Faith

Faith

WHAT DO YOU HAVE FAITH FOR?

Many of you know our incredible housing testimony of years ago. It was an incredible faith walk that inspired many to increase their trust in God. The moment our house sold, a wise mentor said to me, “Lisa, now what do you have faith for?” I remember telling him I didn’t want to return to that place of utter faith. It was scary, and I wanted to go back to a place of comfort and security. He encouraged me that God just grew my capacity to trust Him and to take that trust and pour it into the next thing so that my faith and dependence would become a lifestyle and not just an event in scary times. Whoa! I began to journal… “Lord, I have faith in the air I breathe (like seriously, I never worry or think about it. I just do it naturally). I have faith for water. I have faith that You love me. I have faith that I will always have clothes on my back. I have faith that You are my Savior. I have faith that You care about my housing needs. I have faith that You want to raise these children with me.”

I was walking down the areas I already had great faith in and was allowing Him to build my trust for more. One of my greatest responses when life throws me curveballs, ups, and downs, is to ask, “Lisa, do you have faith in God for  this situation?” It feels like a renewal of my vows each time. Yes, Lord, I have faith and trust in You for this particular situation.

LINGER WITH JESUS

Fight to be a Mary in this loud season. Find His feet and linger there. This affects your mind and heart and brings a calm and peace your children are desperate for at this hour. They don’t want to be doing more; they want to know the peace from a mother that has gazed upon Jesus long enough to transform her.

TOOLS OF WARFARE

So many of you precious people are feeling worn out, discouraged, and in battle. May I encourage you? The enemy’s assignment is to wear you out (Daniel 7:25). But God has given us the tools of warfare. Now more than ever, we must know and apply our armor daily. Ephesians 6:10-17 outlines God’s protective covering over your mind, body, and spirit. But it is conditional – you must pick it up. Spend some time going over your armor, and then GET IT ON! This is not the season to do life on your own strength. In fact, Ephesians 6:10 says our power must come from His strength, not our own. You will overcome, but you have to do it His way!

CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR CREATOR

Hopefully by now you have worked through and settled the question if God wants to speak to you. Faith is an important ingredient in our relationship with our Father. In fact, Hebrews 11:6 says that it is impossible to please God without faith! Ponder for a moment what life would be like if you went mute and had to try to teach, train, and love on your children without words. Seriously, think about how many times a day you use your words to guide your children to teach and train them, encourage them, cheer them on and help them. How often do you use your words to lavish love all over them and tell them how precious and beautiful they are to you? Now, how many times a day do you let your Father speak to you? Stop for a moment and ask yourself.

Why not spend the next hour with your children and tell them you are all going to play a game. NO TALKING. Each person has to communicate what they want to say without using words. Too many believers have limited their relationship to God with the written Word (which is very important), but He wants us to relate to Him, hear Him, feel His love, and experience Him. I liken the difference to wives whose husbands are overseas. While they may exchange beautiful love letters, it is not the same as the wife whose husband is there every night holding her, kissing her, and protecting her. The latter is the kind of love Jesus wants to have with us. We all know no marriage would be healthy or survive without communication. That is how personal God wants our relationship with Him to be. How could anyone find that level of intimacy with someone without talking, listening, and responding to each other? I have often heard people say that they believed God loved them in the “He loves the whole wide world” sense but had never fully understood how much He loved THEM personally until they heard Him speaking to them (John 10:27; Revelations 3:20). The purpose of the cross wasn’t only for forgiveness but also to grant us a relationship with God. God paid a pretty big price to offer us a relationship with Him. Do we not really believe that He wants to communicate with us (John 14:6)? We often pray, fast, believe, declare, hope, meditate, quote Scriptures, seek medical help, strive, ask others to pray, do it on our own strength and lean on our own understanding, but have we simply just asked Him?

