Job’s Restoration Verse: Job 42

    Job’s spectacular turnaround isn’t just a reward for righteousness but also a joyous act of God’s generosity. The fact that God owes us nothing has never deterred him from giving us everything, freely and graciously (cf. 2Co 9:7). Notice that Job’s restoration comes only after he forgives his friends and prays for them. As Jesus says, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Lk 6:37–38).

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald notes that in the first forty chapters of the book of Job, this man faced a sample of nearly every imaginable kind of suffering. On a few occasions he appeared to bend under the weight of the stress, but he never broke. Given every reason to doubt himself and to revise his view of God, he stayed the course.

Every person who desires to live generously will want to acquaint himself with the journey of Job. His is a message from ancient times of a man with a soul that was bigger than the circumstances. Satan certainly got his answer: Job feared God in comfortable times and in chaotic times. No contest!

As this amazing book concludes, a couple of points stand out as worth pondering. Notice that God never told Job why all this was happening to him … All of Job’s anguish finds its roots in a strange conversation in which Job’s character was impugned. One would like to hear God say to Job, “Now that this is all over, let me tell you what it was all about.” But Job was left, apparently, to live out his days continuing to trust in God…

More significantly, Job regained his prosperity … (see Job 42:10). What does this tell us? First, that prosperity is not always a coincidence nor merely the result of hard work. In this case at least, God showered prosperity upon a man because the man had demonstrated his faithfulness.

Second, the prosperity came not simply because Job had endured the suffering but because he prayed for his friends … Job had no reason to pray grace upon these “friends” of his. They’d done little more than add to his misery during his dark days. Still Job, through his prayer, wished for their best and prayed that God would act kindly toward them …

Two important lessons to keep in mind: First, everything we own may be attributed to Providence as much as to hard work; remember, there are others who work hard without gaining material prosperity. Second, we must never forget that a grace-filled heart does more to trigger God’s kindness than all the more visible things a person can do.

Think About It

•              How do you think this story would have ended had Job not prayed for his friends?

•              How is the story of Job tied not just to the topic of suffering but also to the idea of prosperity?

•              What life lessons can you take away from the story of Job?

Pray About It

Lord, Samuel reminds me that prayer is important when he says to the people, “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by failing to pray for you” (1Sa 12:23). Remind me, Lord, that my prayers on behalf of others are my duty as well as my privilege.

(This devotion is from the NIV Stewardship Study Bible by Zondervan. Used with permission.)

                                        *******Have fun till we meet again*******

NO TO WORRY!

                                  Philipians 4:6-"Do not be anxious about anything,  but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God"
        Sometimes it is so difficult not to be anxious about life situations and  circumstances but God  is saying we shoild not be anxious. Perfect love casteth away fear! God loves us and we need to love him in order for fear to be far from our hearts.
When you look unto Christ the author and finisher of our faith then we have no cause to worry because he has told us not to lean on our own understanding but to trust in the Lord (Proverbs3:5). A child that trusts in his/her father will run to him when she senses something is going wrong, the child will not continue to fret but will believe the father will be able to solve it. If we can depend on our earthly parents wholeheartedly then we should depend on our heavenly Father more because he created the earthly.
Look unto Christ at all times and believe his promise that we should prosper even as our soul prospers and it is written that every good  and perfect thing is from the Lord ( James1:17). Trust God that has good things planned for us and worry not .
                                                                                                    *******Have fun till we meet again*******

Your Life Is Shaped By Your Thoughts (by Rick Warren)

               Continue with me in this series and remain blessed as you read

“Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” Romans 12:2a (NLT)

                  You cannot become all God created you to be until you understand the five factors that influence your identity. The first two are chemistry (how you are made) and connections (your relationships). You are a product of the way God created you and of the relationships in your life.

Your identity is also influenced by your circumstances and your consciousness.

Circumstances are the things that happen to you and around you — none of which you control. You are a product of the trauma, troubles, suffering, shame, shock, pressures, and pain that have shaped your life. Perhaps even abuse has affected your identity. If you’ve ever had a series of failures or a catastrophe, it has left an indelible mark on who you are.

Consciousness is how you talk to yourself. You know what? If you talked to your friends the way you talk to yourself, you probably wouldn’t be friends anymore, because our thoughts are filled with the lies we’ve heard from other people that we’ve let simmer and fester. When we repeat other people’s thoughts in our head, they go deeper and deeper in our consciousness, and they begin to shape our identity.

Proverbs 4:23 says, “Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts” (LB). Your thoughts don’t have to be true to hurt you; you just have to believe them. If you tell yourself your marriage won’t last, then it won’t. If you’re afraid you can’t do something, then you won’t. Your thoughts run your life!

Your circumstances may be out of your control, but God is in control of everything. Your thoughts shape who you are, but you can change the way you think. Your circumstances and consciousness have shaped who you are, but the way you respond to your circumstances and the thoughts you choose to believe will shape the rest of your life.

Talk It Over

• What is your natural response to a difficult situation or circumstance? Do you run away or face it? Do you worry or trust God?
• How do you need to change the way you think?
• Who or what around you influences your thoughts in a negative way?      

