Nothing But Praise!
Choosing a topic for today’s post has been very challenging, as well as finding the time to write it, but after debating and considering several topics, and even having one post substantially completed only to lose it when my computer totally locked up, it seems praising the Lord is the only thing I want to do after all! And there IS SO much reason for rejoicing and giving Him praise, honor and glory today!
First, I can’t possibly express how touched I am by the generosity and willingness of total strangers to reach out and bless the two families I requested assistance for on the site earlier today. FAM Ministries is truly fortunate to have so many wonderful people involved with the ministry, and I can’t tell you all how blessed I feel that the Lord has brought each and every one of you into our ministry family! I know you will each be blessed in a very special way for the kindness and generosity you’ve blessed these ladies and their kids with. So I’ve asked both ladies to give us testimonies to share on the site after Christmas about how our gifts blessed them and their children, which is something I know we’ll all look forward to! Also, both ladies were very touched and humbled that people who don’t even know them and their kids would be so kind and generous, and one of the ladies even told me to give all of the money to the other family, which, of course, I told her wasn’t going to happen! While every gift is very special and greatly appreciated, one in particular really touched my heart, which I’m sure all of you ladies will appreciate the significance of as well, because we received $100.00 tonight from a male visitor to the website. And even though I ask the Lord to bless everyone’s generosity, I ask for a very special blessing for a man we don’t even know who is willing to step up and stand in the gap to help compensate for the unwillingness of two other men to be as concerned about the happiness of their wives and children as he is despite being a total stranger! So thanks to all of you for your wonderful support and participation in FAM Ministries and our desire to help make this a very special Christmas for the families!
As I witness the Lord’s hand at work in the lives and marriages of our members, I am so much in awe and can’t help feeling like one of the most blessed people on the face of the earth just to be part of something so amazing and wonderful! It seems like we’ve made some kind of breakthrough in the spiritual realm and things are happening at a very fast and unexpected pace! I received two awesome praise reports from ladies today who are both still feeling a degree of shock, because of how totally unexpected the changes were and how totally different reality ended up being from everything human reasoning and understanding was leading them to believe! So I fully expect to hear restored marriage testimonies from both of them SOON, and we know their kids couldn’t possibly receive better Christmas presents than that!
The wonderful testimonies and praise reports from both of these ladies absolutely prove and confirm that there’s NO way to overstate the incredible importance and significance of Proverbs 3:5-6, this time from The Amplified Bible, because it says Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths. And I can assure you that both of these ladies would be the first to say how challenging and difficult they’ve found that to walk out in their lives over the past couple of weeks.
In fact, it was probably less than two weeks ago when one of the lady’s husbands told her that there was absolutely NOTHING he liked about her…NOTHING, and that one day he was just going to do what HE wanted to do, no matter what anyone thought about it, which was a reference to leaving her for the NCP! It took super human strength to ignore what he said and take those thoughts and hurtful words captive, making them obedient to Christ and the promise in HIS word instead of leaning on her own natural understanding of the situation based on what she was hearing and seeing! And now, in less than two weeks, there appears to be a TOTALLY unexpected and unexplainable turn around! And I have NO doubt it is BECAUSE she made a very deliberate decision to trust the Lord and do things HIS way instead of relying on what her husband and heart were telling her!
Then the other woman was the one I wrote about last week who was considering taking her husband to court to establish visitation guidelines, only to have him call her very broken and distraught the next day! But then everything seemed to be wonderful in his corner of the world again, with no further signs of the broken man she talked to that day, which meant she really had to resist the natural instinct and inclination to lean to her own understanding, which would have led to nothing but TOTALLY WRONG conclusions! She and her husband talked very openly and honestly for a long time today, and she discovered that the situation with the NCP was NOTHING AT ALL like her vivid imagination had misled her to believe! He expressed great remorse, shame, disbelief and guilt for having put his family through everything he’s done, and was able to very honestly and openly describe the hold the NCP has on him. And I couldn’t help being very impressed with the way this woman responded in GENUINE love, honor and respect for her husband, creating a greatly needed atmosphere of grace that will enable him to experience the redemption he is so much in need of now, and then the restoration of their marriage can follow. And NOTHING but the grace and power of our Lord and Savior makes that possible! But once again, she had to resist the natural inclination to analyze everything and try to make sense of things that just didn’t make sense. Instead, she trusted the Lord and did what HE told her to do even when it was the last thing she felt like doing!
So when the devil tries to torture us with thoughts of anything that does not glorify the Lord, we have to remember and practice the wisdom of Proverbs 3:5-6, and refuse to rely on our own understanding, putting all our trust in the Lord instead, and doing everything HIS way instead of the way our flesh wants us to do things, which is almost always CONTRARY to the word! Just as both of the ladies have seen and experienced in such a significant and powerful way, what we think we know most of the time is completely wrong anyway, which is exactly why the Lord told us NOT to try to figure everything out on our own. Not only that, it doesn’t even matter if what we think is true IS true, because God can change ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING! That’s what it means to trust in Him with ALL of our hearts!
Hopefully, sharing these praise reports and testimonies will help everyone understand the importance of keeping our eyes on the power and glory of Jesus Christ and ignoring EVERYTHING else we see and hear. In the end, what God says is what goes, and when we believe that, it should be a lot easier for us to have the attitudes that will draw our husbands back to us instead of sending them elsewhere for what was lacking in us in the first place. As one of the ladies told me today, the change in her husband didn’t come until she started sincerely asking the Lord to reveal what needed to be changed in her instead of worrying so much about her husband. And that reminded me of how the Lord led me to the passage about dealing with the plank in our own eye before trying to remove the speck in our husbands’ eye, and THEN we’ll be able to help him remove the speck from his eye. And even more significant is remembering that He showed me that in terms of the study I did on spiritual warfare and taking every thought captive, which just confirms what she shared. You can read about that again in The Importance Of Taking Every Thought Captive. So PRAISE THE LORD, and be blessed and encouraged!