I recently heard that people who hear God’s voice (and seek Him) are successful people. I agree – God is all-knowing all the time, and desires to share His answers with us, but we need to ask and then be quiet for a moment and listen to His response. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is God’s privilege to conceal things, and the king’s privilege to discover it.” The reason why the Creator of the universe would concern Himself with speaking to us is for one reason alone – He loves us (Romans 5:8)! Many of us have been bruised by life circumstances, past relationships, or parents who parented out of their own wounds which can make it hard for us to grasp the depth and width of God’s love for us (Ephesians 3:8). But that’s the whole point of the Good News – we are LOVED! Radically wanted and loved in a way no human ever has and with a depth so deep we would never be able to consume it all. A proper response to His love is hunger – hunger for MORE of Him! Some of the greatest encounters with God are when we get to a place of such holy dissatisfaction with the reality there is MORE of Him and cry out for it. While we have all of God available to us when we first believe there will always be more of Him to discover, explore, experience, and encounter – always! How hungry are you for Him? Hungry people do what it takes, go great distances and pay the cost to get food. Spiritual hunger is a good thing. Matthew 5:6 says, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”

How hungry are you? 

CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR CREATOR

I encourage you to read these together as a family and strengthen your spiritual hearing together. Pray aloud, “Holy Spirit, I invite You to come and fill my heart with peace (stop for a moment and receive His gift of peace). Come teach me about the Father’s heart to communicate with me. I grant You permission to remove everything and anything acting as earmuffs blocking my ability to hear clearly. I don’t want to partner with any thoughts, beliefs, or feelings that aren’t in alignment with Jesus or Your Word. I long to have an intimate and deeply connected relationship with my Father and grant You permission to highlight things to me. Come have Your way with me and open my heart to receive all that my Father has for me. In Jesus’ name.”

John 15:5-8 (MSG) says, “I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation is intimate and organic, and the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing that will last. Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire. But if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon. This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples.”

Did you catch that? When you make room to hear what HE has to say, the harvest is abundant. It doesn’t say when you labor really hard or do umpteen good things. It says when you listen to what HE has to say! The key is doing what you hear the Father telling you to do, NOT what religion, the Jones, or fear of your mother-in-law tells you to do! The first thing each of us has to settle in our minds and hearts is this: “Does Father God speak to His children?” If He does, then you must stand in faith that it will happen. If you don’t believe His voice is for today, then you are walking in doubt, and that alone can block your ability to communicate with Him. If you do not believe that He wants to speak to you as a parent, you will have difficulty acknowledging when He is speaking to your children. Often, we expect God to scream in our faces, and THEN we will believe He speaks. While He can do anything, our faith typically allows us to experience the Kingdom. The more WE honor His voice, the more we will honor when He is speaking to us.

For today’s assignment, I encourage you to really soak in, chew on, and digest this question deeply: DOES THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE HAVE THINGS TO SAY TO ME PERSONALLY? I encourage you NOT to respond immediately but to spend the day allowing Holy Spirit to reveal to you your faith level and what you truly believe. Be at peace and allow Him to show you as you reflect on the question.

**If you are feeling stuck or have the revelation that deep down you don’t really believe He communicates today or with you personally, then we have to go back to the Word and allow it to transform our minds. It’s okay to press into this issue and allow Him to teach us. Do a Bible word search on the subject. I can teach you how to hear and widen your understanding of what it looks like, but I can’t give you faith or make you receive! That’s an inside job that each person must decide on their own. 

WELL DONE

I have tears as I type this. God knows the safest place for His children is in His will, close to His heart, and following His voice. He has been so tender and good with us to remove the things that stand in our way. He has been patient and kind, but we all have our own choice of how we are going to respond. Are you willing to stay in the frying pan until He declares you ‘well done’? Are you willing to have a season of dying and death to the things you have held onto for so long? Are you willing to praise Him even when circumstances scream otherwise? Are you willing to surrender it all? Are you willing to say yes and follow even when His ways are not your own? He knows the future, the next chapter, and what’s coming, and He knows how to lead His children into the safety of His wing. There are so many stories of many of you saying YES and seeing Him in the land of the living like never before. May we not count the cost but count the reward of saying YES to Him.

STAY HUNGRY

Hunger for more is the biggest key to experiencing more. Hungry people just have a way of finding Him.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF FAITH

A mom shared: “My son said something the other day that really touched my heart. He was fighting with his sister, and I am not sure how it came to be, but he said, ‘Jesus always comes to save me.’ He resolved the fight then and there with that simple sentence.”

