Tag: Bible

encouragement, lessons

Respect Your Position

Adrianna Smith

position

You’ve just been moved or have moved on your own. You thought this move was in God’s plans. It seemed like a wise choice. You’ve asked God multiple times about this move and everything seemed to point to this being the right choice. However, as soon as you start to get to this new apartment, job, city, or this new place in your walk with God, you feel uncomfortable. Although it seems this is the position God wants you in, you can’t help wonder if you would’ve been better off staying where you were previously. Even though the place you were at previously had a lot of negative things and would leave you in the same complacent and mundane routine, you find yourself forgetting those things and wondering if the move was worth it. The question you need to ask yourself is: Do you respect your position? Do you respect the position God gave you? The Israelites were a people who had a hard time respecting the detour that God purposely sent them in to be free from slavery Egypt.

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encouragement

The God of Mediocrity

Adrianna Smith

mediocre

—> Put Your Best Foot Forward For Christ<—

When we prepare ourselves to go on job interviews we make sure we look nice. We practice questions that may be asked or research before applying. The point is we put our best foot forward. We try our best to show the interviewer that we really want the job. I had applied for jobs in the past that seemed to come up miraculously, from people who only met me once but remembered me years later enough to recommend me for a really good job. All those jobs seemed to not work out, the door closed on them for one reason or another. As I was talking to someone about how odd it seemed that all those offers didn’t go through, but the last job I applied to seemed to work out, they told me I probably didn’t show I wanted it enough.

I knew this was a lie, because I’m an overachiever who has applied for jobs and went on externships or job shadowing in my field since I was a freshman. However, this made me think about our walk with God. Do we show Him that we want Him? Do we show Him that we actually truly want to go to heaven? Do we show Him we want to serve Him? We put our best foot forward when it comes to an interview, but what does God get from us?

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encouragement, lessons

Get Your Own Oil!

Adrianna Smith

GYOO

So, you’ve spent a little time trying to approach God. You feel like you know Him and maybe you do. You feel like He’s telling or leading you to do something in your life: start a business, get a degree, get a job, or whatever it is you feel like He’s leading you to do. You’ve told everyone that God has told you to do this thing. You’ve boasted about how awesome the idea is to as many people as you could.

There’s just one problem: it’s been years since He’s told you to do this thing. What’s worse is you haven’t even started doing anything about this idea, maybe at the most you’ve started a facebook page for it. And to make things even worse you procrastinated so long you no longer have time to do this idea or thought God gave you. So, what do you do? You try to get other people to do it for you–and for free too. If you’re doing something like this you need to ask yourself: Why would God give you something just so you could try to force it on someone else’s shoulders?

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encouragement

What Does the Man in Charge Say?

Adrianna Smith

WDTMICS

I’ve worked for a little while in my life despite my age and dealt with many different supervisors over the years. Sometimes, especially when you really care about doing well on the job and pleasing your boss, we can become obsessed with doing ‘perfect’ work. We can get to the point where we are over analyzing every little detail or thing that we are doing because maybe we really like the place or the people there or the job in general. Sometimes we get so excited about the job we worry too much about how well we are doing and start listening to what others are saying about us. Or worse we nitpick and look down at our own work.

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lessons, testimony

Knowing who God is

Adrianna Smith

DYKM

Have you ever just talked with someone for years and years and suddenly your relationship with them just blows up in your face? Questions come out about whether this person was ever really for you or if they ever really knew who you were. See, what I’m learning is we can have conversations with people for days, or years even, and find out that they don’t really know and understand who we are and what we are about. The truth is that this person probably never really wanted or tried to understand who you were from the beginning because they might be clinging to whatever preconceived notion they had about you from the beginning. When I see this happen so easily in human relationships, it makes me wonder about our relationship with God. Do we really know Him? Do we really try to learn and understand who He is? Or do we just believe what others have said about Him or our own initial judgments we had about Him?

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lessons

How to love people who hate your guts!

Adrianna Smith

LYE

How do you deal with people who mistreat you? How do you deal with people who use you for their own selfish purposes? How do you deal with people who plot and scheme against you? How do you deal with people who seem to hate you just because you are you? We all know what the Bible says: Love your enemies, right? Well, what exactly does that even look like? How can you love someone who is clearly hell bent on your destruction? When I think on the teachings of Jesus, I always find myself going back to the Old Testament stories. One that really comes to mind where a man hated God’s people for no real good reason was Haman in the story of Esther.

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encouragement

Just Fire Me, God…

Adrianna Smith

 

JfmG
No, seriously God, just do it. Just end this assignment you’ve put me on right now because there is no way I can do this on my own. How do you even expect me to go through this assignment? Am I even qualified? If I am, I guess I just got all kinds of unqualified because this task seems unbearable and impossible! I thought I was prepared, but now I’m not sure. So, what do we do when God sends us on ‘Mission Impossible’? We believe the impossible can be achieved by Him. Let’s turn to Daniel 3.

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