Also for your words and thoughts toward your mom to be sweet and loving. – For God to provide a way to get your car’s lock fixed. MICHELLE PATIRE- for the event you are planning for it to go well and for each leader and participant to receive the blessings God has for each. I’m praying, too, for Israel and its leaders to look to God for guidance and protection. And for her family to be safe in such a dangerous place. Oh, that all teachers cared enough to pray for the right words.ĭONNA WOLCOTT – continued prayers for your friend to get out of Gaza and return home safely. May God give you the words to speak to each parent. KRISTINE LOUGHMAN-stamina as you grade and have parent conferences. He gives me the cleanliness I could never achieve, no matter how I try. I receive peace from reading that God is putting a new Spirit within me that I will be able to follow His statutes and be careful to follow His rules. I pray that God will cleanse my heart anew each day.
It’s when I fall to my knees and ask for a new, clean heart that I find forgiveness and cleansing. When I try to “be good” and do the things I think I should, I’m just stirring around the sin in my heart. Oh, how I need a new heart and spirit within me. 28 You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. “26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” –Ezekiel 36:24-28īy His grace, may we stop hiding from Him in shame, and in stead turn to face the One who has already blessed us with the purity of Christ and washed us clean. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will also sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. “For I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries, and will bring you into your own land.
While we are busy trying to correct our outward behavior and conceal our inward brokenness, we miss the work God is already doing: He knows our hiding places and wants to give us a better one (Psalm 32:7). He sees us when we are impressive, as well as indecent. He saw us first.įor “Man does not see what the Lord sees, for man sees what is visible, but the Lord sees the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). God sees us and knows us long before we could ever think to seek Him. But Praise the Lord, He is not hiding from us, and nothing is hidden from Him. I want to see Him so badly that I’ve shamed my sinful heart into hiding. But in reality, I start to hide more, feel less, and then wonder why I can’t see God in the midst of my shame. Reading that verse makes me want to work harder and look better. When I read, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8), I’m sent scrambling, trying to scrub my heart of its impurities. My attempts to outwardly correct my inward shame had only exposed it more. What I’d been using to hide and treat my condition was actually the root of my problem. Then, the translator turned to me, diagnosing an allergic reaction to an ingredient specific to Italian soap and detergent. Sitting in the doctor’s office chair, I listened to the translator and the doctor intensely converse, unable to decipher what they were saying. I’m hiding so well that I don’t see a thing-not myself, and definitely not God. And do you know what I see when I do these things? Nothing. Just today, I’ve held doors, given compliments, and tweeted Scripture-which are all good things, but my motives are off. This isn’t the first time I’d taken matters into my own hands, working to scrub away my flaws for a pristine exterior. But it got worse, sending me to the farmacia, which was closed, followed by the doctor’s office, all the while accompanied by a translator who did not know the word for “hives.” The minute the itchiness ensued, I immediately began washing all my clothes and sheets, then used every last drop of my brand-new bottle of soap in the shower. I’d intentionally chosen a program without any familiar faces-just me and the open road! Instead, it was just me… and the scratching. The doctor’s office wasn’t on my list of must-see destinations in Italy, but it’s the one I got to check off the list just 72 hours into my semester abroad.