How Well Do You Love? by Rick Warren

              “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31 (NIV) Yesterday we talked about the first of five factors that influence your identity. We have all been made wonderfully complex and full of flaws, but until we embrace who we are — including our flaws — we cannot make the changes in our lives that will bring about true transformation.
The second factor that influences your identity is your connections. Your connections give your life purpose, meaning, and identity. If you grew up with dysfunctional relationships, then you question your purpose and struggle with identity.Jesus said that the most important thing we should do is love God and love other people (Mark 12:30-31).
Life is not about your accomplishments or acquisitions, your popularity or prestige. It’s about how well you love.There are three problems that keep us from loving fully as God intended:
We’re all imperfect. 
There are no perfect relationships because there are no perfect people.
Sin disconnects us.
 Adam and Eve had the first broken relationship and disconnected themselves from God and from each other. We’ve been excusing ourselves and accusing the people we love ever since.The more disconnected we are, the more fearful we become. We crave intimacy, but we fear vulnerability. We crave acceptance, but we fear rejection.You may not have had a say in the hand you were dealt in life. But God sent his son as your Savior to transform your cards into a winning hand.
No matter what connections you’ve made in life, you will be held responsible for what you do with your connections today.Will you let God affect your connections? Will you trust him for your future in spite of a difficult past? Will you nurture, protect, and build relationships so that God is more fully glorified in your life?Resolve today to build healthy and not hurtful relationships with God’s help.

Talk It Over
In what relationships do you need to invest more time or more of Christ’s love?
How are you doing with “loving your neighbor as yourself”?
How about with your difficult relatives, co-workers, or in a broken relationship?

Please ponder on this writeup by Rick Warren.
                                                                                                     *******Have fun till next time*******

The Healing Power of Confessionby Rick Warren

                       “Before I confessed my sins, my bones felt limp, and I groaned all day long.”Psalm 32:3 (CEV). It’s not just swallowing too much food that’ll torpedo your health in 2014. Swallowing your sin can have even more disastrous results.One of the healthiest choices you can make for 2014 is to receive the forgiveness of God. Many people start the New Year carrying around a stinky garbage sack of sin. Carrying around that sack won’t just make you ineffective for serving Jesus; it’ll ruin your health, too.The Bible teaches in Psalm 32:3-5: “Before I confessed my sins, my bones felt limp,and I groaned all day long. Night and day your hand weighed heavily on me, and my strength was gone as in the summer heat. So I confessed my sins and told them all to you. I said, ‘I’ll tell the LORD each one of my sins.’ Then you forgave me and took away my guilt” (CEV).
In fact an October 2013 study by scientists at Princeton University and the University of Waterloo scientifically verified what David said centuries earlier: Feelings of being physically “weighed down” by guilt are real.God has given us a foolproof method for relief from those soul and body-destroying feelings of guilt: repentance. How do you do that?Make a moral inventory.
 Psalm 138:23-24 says, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test my thoughts. Point out anything you find in me that makes you sad, and lead me along the path of everlasting life” (LB). In other words, you start by grabbing a pencil and paper and asking God to bring to mind your sin. Take your time. Don’t rush it. Be specific.Accept the blame. The greatest holdup to healing is you. Don’t rationalize it. Don’t minimize it. You may not own 100 percent of the blame, but accept the 10 percent of the blame that’s yours.Ask for forgiveness. Believe that God will forgive you. Ask him to forgive you based on what he promises in the Bible (1 John 1:9). Don’t beg. Don’t bargain. Just believe that God is able and willing to forgive you.Don’t put yourself at risk of spiritual heart disease. God wants to use you in 2014. Come clean about your sin. Start over.Then see what God can do through you in 2014.

Talk It Over
Make a list of sins you’ve never confessed to God.
Accept the blame for your failures, and ask the Lord for forgiveness for each sin on your list.
What keeps you from confessing your sins from God?
Are there some sins you struggle with confessing more than others? Why?

These questions you answer to yourself and the cleansing you need shall take place. Enjoy holiday if you are Nigeria today.
                                                                                         *******Have fun till we meet again*******

The power of the WORD!

                    He sent His word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.Psalm 107:20
Meditating On God’s Word Brings Healing. A man who had been suffering pain in his upper back for almost two years. One day, after reading Joseph Prince teaching about meditating on God’s Word, decided to run with it. So on his way home from work that day, he decided to just meditate on Psalm 23:1, speaking it to himself over and over again—“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”He said that he must have muttered the verse at least 50 times as he pondered on Jesus being a good shepherd to him—how kind Jesus is to provide for him, lead him, tend lovingly to his needs and heal him.The effect? “Every breath seemed to just release deeper and deeper waves of healing throughout my entire being and I started to notice the pain in my back just dissipate,” he shared happily. “And by the time I got home, all the pain was gone!”Beloved, if you need healing in your body today, I encourage you to prioritize God’s Word. Meditate on it. Speak it and declare it over yourself. By His Word, God heals and delivers His people from every kind of destruction!
       I had a similar experience and therefore could identify with this situation in Joseph Prince teaching. I had an ailment of swelling and pains from my waist, knee and ankles which was identified as erethema nodossuma of which had no cure. I held unto the word of God that he has nailed my sickness and diseases to the cross and spoke it continuosly and faithfully and my healing was made possible with no drugs or any other thing.
    I challenge to speak God's word in faith to your situation and experience God's mighty hand in action.
                                                                                     *******Have fun till we meet again*******

Offer Your Body to God by Rick WarreN

This is a wonderful writeup, may you be blessed by it.

