The love of Peter

I love Peter.

So far in my readings of scripture he is my favorite apostle.
Recently I was really struggling with sin. A God-given relationship with a wonderful and amazing friend had become something of my flesh, something I desired in more ways than Jesus would have. I had taken a gift from the Lord and twisted it to fill the desires of my heart. But God is Good and never leaves us where we are, never lets us sink for too long. The Lord spoke to my friend and told her that I was something she had to let go; He has been speaking to both of since we've released this back to Him and though it is hard, the reward in the sacrifice is more fulfilling and satisfying than any human relationship could be. The strongest, deepest, most meaningful love in this world is ashes when compared to the Love of the one who created our hearts.

We were made for this love. We were created for this love.


And yet, at times, even knowing this we fall. We get out of the boat and begin to walk across the water, towards the Beautiful One and His open arms. We want to be enveloped in the voice that sounds like waters, the voice that is like the sweetest rain poured out over our dry and thirsty souls, the voice that bids us "Come."
When suddenly we are distracted by the storm. Something catches our eye, snags our focus, and before we can take a breath we plummet into the dark deep abyss beneath us.
The fear is gutwrenching. Your thoughts, your entire being become focused around one central need. AIR. Instinct takes over, your mind blinded by panic. You fight for the surface, you claw at the water, trying to grasp something, anything...but your hands cut through the water like butter. It slips through your hands, they are empty...left with nothing. Lungs crushed with the need to breathe you can see nothing but the blackness that surrounds you. The blackness that will swallow you whole.
And then something closes around your hand; in the cold weight of the waves crashing around you it is warm and light. Strong.
He pulls you up, The Beloved One. And with a loving smile and a broken heart whispers, "Why did you doubt?"

Peter loved Jesus. I know it.
I can see it in the way He defended Him. In the way He got out of the boat to walk to Him. In the way He left all He had to follow Him. In the way He fought for Him as Judas laid the cold kiss of betrayal on the Lord's cheek. Peter loved Jesus deeply.
Jesus asked the apostles, "But who do you think I am?" And it was Peter who responded, "The Christ of God."
And when Jesus told the apostles they would all fall away Peter told Him, "Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away."
I don't believe Peter was being prideful, Peter believed Jesus to be the Christ, the Holy One. Peter had seen the Lord in His glory, Peter confessed Him as the Son of God. Peter loved Jesus deeply and knew in His heart He could never betray this Jesus, this Jewish Man who had called him by name. I can only imagine the way it must have shattered him to hear His friend and God say, "Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows you will deny me three times."

They knew what was happening. They knew the price was His life.
And as Peter stood in the courtyard filled with fear and terror I imagine he began to doubt. In the midst of the storm His eyes began to focus, once again, on the rolling black waves around him. "If Jesus is the Messiah why isn't He calling down legions of angels? What will happen? Where will I go now?" I'm sure His heart was breaking knowing that He could do NOTHING to stop the death of his Beloved friend and teacher.
Then the crowds began to whisper around him. Suddenly a servant girl cried out, "You also were with Jesus"
...seeing, knowing what was happening to Christ. Knowing the fate that would await someone who was following Him...knowing the cost of following Jesus filled Peter with fear. Instinct took over, and once again Peter found Himself sinking into the depths. He was accused again and again, and He denied Christ every. time..., even invoking curses upon himself and swearing to prove it to the people around Him. But as the rooster began to crow I imagine the panic and fear in Peter's heart that only moments ago had been deafening, became deathly silent and still.

He had denied Him.

The one who He loved above all others.
The One who loved him and sought Him out.
The Messiah who had created Him.
His friend.

His Jesus.

Peter's heart shattered as the reality of what He had done hit him.
The scriptures say he went out and wept bitterly.



You can deny Jesus in more than words, you can deny Him by choosing to walk in something that doesn't glorify Him, something that is sinful. To choose sin over the Christ is to deny who He is, to deny Him just as Peter denied Him.
I love Christ. I love Him dearly and deeply.
He has changed my entire life, blessed me in more ways that I could ever even begin to tell.
He has changed me and loved me right in my deepest darkness. He has given His life for me on the cross. And still I have sought out things above Him, I have betrayed Him to seek out other loves, other desires.
And when the reality of what you have done hits, it knocks the wind out of you and the heart break is physical.
Peter wept bitterly and my heart weeps with and for him in that moment because I know what it feels like to deny the only One who has ever been worthy of your love.


Peter loved the Lord with all his heart and now sits with Him in the heavenly places, never again having to deny or be seperated from the lover of his soul. And though we have all denied Him there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Follow Him. And when He bids you come,
go to Him.

