[Today Jax is thankful for: "my bow" (as in bow & arrow)]
Today I am thankful that my all-deserving God is a jealous God.
This post puts yesterday's post about the conviction of the Holy Spirit into perspective. The following is full of many examples of that conviction.
Oooooweee!! The Holy Spirit has been ALL OVER me lately! I finished Priscilla Shirer's Jonah Bible Study last week & for the last two weeks of that Bible Study I've been thinking & praying about what book of the Bible God wanted me to study next. (Not-so-secretly really wanting it to be Beth Moore's James Bible Study.) But, as I sought God, I had a nagging feeling that He wanted me to do No Other Gods again (the study I just did before Jonah).
While I didn't mind because it was a really good Bible Study, I really had just one question for God: Why? Did I do such a bad job last time that I failed & have to re-do it?!
He was quick to answer me:
-The last time I did the study I was in the middle of God sending us to a new church & moving us & I really couldn't separate that from the Bible Study. I only saw it through that lens.
-While God revealed to me MANY areas to work on, since I saw it through the lens of where my life was at the time, I only worked on the idols of family & fear. Those were the immediate needs to get right at the time & I was so overwhelmed with that, I couldn't even think about working on the others.
-Then, God confirmed everything He had been telling me. In case I didn't get the message over the past two weeks, God used the Women's Retreat weekend to confirm it, Sunday School yesterday morning was on idols, both the morning & night message spoke to me on these things, & to top it all off, the invitation song was "Give Us Clean Hands." (We bow our hearts, we bend our knees...we turn our eyes from evil things, Oh Lord, we cast down our idols...Give us clean hands, Give us pure hearts, let us not lift our souls to another...)
-I texted a friend who got this Bible Study when I was doing it the first time & told her that God wanted me to re-do it. She flipped!! She said she wanted to do it w/ me b/c it went right along with the commitments she made to God over the weekend too.
-After doing the first session this morning, I am reminded of why it is soooo important for me to go back & allow the Holy Spirit to deal with me in every aspect that He wants to: The Bible tells me that if I love God, I will obey His commandments. A line in the first session says, "I think the other nine commandments are virtually impossible to uphold if we neglect the first commandment. If God is not God in our lives, doesn't that make the rest of His commandments somewhat optional?"
Thank You God for being a jealous God & not accepting anything but my all.
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