this is mainly because I've heard so many other people's testimonies where God seems to be really BIG. There are people who have been suffering horrible illnesses and been on death's door and God has healed them; there are people who have led a life so far away from God's plan, they have been enticed into a spiral of drugs, sex and depression, yet the Holy Spirit has convicted them and they've turned their lives around; and then there are others, who have had a pretty safe life, nothing too exciting has happened and yet they still trust the same God that healed the sick person and convicted the drug abuser and sex addict. I fit into the category of the latter. I am so grateful to God that I've never experienced anything so horrible in my life - my parents are Christians, they love me unconditionally, I've been set an amazing example of living for Christ with my Grandma. However, in regards to my saying my testimony, my initial thoughts always consist along the lines of: "they won't find it very exciting, I don't think they'd be interested." But, the more I think about it, I realise that although I haven't been dramatically healed physically, nor did I use to be a hard drug user but then "saw the light" (not that there's anything wrong with those testimonies - God can do all that and it's amazing when he does), God has still done amazing things in me, even if they seem small in comparison to other people's stories. He's changed my heart, He's carried me through the desert - through times when I've just felt spiritually empty - restoring my soul, and he's given my life purpose. So I warn you in advance, this story isn't going to be a particuarly dramatic rollercoaster of a story, but I hope and pray that you will find it encouraging, nonetheless.

I could go on for hours about how God's been working in my life but I'm mainly going to focus on one stage of my spiritual journey, which was when I was in Year 8.

Before I tell you about that though, I want to say one little story. Now this may sound rather strange but I'm going to say it anyway...I want to tell you about my birth! I strongly believe that God does not make mistakes - God did not screw up when He made each one of us. There is no mistake that we are alive and even here today. I believe that God has given everyone a purpose and there is an amazing reason why we even exist. I often forget this truth, but I find re-telling the story of my birth just speaks volumes of God's promises and His faithfulness!

So, the morning before I was born, my dad was doing his Bible reading and the verse he was directed to read was Psalm 118 v 17: "I will not die but live to tell of what the Lord has done." At the time, my dad didn't particuarly think about the meaning of that verse - he had other things to be thinking about - he was about to be a dad for the first time! My mum had had an uneventful pregnancy with no complications. A few hours later, my mum went into labour and things started getting complicated. Somehow, I'd managed to get myself tangled up with the umbilical cord and - trying not to be too graphic now! - the more my mum pushed, the tighter the cord got round my neck; I was slowly strangling myself. When I was finally born, I wasn't breathing.

Some of you more medically-minded people may know that two minutes after a baby is born, the midwives/doctors/whoever do, what's called, an APGAR test to see how healthy the baby is. They look at really basic things like: 'are they breathing?', 'do they have a normal skin colour?', 'do they have a pulse?' and you get given a score out of ten. Most babies easily score ten out of ten. It's not particuarly difficult.

I got 2/10...

...low scores right from the beginning!! They thought I wasn't going to make it when God suddenly reminded my dad of the verse he'd read that morning: "I WILL NOT die, but LIVE to tell of what the Lord has done." As you can see, I didn't die. I don't know why I didn't because I should have. But God doesn't make mistakes. There is a reason why I didn't die then. God knew me before I was conceived and has a plan for my life. 

"For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be."   ~ Psalm 139 v 13-16

Praise God!

So, fast-forward a decade: I went to church, Sunday School, youth groups, gave my life to Christ properly after doing a Topz Bible Study in my bedroom when I was 8 years old finally starting to comprehend what signficance Jesus' sacrifice meant for me. Things were pretty good. 

Then Year 8 happened.

I went to an all girls school and loved it. I had a great group of friends at the beginning of the year and we had loads of banter so I looked forward to going to school every morning. One day, two other girls in my class started hanging out with us in our "friendship group". They seemed nice enough and we got on well. However, for some reason, they decided that they didn't like this other girl in my class simply because, in their eyes, she wasn't very 'cool'. They said and did some really cruel things to her, to her face and behind her back. This girl had been made in the image of God and was loved deeply by Him - she did not deserve this. To my shame, I did not say anything about the bullying for weeks and weeks. I didn't join in, I just stayed silent. If I'm honest, I cared more about what these girls would think of me more than what God thinks and his desire that this girl be treated with love and friendship, just as he treats us. Eventually, I couldn't stand the Holy Spirit convicting me anymore and felt that I had to say something. As I was still a massive coward, I couldn't say it to their face but I wrote them a letter explaining how I thought it wasn't very nice of them to be like that and would they please stop it.

Good news: the girl stopped being bullied.

What I wasn't fully expecting was the cold reception I received from them because of that letter. They wrote me back a letter outlining every detail they didn't like about me - my looks, my personality, my actions - and tried to get lots of people to sign it, they called me names, they spread nasty rumours about me and they turned some of my friends away from me. 

I'm generally a pretty sensitive person so I should have felt alone, rejected and insecure. And if I'm honest, I did feel that quite a bit. Yet, at the same time, I felt the most-powerful, surpassing presence of God with me, reminding me of who HE says I am, comforting me when I let the girls' words affect me, giving me strength to keep on praising him and rejoicing in His love even when I felt battered and bruised from the lies that were being thrown at me from every angle. He protected me from their slander and all I wanted to do was rejoice! If God was on my side, who could ever stand against me?! I would be sitting alone in the classroom with no friends, I would hear my old friends laughing at me loudly enough so I would hear, and I would just feel my Father holding me close in His arms, sheltering me from the storm. The main thing I felt sad about was the fact that these girls did not know their Creator and their Saviour. It broke my heart. God helped me to love my enemies. 

This experience led me to want to show my faith publically so I decided I wanted to be baptised. I really felt God wanted me to invite one of the girls that had been particuarly nasty and at first I resisted this because I wanted to not have her laughing at me at my own baptism, for goodness sake! After a while though, I just asked her and she came along and heard my testimony (where I quickly skimmed over how I was having a hard time at school and God was helping me through it), she heard the Gospel and then saw me being baptised. 

After the service, she came up to me and apologised. At that moment, I was reminded of the great sacrifice God made for us. He has shown me so much grace and forgiveness that we don't deserve and he did it without hesitation because He loves us. How could I not show this girl a little bit of forgiveness and grace, when Jesus had lavished it on me? It was difficult, but with the help of God (I needed a lot of it), I forgave her - and oh! forgiveness is the most liberating and freeing feeling!

Still now, I struggle with worrying about what other people think of me and I have to constantly remind myself that my life has a purpose and that God loves me and His opinion is the only one that matters!

Beginnings.

"The Lord gives strength to his people, the Lord blesses his people with peace" ~ Psalm 29 v 11

We are the pinnacles of God's creation! He made the beautiful sunsets, the majestic mountains and the glittering stars, yet he thinks we are more beautiful than that. Our minds control what we think of ourselves. Our feelings lie to us about who we are. His mercies are new everyday. He will never stop calling your name and his voice never falters. Oh the joys of calling him 'Lord' and 'Friend'!

He calls us to know him in fullness.

He is for you, even when everyone is against you.

"You are precious, you are honoured and I love you" ~ Isaiah 43 v 4