Ephesians 6:14-18
Stand your ground, putting on the belt of truth and the body armor of God's righteousness. For shoes, put on the peace that comes from the Good News so that you will be fully prepared. In addition to all of these, hold up the shield of faith to stop the fiery arrows of the devil. Put on salvation as your helmet, and take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion. Stay alert and be persistent in your prayers for all believers everywhere.
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I believe the Lord is pretty serious when it comes to producing the fruit of the Spirit! Our lives are to reflect who Jesus is if we claim to have Jesus living in our hearts. I am sure not saying that this is an easy task because I have to say that this whole week since beginning this talk, I have really been challenged in this area of living this out! And I think if we are all honest with ourselves and each other this is difficult, PERIOD, but that doesn't change the fact that we are called to do it! Being a christian is not a walk in the park and whoever said it was told a big fat lie!! I'm just trying to be as real as possible! Don't get me wrong people, I wouldn't trade this life for NOTHING, because I can't wait for the day when I see Jesus face to face, BECAUSE IT WILL BE WORTH IT ALL!!! But He never said that the road would be easy. If anything, He said the opposite, He said there would be persecution and opposition we would face. I believe it is how we handle it that makes the difference in this dark world. See that is why we are called to be a light in this dark world. Sometimes when we are ready to chuck our fruit at somebody instead of lovingly handing it to someone, HAHA, I hope you get my humor in that, what I mean is, we may feel the need to jack slap someone instead of loving them, but God is calling us to love because that is what is gonna reach that person and change their life for His glory! This is why, how we react and live our lives DOES MATTER!!!!
Matthew 3:8-10, Prove by the way you live that you have repented of your sins and turned to God. Don't just say to each other, We're safe, for we are descendants of Abraham. That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones. Even now the ax of God's judgement is poised, ready to sever the roots of the trees, Yes, every tree that does not produce good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire. Matthew 7:15-20, “Beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves. You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions. These are pretty powerful scriptures and speak loudly!! I think our Love walk is a very important part of our fruit production as well!! We need to keep our love in check. 1 Corinthians 13, speaks of Love being patient and kind and not being jealous or boastful or proud and not demanding its own way and many other things! So we definitely need to keep our love in check and I think if we can keep an eye on this, it will help in keeping the other fruits in check! We are surely not going to be perfect in this, I am challenged daily in this, but I know that the Lord is calling me to step it up and to grow in Him and to mature as a godly woman. That is what growing is and being a christian is all about. We have to daily take up the cross and put away our flesh and our desires and selfishness and live like Jesus! That's what dying to self is about! Let's do this thing together and keep encouraging one another and LIVE OUT LOUD FOR JESUS so we can see souls brought into the KINGDOM!! Krista Ephesians 3: 18-19
And may you have the power to understand as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be MADE COMPLETE with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God. We find our real value in Jesus!! We all seek to be loved and cared for and want that true Valentine in our lives!! Let the Lord be your ultimate Valentine! I believe Jesus wants to be the Love of our Life!! I have to tell you that Jesus truly is the LOVE of my Life and I have found myself complete in Him, and by doing that, I have fallen so in love with my husband all over again!! You may read this and laugh at it, but it is true. I can remember the first years of our marriage was rough for me and my husband because I was trying to find my value in that. If we would fight, then all the sudden I would feel unloved and relate it to how others even felt about me. I dealt with low self-esteem and guilt all the time and that played a big part in how I even valued myself. I believe I carried a lot of baggage into my marriage from my childhood though from my parents divorce. That played a huge part in how I valued myself as well. So, not realizing who Jesus seen me as caused me to feel unloved and then it would just cause problems even when there really wasn't a problem. I just was searching for that love and acceptance all the time. And I believe we all want to be accepted and loved and we find ourselves seeking out relationships or seeking other things like drugs and alcohol to help cope with what we may be dealing with. My prayer is you don't turn to those things to try to find your value or acceptance!! Jesus said you were worth it and paid a high price for you and for me. We have to realize who Jesus says that we are and truly how much He does love us. It took me sometime to really realize this, and getting in my Word and daily seeking the face of God! But I found out the more I searched for Him, the more I found Him and the more I found Him the more I loved Him and the more I wanted to be in His presence. The more I was in His presence, the more He was teaching me about who I was in Him and how He loved me. He really is jealous for me, but not just for me, He is for you also! Realize you are COMPLETE in JESUS and HE wants to love on you. Me and my husband have the best relationship now and I love being married to him and our 3 children and our life God has given us together. Have we got our struggles? OH YEAH!!! Do I want to kill him sometimes? OH YEAH!! LOL!! Thank the Lord for His mercies that are new every morning! Haha! I am a very blessed woman and don't ever want to take it for granted. Know who you are and count your blessings today!! Krista Forgiveness- This is a very powerful thing that can either control us or set us free. I heard a statement one time, I believe from Jeanne Mayo that said, "Unforgiveness is like drinking a poison and expecting someone else to die from it"!! That was a very powerful statement to me and spoke volumes to me. I know we all have a story and you may be saying, Krista you have no idea what I have been through and you would be absolutely right, I don't know your story and I don't know what you have been through or who the people are in your life who have hurt you in some way, but what I do know is my story and a Savior who took my story and made it something amazing and is still in the process of writing it!! The amazing thing is, is that the same Savior wants to do the same for you. Jesus talks about forgiveness quite a lot in the Word. He even showed us by example how to forgive when it seemed most impossible! Romans 5:8 says, But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.
