I was praying today, just allowing the Holy Spirit to lead me into what He wanted to do. After a while, my prayers turned towards the church in the UK.  I’ve said in a previous blog that there was a day last year when I felt God put His passion and zeal for His house in my heart.  I still carry this and so cannot help but pray for the church.  I also heard someone say a few months ago, ‘as the church goes, so goes the world’.  I have a deep conviction in my heart that this is true, and so whenever I pray for the church in Great Britain, I always have at the back of my mind the effect that a revived and awakened church would have on this nation.  I feel as though the church is actually the heart of Great Britain.  It is where the life-blood flows from.  As I prayed, the Holy Spirit opened His word to me and showed me that the church is also the eyes of the nation.  Matt 6:22-23 says ‘the eye is the lamp of the body.  If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.  If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’  Our nation right now is in great darkness because our eyes are shut, allowing no light into the body.  The rest of this passage of scripture shows us the cause of the church’s darkness. ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also…No one can serve two masters.  Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and hate the other.  You cannot serve both God and money’ (19-21,24).  When the people of God forget that they are a spiritual people and are foreigners on this earth, we get caught up in the things of this world, with the worry of what we will eat and drink, and the clothes we wear.  But no one can serve two masters, and so the light of God’s kingdom dims, and eventually goes out, leaving the world in great darkness.  So I’m praying right now that God will disentangle His church from the cares of this world and set us free to be people of the Spirit in whom the Light of the World can shine bright again. 

“If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts know to you” Proverbs 1:23

I’ve been asking God to mature me so I thought proverbs was a good place to start. This scripture stood out to me. So often I pray show me your heart and I desire to know what he is thinking, but he says he will do these things for those that respond to his rebuke. I think sometimes God’s rebuke is easily missed, it can come through circumstances, a word at church or from just talking to a friend, just a gentle nudge in my heart. If I learn to respond to that nudge in my heart, then he will pour his heart to me. It’s say he takes the upright into his confidence. I know that’s where I want to be in his confidence, but if I want this I’ve got to let him rebuke me-discipline me. I think this is what I’m learning that I have to let him take me on his path, because that is the one that will lead to life.

As i am praying and asking God to lead me through prayer sometimes i see a picture and it starts starts like a broken jigsaw and piece by piece its coming together its a picture of beauty and love like a flower bed all the diffrent rich colours each with fine detail rich green grass the ray of the sun beaming down on it and as i look at the flowers the fine detail in each one i think of how God made us we read in psalm 139 v 13 - 16 ” For you formed my inward parts you covered me in my mothers womb i will praise you for i am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well my frame was not hidden from you when i was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth your eyes saw my substance being yet unformed and in your book they all were written the days fashioned me   “  It speaks to me how God looks at our lives with great detail my heart all that i am and looks with love and he sees the finished creation and the many parts being put together of how we go through this journey learning to prosper where we are planted to give glory to Gods name

So today God did something cool. I went for a meeting with a lady about a special diet I am going onto and during the meeting when I was supposed to be learning about this diet and how to do it, but God had something slightly different in mind. I started talking a bit about myself and telling her about my life and testimony and she completely opened up about herself and how she was desperately seeking comfort, God started to speak to me about her and I was able to talk to her about God’s love and how He is always waiting for us to call out to Him and she allowed me to pray for her, that God would come into her life and that He would give her His peace that passes all understanding. At the end, she said that it must have been God that arranged our meeting and she was right.

 Why have I told you all this? Because I want you to know that God has these little gems for us to find. These moments where we can take Jesus to people that need Him. And it doesn’t mean that we have to strive to make something happen, God just gives us a present, He gives us the chance to bless someone else by telling them about His love.

On Fire School recently, we listened to a prophetic utterance by Stacey Campbell where she said that if you have been touched by the arm of God then all you need to do is reach out and touch someone else and I feel like I have experienced that joy today.

 God has spoken to me recently about honouring Him. Or rather the lack of honour I had for him. God has been so gracious to me throughout my life, saving my life miraculously twice with no medical explanation for why I am now alive.

However, the reality of what God has done for me had not pierced my heart. In fact, I was completely broken by the fact that actually, I had no trust in God at all. God had more than proved His awesome power over this life to me by these events and yet I was so scared to trust Him, believing Him to be at best uninterested in looking after me and at worst, incapable of doing so. In essence, my God was too small! Massively too small!

I was of course, heartbroken to discover this, heartbroken that I had so insulted and dishonoured God with my lack of faith in Him in spite of his obvious demonstrations of His saving power in my life. However, praise God! He is always merciful and had gently revealed this to my heart. He had brought this revelation in such a gentle way, the Holy Spirit simply touching my heart and speaking quietly to me and saying “well, if God saved your life twice in this amazing way, surely you can trust Him? Surely these acts show that He cares about you massively, is deeply interested in you and is more than capable of looking after you?” And as the truth of this statement permeated my heart and spread out throughout my being, I began to weep. Because I realised that I had NEVER honoured God for what He had done. Of course I had told people and given testimony but to actually turn to God with thanksgiving and praise was something I had never done. And I had not celebrated God with joy shining out of my face as I related what He had done. I had been almost apologetic as I told people, waiting for disbelief and mockery. How wrongly had I behaved?!

As I repented to my Daddy for not giving Him His due, a weight lifted from me and a change happened in my heart. I felt it happen, the fear of other people’s opinions went, the fear of claiming a miracle and having people disbelieve me went, and a joy in the Lord came in. And the results of this are showing in my life, I am able to come to God and praise Him and thank Him easily, with no uncomfortable feelings, but with sincerity and honesty, knowing that He is more than worthy of my praise and wanting to let Him know how thankful I am. And I am able to share a powerful testimony of JOY! When I talk to people about what God has done for me, the joy of my salvation shines out of my face and when I talk to people that don’t know God, they can see that I have something that they don’t. And they want it! Because I have been set free from the prison of fear and lack of trust in God and have been released into the Joy of the Lord. So now, I have a basis of trust in God. I have a great place to start from and every time the enemy comes with a lie or something to try to make me worry about my future, I can turn and remind the devil of all that God has done for me and he has nothing to say because God cares about my watchfully and attentively as He has already proved.

Psalm 18 v 28 – 29:

“Lord, you have brought light to my life; my God, you light up my darkness. In your strength I can crush an army; with my God I can scale any wall.”