Category: Sister Judy (Page 251 of 271)

Devotions from Gary Thomas’s book, Pure Pleasure

God delights in our delight!  In Isaiah 62:4-5 it says “The Lord will take delight in you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”
Enjoying God and what He has created (in the way He intends us to enjoy it) brings pleasure to God.  If you are a parent, you can picture your joy as you watch the delight of your children tearing into their presents on Christmas morning. 

Our Father also takes pleasure in our joy.

If we live only out of duty it robs our heavenly Father of great pleasure. But when we connect our pleasure with God it builds our souls and strengthens us.  Pleasure divorced from God leads to pain and misery.

. “A vital relationship with God colors our pleasures with a holy passion and leads us to value relationship over the spirit of possession, intimacy over ambition, and service over selfishness. God sets us free to revel in what He has designed for our enjoyment and eventually, as we mature, we begin to detest what goes against His nature and will.”

So we don’t need to fear pleasure but fear separation from God that will corrupt our sense of pleasure and make the pleasure drive dangerous.

 As we pursue God we will find pleasure is a by-product of life lived in surrender.  Let us continue to journey with Him so that our hearts can be gradually shaped to look for the deeper side of pleasures.

Devotions from Pure Pleasure by Gary Thomas

 Jesus said “I came so that they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.” ( The message translation)

“The good things of this earth, created by God to be received with thanksgiving and praise- things such as friendship, good food and fine drinks, laughter, sex, and family life- can be redeemed to season our life and faith in many positive ways.”  We all have need for spiritual disciplines, self-denial, detachment etc but we also need to embrace pleasure as a way to celebrate God and the life He has given us.  It becomes a spiritual sickness when we denounce pleasure simply because it feels pleasurable. As Christians Satan can trap us with our compulsions in which we take pride for working so hard and seeing enjoyment as weakness or “giving in”  Sometimes the most spiritual thing to do when you are tired is to take a  nap rather than push on and on. We don’t honor Him when we deny ourselves everything He created to bring us pleasure. Julian of Norwich tells us to let God win us over with His joy, pleasure, and friendship, and then we will be that much less vulnerable to being fooled by the counterfeit pleasure of sin. 
We must not lose our zeal for outreach to poor etc but in the same way, for the sake of honoring God, we shouldn’t neglect celebrating His goodness and faithfulness. Let us remember as we go about our day today that our pleasure brings pleasure to God

Devotions from Gary Thomas’s book, Pure Pleasure

Maybe when you read the title of Thomas’ book, you thought of sin, like- “If it feels good it must be sin!”

But God wants to bless us with so many pleasures and gifts from His hand that delight us –  and in delighting us brings pleasure back to Him.  We need to receive these gifts and allow God to use them to ruin us to the ways of the world.  We can learn to fill our souls with prayer and fellowship but also beauty, art, noble achievement, fine meals, rich relationships, laughter etc.  When we deny ourselves God’s good pleasures we end up becoming vulnerable to illicit pleasures.  We must not set up our lives for just duty, responsibility and obligation, with little true pleasure to season our day. That will only make us thirsty and desperate for illicit pleasures.

God has designed us for healthy pleasures to sustain us. He delights to see us live in pleasure, just as any of us as parents love to watch our children squeal with delight on Christmas morning. 

It’s true that “God created us for His own pleasure, not our own; but when we live a life of holy pleasure, we do bring pleasure to God.”   Let us go on to enjoy God and believe there is a holy purpose behind the intentional cultivation of appropriate pleasures!

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

The work God calls each of us to do is a means to put our love for God into living action.  Our vocation is to belong to Him. If we say Yes to God it means we surrender fully, without reservations and allow only God to make plans for our future. It is to say, “I accept what ever you give, and I give whatever you take.” It doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things but is a simple acceptance because we belong to Him. It involves loving trust. We must be empty if we want God to fill us.  “If God who owes us nothing, is willing to give us nothing less than Himself, can we respond by giving Him only a part of ourselves? “ He wants all of us. He wants us to give ourselves completely to Him and keep His interests in our hearts. That means fighting against our own ego and love of comfort.

We are not here to just to fill a place, just to be a number. He has chosen us for a purpose and we are precious in His sight. May we give Him all!

Devotions based on Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

“The prize with which God rewards our self-abandonment is Himself.”
Suffering will never be completely absent from our lives but we must not be afraid of suffering. Our suffering can be a means of love if we make use of it. Suffering in itself is useless but suffering that is shared with the passion of Christ is a gift and sign of love.  Christ’s suffering proved to be a gift to us, because it is through His suffering that our sins were atoned for. So when we are going through difficulties let us remember that the passion of Christ ends in the joy of the resurrection. Likewise as we suffer it helps to remember that the resurrection has to come, lest we lose our joy.  Even death can be something beautiful for it is like going home.  At the moment of death, we will not be judged by the amount of work we have done, but by the weight of love we have put into our work.  Death is like our coronation: to die in peace with God. He who dies in God goes home!  We come from God and we go back to Him!