I encouraged her not to just let it be a sweet moment but to write it down and encourage her son with that in the days/years ahead. When he is going through something hard or challenging, remind him, “Hey buddy, do you remember when you said that Jesus always comes to save you? Well, He wants to do it again for you.” This is how we help add layers of bricks to our children’s faith and journey with their Father.

WITH THEM, NOT FOR THEM

Stewarding a child’s heart with God needs some sensitivity. When we lived in California, scores of parents would come to me confused why they sold everything to move halfway around the world only to find their child resisting the things of God. Over time, it became apparent that many of them did it FOR their children, the hope of deeper and greater things, but they failed to do it WITH them, which would have allowed them to walk out their journey and taste and see the Lord’s goodness. Ultimately the children were mad at God for taking away their grandparents, friends, favorite stores, and all things familiar. Knowing this, I have been very careful with my child’s heart when I feel God asking us to obey in a BIG way. The moment I started to realize we might not be staying in Colorado (about a month after arriving), I mentioned it to the kids in question form, “What would you think if God was telling us not to stay in Colorado?” and I was allowing them to get used to the idea. We learned how to steward the question together, often talking and processing different options. It allowed us to dream together (Ellie was convinced God was going to send us to Australia). Lauren and Emma were excited and open from the get-go. They have seen God be faithful, and while they love their friends here, they were ready for God’s adventure, their faith was already built that God is good. Ellie does not like not knowing what to expect. She is empowered with information, so her part of the process was learning to trust God in the dark and when her mind can’t see it for herself. She did a great job of working it out, yet once she went to North Carolina with me and saw it for herself, her sail of faith went up, and she was on board. However, my son was different. He hates change and is super loyal, so he doesn’t like leaving people; it is harder for him. He didn’t want to move to California and then didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go to Colorado and then didn’t want to leave. I know this about him and attempted to help him process it in stages. We were on day two of our scouting trip, and I could feel a wall in the spirit. It was frustrating. I called a FaceTime family meeting, and it was revealed that Hudson was speaking against the trip. While the girls had their sails of faith up, Hudson had an anchor. We are so connected as a family I could FEEL it 1,000 miles away. I was a little frustrated but knew it was better that I wait to move forward and do it together rather than do it FOR him, or he would blame God for leading me where he didn’t want to go. I finally told him this, “Hudson, I am not asking you to get your heart right to move to North Carolina. I am asking you to process whatever is in the way of being fully surrendered to God so that you are willing to go wherever He leads us.” There is such a difference. He took the time to surrender the things that he was holding onto ABOVE wanting God’s will, and by the time I came home, he met me in the driveway with tears and his blessing to go wherever God was leading us. Doing things FOR our children is kind. Doing things WITH our children allows them to build their faith and trust in God’s goodness.

LED BY THE PRESENCE OF GOD

Reliving old testimonies are my memory stones of what God has done. This is from six years ago. 

Housing update for those of you who have been watching this journey unfold and want to know how to pray for us. Our house was rented from under us, and although it wasn’t right, I felt led to accept it and move on. I had great faith that God would provide as that is His testimony with us. However, weeks turned into months of looking for our next home, and yet nothing lined up. It wasn’t for the lack of finances, leads, references, or interest from the owners but rather a lack of peace with each place. Time was ticking as we were scheduled to be on the road for two months, speaking at over 17 engagements with Let the Children Fly in three different states. I was overwhelmed by the details of it all. Finding lodging for eight weeks was a full-time job in itself, let alone caring for the kids, securing storage, a home for our dog, launching a new product, teaching weekly, working daily, and all the year-end activities, PLUS finding a house! I just about signed an application for a one-bedroom apartment just to feel secure that we had SOMETHING to call home when I heard the Lord say, “You can do that if you wish, but I am not in it.” With an attitude the size of Mississippi, I said, “Do You mean You want me to go on the road with four kids bouncing from hotel to hotel for eight weeks straight with no home?” to which He so tenderly said, “YES!” In that moment, I surrendered the battle and stopped striving to find our housing. We threw everything in storage, found a home for our dog, packed our suitcases, and left. The deep joy and peace that we have endured on the first part of our travels have been indescribable. There is something about facing what we fear the most and allowing Him to take us to the other side. When you are led by the presence of God, peace becomes your pillar, and where there is no peace, the choice becomes clear. I can’t tell you just yet how this is all going to unfold.