Even if you fall He will be with you, hand clenched tightly around yours...he'll never let you sink for long.


"And behold I am with you always, to the end of the age."
-Jesus (Mathew 28:20)

Revelations from the Holy One : Behold

While mulling over the Great Commission the other day the Holy Spirit gave me a revelation. I could probably write a book on the Great Commission, and although I'm very passionate about it, the part that God illuminated was the last piece of verse 20.

"And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” - Matthew 28:18-20

This is the first command that Jesus gives His disciples after rising from the grave.

He is God.

He has risen.

Death could not hold Him. He has done it. He fulfilled His promises. All the prophecies. This Jewish Man. He is the Holy One. The Messiah. The Son of God.

I imagine they were trembling in fear and awe, hanging on every word that was about to pour from their Messiah's mouth.
He begins to speak and a hush falls over the disciples, ears straining to capture every word. Heart pounding. History is changing and they are witnessing the God of the Universe stand before them.

He speaks but He preludes His command with a statement. "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me"...Whatever He is about to say He is saying with every ounce of authority given to Him, whatever He is about to say He is declaring in all of His power, His might, His authority. He tells us to go and make disicples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them.


But there is more.



At the end of His command He adds something, something so beautiful it's hard to grasp, and if you aren't listening carefully you might miss it. With all authority in Heaven and on Earth He says "and behold, I will be with you always to the end of the age."

He is with us.
To the very end, He is with us. We have nothing to fear;
through the pain, the tribulation, the heartache... He is with us.
Through the joy, the celbration, and the success... He is with us.
Through the dark, through the desert, through the dry parched lands of this sinful world... He is with us.
And when the Eart is shaken and begins to crumble, when we are persecuted throughout the Earth, when the end of the age has come, even then...He is with us.


How unbelievably sweet a promise.
And those of us who know Him, know this Jewish man is in the buisness of fulfilling promises.
And He has made this promise with all authority given to Him.

The same Jesus who walked on stormy seas, the Jesus who fed five thousand, the Jesus who rebuked the storm, the Jesus whose eyes are like flames of fire and voice is like waters, who will come with a sword on clouds of fire, with thousands upon thousands of angels...this Jesus, with this authority
says "I am with you always, to the end of the age."

Truly, He is Immanuel - God With Us

Prayer

I trust you Jesus, with my dreams, with my heart, with my deepest desires. I believe you are for me, and after my joy. I will release the fragile things I've held so tightly and been afraid to let go, afraid they would shatter and my fragile heart would shatter with them. But I will not sit where it is safe. I will leap and fall and trust that I will be taught to fly. I love you, I trust you with my heart, my dreams...all of me.

Scuba Diving With Jesus

The other day I heard something that just kind of...blew my mind open the other day... "The more inward you focus, the more msierable you will be." I don't know about you, but in my walk with Christ this is so incredibly true. The second I take my eyes off of Him and start looking at myself, or even my desires I begin to sink. Just like Peter, I get distracted by the things going on around me and before I know it I start to fall, to sink into the black abyss that only moments before I was given strenth to walk across. It can be so hard to keep our eyes on Jesus when we are surrounded by books, movies, people, magazines, commercials, advertisments, shampoo bottles...you name it, that are telling us something different. It can be hard to keep our eyes on Christ if for the last hour or two we watched a television show, or read a book about sex, lies, materialism, and scandal. Imagine our walk with Jesus is like scuba diving in a tank, if you fill up your tank with the worldy message, which is in direct opposition with scripture, you're going to sink. Your eyes will not be on Christ and you will start to desire and long for things that are of the flesh, you will find yourself going to your bible less and less, and picking up a magazine, or remote instead. The bibles tells us that a mind set on the flesh is hostile to God and cannot submit to Him. (Romans 8:6-8) Instead we have to fill up our tanks, our lives with what is Holy and good. We have to set our minds on things of the Spirit. How do we do that? By being incredibly careful with what we allow ourselves, to watch, read, and purchase. And even more careful with what we allow into our homes. And by cutting off those things that pull are hearts away from God. The bible tells us to crucify our flesh, to deny it of its sinful desires. (Romans 13:14, Galations 5:25) If we are God's children, if we know Him and have accepted Him in our lives, our deepest desire HAS to be constantly striving for a deeper, more intimate relationship with Him. He shouldn't be the top of our love pyramid, He should be the pyramid. We should fill up our lives with things that bring us closer to Him, with things that are of and from Him.

