It's a Process!

The world has a mistaken notion about us followers of Christ. They think when we say we are Christians, that it's like a cup of dry soup mix -- pour the waters of salvation over us and we become instantly perfect and then when we don't measure up, we're called hypocrites.  I hate to tell the world, that we struggle just like everyone else, however, we have what they don't, a relationship with Christ. Some are better at listening to Him and obeying and others, for whatever reason, find it harder to yield to his sweet whispers.  Thankfully, God isn't finished with me yet, cause I'm an adopted daughter of THE King! 👸

Our testimony leader was speaking to us a couple of weeks ago about the sacrifice of praise. As he was speaking about the Hebrew sacrifice, I began thinking about what I could sacrifice in order to praise and thank God and it clicked into place. I've struggled all this last year with writing my blog posts every week like I set out to, sometimes wanting to quit and deleting this whole blog, but Jesus kept whispering "Persevere," which has become my strong rope to hang onto when I wanted to give up. I realized that I could sacrifice those "I don't want to" feelings and CHOOSE to be thankful instead. 

"Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise -- the fruit of lips that confess his name." ~ Hebrews 13:15. 

I look up words in the dictionary I don't fully have a grasp on -- like mercy, for instance, one of the words in the beatitudes, that we were reading in church a couple of weeks ago. Positive words sometimes seem foreign to me, so when I ran across a possible meaning of mercy, I had to "chew the cud" and think about it. The sentence "It was just a mercy we had our seat belts on when it happened." grabbed my attention, because having just recently been in a car accident, I thought WOW! A heavenly reward for obeying the law! 

As far as Documented Faith goes, I've been working on my twelve dividers for my faith-book all this month. I've recorded my work here on my "Craftin' Bliss" blog and also assembled a couple of glue book pages that I decided I had enough pieces for. I uploaded those here on my "Taking Stock" post as well telling where I found some of the components for them here.  Stephanie showed us what she's been doing in her faith-book and it appears that she has a commentary going. 

I asked my husband what a commentary was and he showed me a book out of his personal library by C. H. Spurgeon called "Spurgeon's Devotional Bible." It looks similar to a study Bible, except that it has Spurgeon's own comments after various Bible verses in italic script instead of down at the bottom or in the middle of the two columns of scripture.  He told me that a commentary explains or illustrates key points; after Stephanie paraphrases what she is reading,  whether it be her Bible or an inspirational book, she uses her own quotes as a prompt to help her remember what she's learned. 

So, in closing, I said a few posts ago that I wanted to show you what Lynn Shokoples inspired me to make with the face of one of my pocket pages, so look below. Click on the image if you need to enlarge it to see details. I used one of Stephanie's images she sent us in a devotional (Thank you, Stephanie, for sharing your lovely talent with us!) and used Lynn's layout (Thank you, Lynn, for yours also!) to apply it to my gelli-printed background. That red heart and flower just pops off the page and draws your eye in, don't you think?