“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.” Romans 12:1 (NIV)

        For change to happen in any area of your life, whether it’s financial, vocational, educational, mental, or relational, you have to begin with the physical.

Why? Because your body affects your behavior. Your muscles affect your moods and your motivation. Your physiology can actually affect your psychology.

Romans 12:1 says, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship” (NIV).

The problem with a living sacrifice is that it can choose to crawl off the altar. We do this all the time. We offer ourselves to God, and then we take ourselves back. This is not a once-for-all offer. You’ve got to do it four, five, or maybe 10 times a day!

So what is your "true and proper worship"? There are three things you can do with your body that the Bible says are acts of worship:

1. Cleanse your body. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 7:1, “Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.” You cleanse your body by controlling what you allow in your mind through what you watch and listen to and in your body by what you eat and drink.

2. Care for your body. Ephesians 5:29 says, “No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church” (NLT). Keeping your body in shape is an act of worship to God.

3. Control your body. “Each of you should learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable.” 1 Thessalonians 4:4 (NIV). Control your body so that it doesn’t control you. There is no reason to say, “I couldn’t help myself!”

No matter what kind of change you want to make in your life, it will require energy. To have the energy to meet your goals, change has to start with your body.

*******Have fun till we meet again*******

God Sees What You Can Become By His Grace by Joseph Prince

 For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. Hebrews 10:14, NASB

 When God was with Moses on Mount Sinai, the Israelites became impatient and asked Aaron, whom Moses had left in-charge, to make them other gods to worship. And without so much as a word of protest, Aaron crafted a calf from the gold that the people had given him, so that they could worship it. While this abomination was happening, God was telling Moses that Aaron would be His very first high priest: “Call for your brother, Aaron, and his sons…Set them apart from the rest of the people of Israel so they may minister to me and be my priests” (Exodus 28:1).

Didn’t God know what was happening down below? Of course He knew, but He did not see Aaron as he was then. He saw what Aaron would become by His grace—His undeserved, unmerited favor. God saw Aaron representing the people before Him as high priest of the nation, and entering the Holy Place on the Day of Atonement.

My friend, as with Aaron, God knows all about your challenges and weaknesses. If a mistake you’ve made keeps coming back to haunt you, or if you have a weakness that keeps cropping up, don’t focus on it and get frustrated. Look through God’s eyes and see as He sees you by His grace.

To your heavenly Father, you are righteous in Christ, perfected and sanctified for all time by His finished work (2 Corinthians 5:21). Once you realize that this is how your Father sees you, you’ll begin to manifest it in your actions. Then, like Aaron, you will be able to rise above what you are now, and be the champion that God already sees you as through His grace! 

I was blessed by this writeup and would love you all to be blessed too.

*******Have fun till we meet again*******

Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord-Genesis 6:8

This a wonderful piece by Joseph Prince. Enjoy it

Rest Finds Grace

The first time the word “grace” appears in the Bible is in the story of Noah—“Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8). Noah’s name means “rest,” so the verse is showing us here that “Rest found grace in the eyes of the Lord.”

My friend, the enemy gets you off-track by getting you out of rest. How does he do this? By getting you into self-effort, where you trust in your own abilities to solve your problem. He wants you running around frantically looking for a solution, feeling anxious and troubled. But God wants you restful, trusting in Him and allowing Him to lead you to victory. Look at Jesus in the Gospels. No one was more restful than Him, yet no one was more effective than He was! Jesus rested in the love of His Father and only did what He saw His Father doing—there was no self-effort.

Beloved, stop striving through your own efforts and rest in the Lord’s love for you. Rest by trusting in His finished work. That’s how you allow Him to direct you with divine wisdom to His divine solutions. That’s how you allow His grace to abound in your life. His grace will stop that addiction. His grace will drive out that disease. His grace will fill your areas of lack and lead you to abundance and victory!

*******Have fun till we meet again*******

NEW YEAR!!!!Welcome back blessed and highly favored readers.

  Psalm 150:6 "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord". We thank God that we are all partakers of this new year 2014.

     Many of us had great success and many of us had failures in one way or the other in 2013 but thank God it is all in the past and we are alive today to say Happy New Year to each other. As Paul said forgetting the past and pushing ahead is very important for us to succeed as children of God or else the enemy would weigh us down with regrets and depression preventing us from fulfilling our purpose of being alive in 2014.
 I will praise the Lord because i am alive as you should do too because it pleases God and it is a commandment- Let all that has breath praise the Lord.

*******Have fun till we meet again*******