No longer walk, as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding; alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned in Christ. Ephesians 4:17-29 (empahsis added)

The passage of scripture that illumanates this the most for me is Colossians 3. I really suggest after your finish this, you open up your bible and read the scripture I've talked about here for yourself, ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate the words for you, to convict you of the places where you are falling, and to teach you how to walk in closer relationship with Jesus; how to walk in the Spirit.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, eveil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these, the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk fron your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowlege after the image of its creator. Colossians 3:5-10 (emphasis added)

Scriptures to check out: Mathew 14:22-33; Romans 8: 5-8; Romans 12:2; Romans 13:14; Ephesians 4:17-24; Ephesians 5:3-10; Galations 2:20; Galations 5:24; 1 Corinthians 10:13; 2 Corinthians 4:16-18; Colossians 3:1-17;

We Killed God.

We killed God.

Sometimes I am overcome by the gravity of that fact.
Read it to yourself and marinate on it for a few moments, allow it to really sink in.
We killed God.


And the most amazing thing ever, is that death couldn't hold Him. I love those words, and they mean everything to me "Death couldn't hold you down."
I get goosebumps everytime.

The problem is that until you accept true responsibilty for the roll you played in His death, you will never fully grasp what His ressurection meant for mankind as a whole, and for you personally.
Many of us are under the illusion that the people of the past are responsible for the crucifixation of the Messiah, but that just isn't true. We are all responsible. Each and every one of us have beaten Him savagley with whips, have denied Him multiple times, have betrayed Him for a material reward that was small and insignifigant, have held Him to a cross and hammered the nails in.

We are responsible, and we killed God.
You have to feel the horror in that, you have to feel responsible. You have to know that you played apart in His physical suffering. To deny your role in the crucifixtion, is to deny the entirety of what happened on the cross. To deny it, is to deny Him and the true grace and love He extends towards you.

How many times have you felt like speaking out against something you knew was wrong, but held your tongue instead? How many times have you had lustfull thoughts towards someone who wasn't your spouse? (Singles that applies to you as well.) How many times have you denied your beliefs, in any way, shape, or form? How many times have you been selfish instead of serving? How many times have you spoken ill of someone behind their back? How many times have you dressed a certain way to attract someones attention? How many times have you been rude to someone? How many times have you been unforgiving? How many nights have you spent wishing your life was more...something else? How many times have you been discontent with the season you are in? How many times have you taken your frustrations out on someone you love? How many times have you loved your enemies?

How many times have you sinned? To many to count, we sin every day. Probably hundreds of times every day, and let's face it even if you have a real tangible relationship with Jesus, in which you desire to give Him your everything. Even if you make Jesus the center of your life, you will still sin every single day.

Every

single

day.

We aren't sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.
Do you feel horrible about yourself yet? I hope so, the world will tell you "You mess up but you are a GOOD person. No one is perfect, but you are GOOD." Well, I sincerely doubt God looks down at the Earth, at all of the lieing, cheating, rape, murder, molestation, revenge, bitterness, and selfishness and says.."Man! These are a good group of people!"
How many times have you heard something along the lines of "You need to stop looking down on yourself and realize just how amazing you are."
No you don't.
You need to stop looking up at yourself, and realize just how amazing JESUS is.

"It is not for your sake that I will act, declares the Lord GOD; let that be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded in your ways, O house of Israel."
Ezekiel 36:32 ESV (emphasis mine)

Be ashamed and confounded in your ways.

When we realize just how truly sinful and horrible we are we can finally realize the enormity of what happened on that cross. When we understand that we have each hammered those nails, that we each played a part in His crucifixtion...that we killed God.
We can finally see just how deeply God loved the world...
just how far the love of Christ truly extends.


One thing that I've heard recently that opened my eyes to the magnitude of the cross, was that we all need to stop plugging ourselves into the wrong characters in the bible.
We are not the good guys. We are not the heroes and the saviours.
We are the Pharisees, the modern day Judas, the ones who pinned Him to that cross.

And He loved us in the midst of those things, and loves us still.
He looked us in the eye while we plunged the spear into His side and forgave us not only after we sinned, but while we sinned against Him.


And the reason we are washed clean and allowed into the gates of Heaven isn't because we are good people and it isn't because after we accept Jesus we become good people. It is because when God looks at us He doesn't see our disgustingly filthy selves, but the perfection of Christ.
We were made to worship, the question is who and what are we worshipping, because usually it's ourselves. We have to stop turning our mirrors inward and gazing at our own reflections, and start reflecting Jesus.
We have to stop trying to see ourselves as good people, and realize that unless you are nothing, Christ can't be your everything.