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

“We know that if we really want to love, we must first learn to forgive before anything else.” We are all sinners needing forgiveness and we must be forgiven in order to be able to forgive others.  “Only in confession can we go as sinners with sin and come out as sinners without sin.” Confession is a place where we allow Jesus to take away from us everything that divides, that destroys. It is humility in action! Even our failures can be offered up to Him, and His mercy is greater than our sins as He forgives us.  Our souls should be like a transparent crystal through which God can be perceived. Sometimes our crystal is covered with dirt and we need to examine our conscience and ask Him to give us a clean heart.
We need knowledge of ourselves to see our faults and then to turn to Him in confession. What we considered a stumbling block in our lives can then become a rock we can step on, and this knowledge of our sin can help us to rise.
How wonderful to receive communion and know He washes our sins away and cleanses us. This is a tangible way He comes to us and we are united in love to Him.

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

“God has not created poverty; it is we who have created it. Before God, all of us are poor.”  Poverty is not just being hungry for food, but hungry for human dignity.  This is the hunger to be loved, to be wanted, and to feel the presence of Christ. So many are lonely, discouraged, and lack meaning in life.  Even among the rich are the very spiritually poor.  It is easier to satisfy physical hunger than the hunger from being spiritually deprived. 
Riches can choke us if we don’t use them fairly. Not even God can put anything in a heart that is already full.  Poverty is freedom in the fact that what we possess doesn’t own us, doesn’t hold us down or keep us from sharing of ourselves. Jesus wants us to remain as empty as possible that God can fill us up.

“Our poverty is our humble recognition and acceptance of our sinfulness, helplessness, and utter nothingness, and the acknowledgment of our neediness before Him.”  Jesus said, ”Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Matt. 5:3

“Our lives, to be fruitful, must be full of Christ; to be able to bring His peace, joy, and love we must have it ourselves, for we cannot give what we have not got.”

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

“Don’t pass by the cross; it is a place of grace.”  All of us have to carry our own cross, all of us have to accompany Jesus in His ascent to Calvary if we want to reach the summit with Him.  This means we have to empty ourselves of self.

Love, in order to survive, must be nourished by sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of self.  Renouncing self means to offer our free will, our reason, our life, in an attitude of faith.  We shouldn’t allow anything to interfere with our love for Him. He is our joy and our strength. Temptations and trials will come, but nothing can separate us from His love.  All He wants of us is to give ourselves to Him in all our poverty and nothingness. We can  lean on Him in complete trust even when all goes wrong and we feel like we have lost our way.  He can us use to accomplish great things on the condition that we believe much more in His love than our weakness.  We can have absolute confidence in Him because He is Jesus.  His hand is in all our happenings and He desires our undivided love.

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

How do we work and keep our attention fully on the Lord?  It seems impossible but the important thing is that our it is our intention and the desire of our heart that our work be done with Jesus and for Him.  It is what He wants…our will and desire to be for Him!

When we think of electricity, we are like the wires and He is the current. We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, to produce the light for the world.  Or we can refuse to be used and allow the darkness to spread.

Sometimes what we do for others may seem insignificant but everything we do is important to God.  God won’t ask how many books we read or how many sermons we preached, but if we have done our best for the love of Him..

“Unless our work is interwoven with love it is useless. To work without love is slavery.” No matter how small or insignificant our work may be, let us make it Christ’s love in action. The fruit of love is service. Love leads us to say, “I want to serve”.  Let’s not forget that as we serve the poor around us we are doing something beautiful for God.

Devotions from Mother Teresa/No Greater Love

Holiness is meant for all of us  and the first step to becoming holy is to will it. Holiness consists in carrying out God’s will with joy, it is renouncing our own will, it is running toward Him!  TO become holy we need humility and prayer as we lift our hearts to Him and let His light enlighten us.  As we experience His love it should cause us to spend ourselves for others. Since we can’t see Christ to express our love, we can see our neighbor, and do for him what we would do for Christ. Let us put love into action! He wants to do great things through us if we let Him and don’t try to interfere with Him. “We interfere with God’s plan when we push in someone or something else not suitable for us. People may come with wonderful ideas, with beautiful things, but anything that takes us away from the reality of what we have given to God must remain outside.”  Let us totally rely on our Father with the spontaneous abandonment of little children.

As we are so loved by Him, let us, as an act of gratitude, determine to be holy because He is holy.