Embrace the Within no. 50

"Take time to focus your heart and your thoughts on the Lord."

• Ray Pritchard

Heavenly Father, redeeming Christ, and comforting Spirit,

I thank you for all the obstacles and challenges I faced this past week. Your Grace and Truth have helped me hurdle those obstacles and face those challenges. Allow me to focus on all the good that is within my life and the thankfulness and praise that lie beneath every small kindness within my life. Let me be thankful that small sicknesses and small obstacles are not larger. Let me be thankful that even though I may not see the way that You have already walked that path and provided the path through. Help me, Lord, to know that there is nothing impossible when it comes to life. Allow me to be thankful for the time I have on this side of eternity to witness of Your Power, Your Grace, Your Mercy, and Your Truth.

Thank you for showing me that since nothing I do matters in my salvation that everything I do matters in life. My deeds are never going to be enough. The pointless actions of a broken nephesh can never redeem my transgressions BUT You provided a way that relies not on my deeds BUT the sacrifice of Your Son in a plan for perfection. That has been a revelation over the past few weeks that keeps making more sense as I move forward in my journey along your way.

Help me to remember the conversion of Saul and how you took one of the most deadly and dangerous enemies of the first century and turned his life into one of witness for Your Glory. Help remove the scales from the eyes of others as You restored my vision to see and embrace Your Way. I am thankful for the chance to move from the path of rebuker and malcontent in this world and into a testimony of Your grace and mercy. I thank you for all the understanding that I have gained through studying your Word and building a better relationship with You. I thank you for allowing that opportunity through Your Way and not my way.

I pray this week that those that are suffering from physical, mental, and spiritual weakness will find Your strength. I am thankful for the healing that awaits all of us this side of eternity. I thank You for showing me the power of prayer and the healing that can occur with faith and trust in Your power over this mortal world. And I look forward to an eternity to learn even more about You.

As I move forward with the ending of this week and the promise of a new week ahead, I ask that You look over all that is around in my life and help my words and actions be a blessing to Your glory. Help me and those I meet along the way to see Your vision of the world to come, Your Truth in all those interactions. In all this I ask that it is Your way and not my way.

Hear, O Israel: YHWH, our Elohim is One! And I will love and worship and thank and praise my YHWH, my Elohim with all my nephesh!

Amen.

Shalom to your home. Bless your being. The reign of YHWH is now. Be a blessing to YHWH and others.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyNepheshMyChoice #ChristsLifeMatters #EmbracetheWithin #NotMyWayYHWH #GodKnows

Embrace the Within no. 48

"The more the soul is conformable to Christ, the more confident it will be of its interest in Christ."

• Thomas Brooks

Not only am I a hypocrite which is nothing to own in today’s society. I am a few other things that are usually misunderstood in today’s society. The two main misunderstandings I face in my life are the facts that I am a Christian and I am an anarchist. The secular hypocrisy that exists in being a Christian was the focus of my writing yesterday. I gave up the old way of doing things with myself as the center of attention. I gave up focusing on putting self first and put YHWH first in my life through the sacrifice of His son. Anarchism is equally misunderstood today. And the two paths are integral to my daily journey.

Without anarchism and voluntaryism, I don’t know if I would be a Christian today. The path of physical and mental health and liberty were very important to starting my path to Christ. A lot of folks find Christ first and then change their lives. I was well into changing my life when I rediscovered the importance of spiritual health and became truly Christian. I was raised in a Christian house and raised in a Christian church BUT I don’t really know if what I was doing within that family and within that church was really Christian. I was surrounded by all the right influences and all the right teaching BUT I never really internalized the message. I could put on the outward appearance of doing Christian things BUT the motivation wasn’t internal. The motivation for me was always external back then.

And I think that external motivation can be enough for a lot of people. That external motivation can keep a lot of people from sin. And I never want to downplay the importance of external motivation to changing people BUT, personally, I wasn’t going to be happy with a life run by external motivations.

I ran my life for decades on external motivations. And then things started to change and the questions led to more complex questions and the answers the world was providing failed to pass the sniff test. And then the road to liberty started for me about a decade ago. Through that journey of questioning and unlearning and more questioning, I started to discover that I was going to have to make some tough choices about personal responsibility and self ownership. So, I had to start taking those things seriously and nothing sped up that process like March 2020.

Now I am internally motivated not for my self BUT for a better relationship with YHWH. I have to take personal responsibility for my relationship with Him. I can’t outsource my freedom and I definitely can’t outsource my faith. I have to take self ownership in the choices that I need to make in order to have a right relationship with YHWH. And that means the self ownership to understand that I give up my own ownership of my self to Him. Because everything I have, everything I am, and everything that will ever be in my life is because of Him. And being a Christian and an anarchist motivated through personally wanting to be free in Christ is my full time commitment. It takes a change in routine, a change in thought, a change in practice that is going to get weird looks from the world and confusion about what all these things mean. BUT it also leads to some really wonderful conversations with folks you have known for decades and folks you only just met.

So, embrace the labels the world wants to place on you. Own them and let them empower your walk rather than see them as an obstacle. The world talks about each other just as much as they talk about us. Let them. You get to make the better choices. You get to make the right choices because YHWH leads the way. Own your choices and own your life. Not my way BUT YHWH.

Peace to your home. Bless your being. The reign of YHWH is now. Be a blessing to YHWH and others.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyNepheshMyChoice #ChristsLifeMatters #EmbracetheWithin #NotMyWayYHWH #GodKnows