Without Jesus there is nothing.
Without Jesus we are nothing.
Anyone who doesn't love Him is walking dead,
For only those who have met Him know what it means to be alive.

Something Personal

I wanted to share something pretty personal about myself with you.

When saying words that end in "ble" (bible, horrible, deplorable,foldable, affordable, loveable, ect) I like to pronounce the word more like this..

*Please read the folllowing aloud.*

af-or-di-bleh
I'll give you another example...

love-eh-bleh

One more?

dep-lore-eh-bleh







I do it because I think it's funny...
it's probably not.

Dreaming With a Broken Heart

How long have you longed for a romance like this? How long has your sweet heart clung to the dreams of a young girl, whose fingers traced the outlines of wonderful fairytales. How long have you sat by your window imagining you were a princess, waiting for the knight in shining armor to come and sweep you off your feet? Be honest with yourself, aren't you still waiting?

Don't you sit at night with a romance novel held between your fingers, lost in some world where strong men fight for beautiful women...where there is heartache and pain, but also great love and restoration. Do you sit on a couch clutching your chest, your cheeks wet with tears, completley intwined in the play on the screen. Wishing desperatly someone would stop the plane for you, would knock on your door, would fight with every breath that they had.

Go back to that place in your childhood, when you were a little girl and you dreamed, now remember that dream (I doubt you've forgotten), remember the promise that you were told by the fairytales, the promise that we have all so desperatley clung to. "Someone is coming. Someone is coming for you."

And aren't you heartbroken that no one has? Isn't there a tangible pain in your chest at this very moment that no one has. No one has.
Allow that to really sink in for a moment, allow yourself to feel that pain..really feel it for a moment.

Most of our lives as women, has been about this pain and this promise. No one has come and no one is coming.
Have you thought those words to yourself? Have you laid in bed at night, engulfed in the darkness and cried because you knew you weren't worth it. You aren't good enough, you're to much or to little, stop trying, you aren't pretty, you aren't womanly or feminine, you're fat, you have to work harder so you can be better...I know I've fallen asleep on a pillow wet from my tears more times that I care to admit. Wishing desperatley for someone to come for me, but knowing deep down that I wasn't worthy of it. I wasn't good enough. Even now, tears running down my cheeks, I hear it whispered over and over again.
Every time you feel hurt and pain or rejection, it only seems to confirm what you already know to be true, you are worthless. They leave, or they stray and you aren't enough to keep them. They are abusive or absent, and you aren't enough to make them want to change. No matter how hard you try or fight you just aren't enough.

I have spent my whole life believing these LIES, and my wager is that so have you. These lies are from an enemy who would crush you and kill you, who hates you with the very essence of his being. He sits by your side and pushes the knife deeper and deeper, manipulating EVERY situation for his benefit, but there is one truth he cannot destort if you don't let him...

Someone has come.

Allow that to sink in for a moment.


Someone has come for you.


He is pursueing you with everything he has and His name is Jesus.
He desires you like a bride. He seeks you out and pursues you, like a lover. He wants you for his own and will protect you and lead you always. He is strong and fierce, and nations tremble under his power. He is also loving, devoted, and kind and will always care for you tenderly. He looks at you exactly as you are, and says " I want THAT woman." Not that woman after she loses 20 lbs, not that woman after she dresses better, not that woman once she is off drugs, not that woman once she puts on her makeup or has better hair...He doesn't look at you shaking his head and say "If only her hair weren't so frizzy, if only she didn't have cellulite, if only she were..more."
No, he looks at you now, exactly as you are...
broken, bruised, flawed, in pain, and with more baggage than you can carry and says,
"I want her with everything I have..she's the one, she's the only one."

He sees your faults, your secret sins, your most intimate fears, and says “I love you completely” and then he went and did the ultimate romantic move, and died to prove it to you. He hung on a cross dripping blood, after being tortured and beaten savagely for HOURS. He was unrecognizable because the flesh had literally been ripped from his body, and he did it for you. He looked into your eyes and through the blood and sweat and tears shared a smile meant only for you. And when he took his last breath the face that he pictured was yours. He made the ultimate sacrifice with your name written in his heart.


All you're life, you've been waiting...
you were the little girl by the window waiting, who has grown into the woman who sits on her couch, and still waits.

Waiting for your knight in shining armor, waiting for your soul mate...waiting for the man who will come and will just take it all away.



Well,I have to tell you something.
Someone is here, but he isn't just a man ... he is a champion.