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No Other Choice
I owe a debt of gratitude to the village of spiritual veterans that surrounded my childhood and adolescence. I’m inspired everyday by their examples, but this isn’t to say that these individuals were perfect. I learned from the good and the bad. I saw rampant infidelity, and I witnessed with my very own eyes the…
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Shut It Off!
It probably comes to no one’s surprise that the popularity of social media has skyrocketed during this current season. With less physical contact and interaction among each other, we’re spending more of our time looking at what others are doing, and they are all too happy to keep us entertained. It starts easy enough. We…
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God Will Answer Our Prayers!
In Matthew 7:7-8(NLT), our Master Jesus gives us a clear picture of what faithful, persistent prayer is supposed to look like. He said, “7 Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone…
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Set Aside the Baby Bottle and Chew on the Meat
Hosea 4:6 tells us that God’s people are destroyed because they lack knowledge. This can sound very harsh to an untrained ear, but it shouldn’t seem harsh at all. Society places a great deal of emphasis and priority on education, so much so that we put our little ones in an educational environment almost as…
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What Comes After the Rest?
One of life’s most fundamental pieces of wisdom is that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re not able to prepare for the destination. Every person that is living and that has ever lived is on a spiritual journey. Jesus Christ tells us in John 4:24 that God is Spirit. God created everything that…
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Are You Creating A Space for Love to Land?
“I’m thirty-two, and I’m the only one in my group of girlfriends that’s still single.” This statement, or something like it, is one many of us have heard from at least one of our single friends. Now more than ever, we’re being told that loneliness is an epidemic, and some have bought into this hook,…
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Dealing with Sadness and Uncertainty
The famous writer and poet, Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true.” It speaks to me now just as much as it did when I first read it in high school. I’m old enough to have learned some serious lessons from life’s mistakes and its triumphs. One of the important lessons that is evident…
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Is God Punishing Our Sin?
1John 4:1(NLT) tells us, “Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world.” One of the statements I’ve made many times over the years is regarding the importance…
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We Want It Now, But God Says “Not So Fast”
It is said by many people that we live in a ‘me’ society where everyone is out for themselves. This is a survivalist mentality because people will act and do things that are aligned with their own personal agendas. Sometimes their motivation is out of selfishness or greed, because they’re only thinking in terms of…
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A New Level of Relationship
One of the most well-known Mosaic Laws in The Ten Commandments is Exodus 20:3(NKJV), “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Those of us who were students in Sunday School learned that Heavenly Father is a jealous God, and for most of us, this sufficed as the answer to why we shouldn’t engage idolatry…
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A Youthful Spirit and Mature Spirituality
Wonderful sisters in Christ of a certain age need to be confident in the goodness, power, and faithfulness of our God. More and more, it seems we’re allowing this confidence to slip further away from our grasp. Oh, we hide it well. Most of us are used to hearing and saying, “God is good all…
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Lids Ripped Off Our Little Boxes
In Mark 11:24(NIV), Jesus Christ says, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” This is an extraordinarily wonderful truth! Our Great Big Powerful God has made it very plain that we have access to Him. So much so that when we…
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Where Do We Go from Here?
Wherever we are in our spiritual walk with the Father through Jesus Christ, He’s calling us to go further—to become more deeply rooted in Christ. God wants us to do this so that we become spiritually stronger, and so that the vision He holds for us becomes clearer. This is so important because some of…
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A New Dimension in Prayer
It should never escape the minds and hearts of any believer that prayer to God is meant to be an expression of our total lives in Christ. The habit pattern for many of us, though, is to portion off our lives into categories. We label most of it as stuff we can handle, and other…
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God Will Show You What He Can Do!
Proverbs 19:21(NLT) says, “You can make many plans, but the LORD’s purpose will prevail.” Making many plans is what we humans do. We’re constantly making decisions and choices that we think will lead us where we want to go. God tells us in Proverbs 19:21 that we can certainly do this, but we must always…
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Can’t Nobody Do Ya’ Like Jesus!
