Something About The Joy

     Come to me, all you who are weary  and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30 I enter the New Year celebrating an age-old truth freshly spoken into my heart by God through the Holy Spirit today.   It's a culmination of the "rest" theme He's been leading me gently into over the past few months.   I pray this message of rest will comfort and strengthen your hearts, as it has mine. A version of the following message was originally published in the Far East Broadcasting Company's blog on December 11, 2013. I've added some thoughts here on hearing from God, another theme you will have noticed in some of my previous posts on this Joy blog. "So much for your preachy Thanksgiving post last week about how we should thank God ...

Did you ever wonder how God's voice sounded to the ancients?   When the Bible says, "God spoke" to   Abraham, how did Abraham know it was God speaking? The Bible rarely tells us how the people of Old Testament times "heard" God speak.   It just says God spoke, and leaves it at that.   It's as if God assumes people would know He was speaking, and what He was saying, without any further explanation.   But I don't always know, so God has obviously left an important piece of information out of the Scriptures. Or maybe not.   Maybe there's something left out of my way of hearing God instead.   Maybe something is screwy with my way of perceiving reality, as hard to believe as that may be. If I asked him, "Abraham, what made you think it was God speaking when you came up with that crazy idea that your descendants would outnumber the sands of the sea?" he would probably look at me like I was the crazy one.   He would ca...

I'm finally beginning to listen, and I'm discovering, to my great delight, what God means when he tells me to rest.    God's rest is not passive inactivity.   Instead, it's a deliberate action on my part that leads me into the center of His peace.   Here are four elements of God's rest that can revitalize us and bring fresh excitement into our walk with Him. R ELINQUISHMENT Entering into God's rest involves, first of all, my relinquishment of my own agenda.   Agendas are not intrinsically wrong.   God has an agenda.   The Bible is His revelation of His agenda, from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation.   His agenda is all about goodness and grace.   My agenda rarely takes into account those two attributes, so it's often at cross- purposes with His.   My agenda centers around my needs and desires--my list of priorities--my "To Do" list.   That's why living according to my own ...