I can’t believe it’s already April 8th! In a little more than 5 weeks, I’ll be boarding a plane and heading home. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was saying, “In a little more than 5 weeks, I’ll be boarding a plane and heading for England”. How quickly the time has flown!
Today I want to share with you some insight from Beth Moore. Over the last year, God has blessed me tremendously through her teaching, and at the moment I have the added blessing of doing TWO Beth Moore studies. Andrea and I are leading a group of women from St. Andrew’s through “Jesus, the One and Only”, and I am currently going through “Believing God” on my own. It is from the latter study that I want to share with you today.
Yesterday I was watching the video session that begins the 4th week of the study. Since the beginning, we have been committing to memory a 5-statement pledge of faith:
1. God is who He says He is
2. God can do what He says He can do
3. I am who God says I am
4. I can do all things through Christ
5. God’s Word is living and active in me
Having spent the last two weeks unpacking the ideas in the first two statements, we are moving on to the third statement this week, and I found Beth’s teaching in the video session so encouraging. We looked at Ephesians 1:3-8 as just one portion of Scripture that reveals to us some truth about who we are. According to those verses, I am first and foremost LOVED by God; in addition, I am BLESSED, CHOSEN, ADOPTED, ACCEPTED, REDEEMED, and FORGIVEN! We then looked at how knowing that truth should affect our lives.
In the process, we spent some time in Romans 4, which makes reference to both Abraham and David. Towards the end of the session, Beth called our attention to the relationship between these two men. Most likely, they would not have had any issue believing the first two statements of our pledge of faith. God was speaking directly to both of them, and His work was pretty evident in their lives. Although that was true, both of these men turned from God’s precepts: Abraham took matters of the promise into his own hands and committed adultery (albeit with his wife’s consent) with Hagar; David committed adultery with Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, and tried to hide his sin as long as possible. It is very possible that both of these men had a crisis of faith when it came to believing that they were who God said they were. How often do we do the same? We look at our sin and believe we have nullified everything God has said about who we are. But that’s not true.
Beth’s next statement brought tears to my eyes as the truth finally entered my heart, bringing healing and hope with it. “You have sinned, but YOU ARE NOT THAT SIN!” I have struggled with the same sin issue for almost 12 years… that’s half of my life! In the last few months, I have finally been taking steps to be free of that sin, but it has still been easy to believe the lie that this sin is part of me, is part of who I am. God spoke through Beth yesterday to tenderly remind me that it’s not true, that I am who HE says I am. I am LOVED, BLESSED, CHOSEN, ADOPTED, ACCEPTED, REDEEMED, and perhaps most importantly, completely FORGIVEN. Any decision to believe otherwise is a decision not to believe God.
I pray that you might come to know that you ARE who GOD says you are! Believe that you are loved, blessed, chosen, adopted, accepted, redeemed, and forgiven. And search the Scriptures to find out more about who God says you are. I guarantee it’s a much brighter picture than the one Satan or the world is trying to paint.
In Christ,
Katie