Charlotte called her dad a very mean dry alcoholic. When they were children, before he got sober, he would whip her and her other siblings frequently for no reason. She said when she asked him why he was punishing her, he said if he whipped one, he had to whip them all. They were terrified…
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Truly Walking in Freedom
We have big problems these days, and it’s not just on a micro level, but on a macro one. We’re seeing the enemy’s plots on a very large scale and his tactic of divisiveness and lies is more transparent than ever. But society is revealing to us that there are very few people with their…
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A Marriage Ultimatum without A Foundation
There are very few more important treasures in life than wisdom and spiritual maturity. Margarite found this out the hard way. I had known her for almost ten years before she married her long-time love at 58 years old. She had gotten serious about her walk in the Lord and gave her boyfriend an ultimatum,…
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Are You Ready for Restoration?
In the Old Testament, Isaiah 43 looks forward to the release of God’s people from their captivity, but it goes beyond their current situation of bondage in Babylon and looks even to our redemption through the Lord Jesus Christ. Heavenly Father gives them a great encouragement in Isaiah 43:19(NLT). He said, “For I am about…
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Released into Your Destiny
In our younger years, many of us had dreams of who we’d be in life, what we’d be doing, and who we’d be doing it with. As we got older and more mature, we began to understand that things would not go exactly according to our plans. Some of us didn’t land the dream job,…
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God Is Faithful!
Every now and again, I dust off my chronicles of being single and desperately wanting to be married. I share them with anyone that might be inspired by my testimony. For sure, it is most definitely a testimony that set the stage for the rest of my life, and I say this because I believed…
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It Keeps Pricking, Even After You’ve Given It to God
In 2Corinthians 12:7, the Apostle Paul talks about his thorn in the flesh. Most of us know what it feels like to be pricked by something sharp, perhaps by a needle of some kind or by an actual thorn from a plant. It’s not a pleasant experience, but in most cases the hurt goes away…
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Pressing Through in the Midst of Adversity
“I know He’s able to do it, but will He do it for me?” Even after all the miraculous records that are written in the Bible, many of us still struggle to trust God in our weakest, most vulnerable moments. Most of us can get over those minor hiccups in life and bounce back relatively…
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Decluttering Emotionally
This year went by in a whisper, and with another new year approaching, we need to take a little inventory. We need to access what worked for us in the past year and what didn’t, so we can make some changes. Resolutions are the go-to in order to get this done and start everything off…
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Don’t Let Guilt Steal Your Confidence
Romans 8:1(NKJV) says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.” Condemnation is a word that we associate with a state of no longer being useful for anything. When something is condemned, we instantly think about a…
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Too Timid to Claim What’s Yours…Don’t Be!
John 10:10(NKJV) is a verse of scripture that most believers know, but many of us have not gotten to a place where its truth is actually manifested in our lives. Jesus declared in this verse, “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may…
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It’s Already Yours!
“Hannah was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the LORD.” (1 Samuel 1:10, NLT) Hannah’s Cry of Anguish Hannah knew a thing or two about emotional pain. She was loved by her husband, Elkanah, but she wasn’t his only wife. Peninnah, the other wife, had children, but Hannah did not. In that…
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Afraid He’s Going to Take It Away
We can be so stuck in the mode of struggle and strife that we can’t imagine what a life of peace and rest looks like. This happens when we become conditioned by fear because of the attacks waged against us by the enemy. It is indeed the devil’s intention to cause us to respond to…
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The Fallen Woman
I, like so many of those who knew her, believed that Twawni Davis was destined for great things. In addition to her model good looks, she was the most talented individual I had ever known, and as a young person I was always mesmerized in her company. Of course, she dated the most handsome, popular…
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Spread Too Thin
Whether it’s on our jobs, in our family life, or in our lives period, many of us are guilty of spreading ourselves too thin. We are trying to get too many things done in a limited amount of time. This can cause us to compromise the quality of our lives and work, because we’re taking…