Heart in Bloom

“Allowing God to Change Us is So Much Better Than Doing It Ourselves:

God uses people in all kinds of ways, and once we realize this, we can be ready to be molded by our Maker. So next time you feel down and not worth very much, just remember that God always finds a way to use us, if we will just give Him a chance.

Quit making excuses for not submitting to the will of God. The Lord can use you to your full potential. We all must remember that we aren’t the message, just the messenger!

God wants spiritual fruit, not religious. Don’t try to force your religious beliefs on others. Just let the light of Christ shine in your life through love and understanding. If you’ve got a problem, God is the answer. It is time for all of us to start counting our blessings. Learn to laugh every day. Job writes, ‘God will fill your mouth with laughter and lips with shouts of Joy!’ (Job 8:21) There’s an old saying, laughter is the best medicine! And if you can’t find something to laugh about, smile, whistle, or sing. If you pray with all your heart, as a child of God, prayer is like calling home everyday. In the meantime you’re staying close to your maker and Savior Jesus Christ through prayer.

Now lets offer this prayer to our Lord: Now let’s offer this prayer to our Lord: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it is me!’

The Bible teaches us that our minds need to be brought under the control of Christ. God can’t begin changing our lives until we allow Him to change our mind. Only then will we have the strength and courage to overcome evil with good, as God’s word teaches us.

It all starts with the mind. If Christ isn’t invited into your heart and soul, your mind will be drawn by human nature to things that won’t be good for you. Sometimes, it may seem good, but often, it turns out to be harmful to us physically, mentally, or spiritually.

Just as we watch what we eat and what we drink to protect our bodies, we must also watch what we allow to enter our minds. After spending 40 days without food in the desert, Jesus was tempted by satan the devil a number of times. But Christ didn’t allow the evil one to keep enticing him. Jesus exclaimed on one occasion, ‘Get out of here satan, for it is written, you shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only shall you serve.’ (Matthew 4:10)

It is not enough to get bad thoughts out of our minds. We need to make a conscious effort to replace any bad thoughts with good ones. And through fervent prayer, we can overcome evil with good. Jesus is our good shepherd who is ready to come into our heart and soul. He will guide us ‘along right paths,’ (Psalms 23:3). ‘Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world,’ writes Paul, ‘but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.’ (Romans 12:2) ‘Then you will know how good and pleasing and perfect His will really is.’

It’s a wonderful feeling to know what God wants us to do in life. No one can improve on God’s will – we can only strive to obey His will. Just as Paul’s life was changed on the road to Damascus, so can ours. Paul’s life was coming into contact by the living Jesus Christ. It all started on the road to Damascus, when Paul who was named Saul, was persecuting Christians. Paul’s life was turned around at that moment. His heart now belonged to Jesus Christ his Savior.

Paul said, “I’ve got my eye on the goal where God is helping us onward – to Jesus.’ I’m off and running and I’m not turning back.’ (Philippians 3:14)

Just as the potter shapes the clay, this is how God molds our lives daily. If you’ve seen a potter at work, you know how much patience it takes for the artisan to shape and reshape that piece of clay into a beautiful and useful object. It is entirely in the hands of the potter and his wheel. In the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, the prophet is told by God, ‘Get up on your feet! Go to the potter’s house. When you get there, I will tell you what I have to say.’ (Jeremiah 18:1) ‘So I went to the potter’s house,’ writes Jeremiah. ‘And sure enough, the potter was there working away at the wheel.’

Whenever the pot the potter was working on turned out badly, he would simply start over and use the same clay. Jeremiah observed the potter at work, the wheel that had a formless mass of clay on it. But as he turned the wheel, his skilled fingers shaped the clay. Jeremiah had seen the potters at work all his life. But that particular day, he saw something he hadn’t before. He saw God at work shaping people, and each of those people were beautiful and each one useful in a special way. The master potter (God) is trying to shape you and I into something very special, with special qualities.

The prophet Jeremiah had been around and had seen people who weren’t useful in the work of the Lord and had words to describe it, like self-will, sin, or outright rebellion. Jeremiah saw firsthand what the potter would do, he wouldn’t get upset, kick the wheel, throw that piece away, and grab a new piece. He would simply start over and use the same piece of clay to make another pot. He didn’t cast it aside as if it was a worthless piece of clay. Sometimes the process can be painful for us, but there’s always a purpose for us.

The Lord has been shaping your life and mine from the beginning, just as He did with the life of Jeremiah. This is what God said to Jeremiah and He tells all of us, ‘Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you.’ (Jeremiah 1:5)

Our identity doesn’t begin with the time of our birth or the first time we realized that we were a living breathing human being. There’s something previous to what we think about ourselves, back to when the time God was thinking of us. Parents await a child’s first words, but it was really God who spoke those first words, and who should always speak the first words in our lives. If we allow Him to make the first move and continue to speak the first words in our lives, then we will feel the work of the Master potter in our lives every day.

‘The word of the Lord came to me, o, House of Isreal, can I not do with you as the potter does? Declares the Lord.’ (Jeremiah 18:1-8)”