That's amazing to me. I know that Jesus is the constant in my life, and I have to continually run to Him to help me in this area of my life. His Word says in Matthew 6:14, "If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins." These are Jesus words here speaking, written in RED. That is powerful right there. The thing of it is, is that when we choose not to forgive, it is eating away at us and causing more harm. The Lord wants us free, completely free. Forgiveness brings that freedom, it doesn't make what that person did to you right or okay, but what it does do is begin to free you of all the bitterness and hurt so you can begin to truly heal! Choose to forgive today! Sometimes this is a process, we have to choose daily to hand this over to the Lord so He can help us in these situations! I would love to hear from you how maybe you have overcome in this situation yourself or maybe how you are still overcoming in this area. I know for me, I have overcome in areas and am still overcoming. Let's walk this out with Jesus together! Krista I absolutely love the old testament! I used to hate reading in the old testament. Really I did, I couldn't focus and felt like it was just not for this day and time until one day the Lord just totally awakened my spirit and I began to fall in love with God's Word completely. I realized that reading God's Word was about more than just some words on a page. It was about getting to know a man, a Savior, a King who loved me so much and paid a price, a High price for someone like me. And when I began to realize that and that God wanted relationship with me, His word became so alive to me and I fell in love with the entire bible.
God's word is a love letter to us. Have you ever been given a love letter by a crush??? Come on, don't lie!! We have all probably been given a love letter at some point or written one at sometime in our lives. The point is, is that God has written a huge love letter to us and He just wants us to open it up and read it. His Word is a lamp unto our feet and light unto our path. It guides us and directs us in the right way, it leads us and helps us in times of trouble. His Word brings peace in times of trouble, and His Word tells us who we are when we seem to be confused about that fact! We have been given the greatest love letter ever written and so many times we won't even pick it up and read it. This is what I mean about going only ankle deep!! I believe God wants us to go deeper with Him! I believe He wants us to jump all the way in the water. Ezekiel 47 is such an amazing chapter. Ezekiel 47:3-5, 9, Measuring as he went, he took me along the stream for 1750 feet and then led me across. The water was up to my ankles. He measured off another 1750 feet and led me across again. This time the water was up to my knees. After another 1750 feet, it was up to my waist. Then he measured another 1750 feet and the river was too deep to walk across. It was deep enough to swim in, but too deep to walk through... vs. 9, There will be swarms of living things wherever the water of this river flows. Fish will abound in the Dead Sea, for its waters will become fresh. Life will flourish wherever this water flows. Don't just stay ankle deep, or knee deep, or waist deep, jump all the way in with God!! When you drink of this water you will thirst no more!! He brings life to every situation. He is life!! This is such an amazing picture of how awesome our God is. If you know anything about the Dead Sea, nothing is even able to live there because of the salt!! That is why it is called the Dead Sea! But scripture is saying here that when this water flows here that the fisherman will stand and be amazed, that trees will have life along the side of the river flowing into the Dead Sea and there will be life and it will flourish. My God is AWESOME!! I don't know what you are facing today, but I know a God who can bring dead things to life! Jump in head first! Don't hold back any longer from giving your all to God. Give Him your whole heart today, He wants all of you not just some of you. Some of you have only been ankle deep in the water, and some knee deep and some waist deep, jump in over your head. Jesus is the only way, there is no better way, He knows what is best for you. He has a plan! His ways are so much better than what you think you have figured out! Give your all to JESUS today!! Choose today, to deepen your relationship with the King of kings and Lord of lords. Get in your Word daily and pray daily. He wants to have a relationship with you. Think about how your relationship would be with your spouse or with your kids if you went all day long and didn't even speak to them all day long or have any communication with them. So many times, this is the way we are with the Savior or the universe who took our sin upon Himself and paid it all for us. Let's dive in head first!! I'm ALL IN!!! GOING DEEPER! Krista Do you know that you have a gift that is inside of you that has been given to you by our Father in Heaven!?!? That's right. God has given you a gift to be used for His glory! You have PURPOSE, you have DESTINY, you have a CALLING! Fear will always try to drown out our faith, but God is bigger than anything the enemy tries to throw at us. We have to get our focus on the things of the Lord. On Kingdom things. When those voices that creep in saying you could never do that, or say that, or you will never be good enough for that, we have to remember who our Abba Father says we are. Romans 8:15-17 So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God's spirit when He adopted you as His own children. Now we call Him Abba Father. For His Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God's children. And since we are His children, we are His heirs. Do we really get that scripture? Wow, it says that our spirit was joined with His and we have God's spirit inside of us and he is our Daddy, and we are his heirs!!!!!! Powerful!!! That means we have an inheritance to Kingdom things! Oh boy!! See the enemy likes to tell us we are nothing and don't belong anywhere and that's where the fear creeps in and keeps us from fulfilling the things that God has called us to. But we have power, love and self-discipline, according to 2 Timothy and we don't have to be afraid. We just have to begin to tap into our inheritance that has been given to us and begin speaking with the authority that we have been given. You were created for a reason. Jesus loves you with an everlasting love. He didn't just come to earth and die for nothing, it was for you and me. God seen that we were worth something and He gave up His own Son for our worth. How amazing is that!? God is so good. Realize who you are and begin to fan the flame inside of you and stir up that gifting you have been given and start walking out your calling for JESUS!! We got KINGDOM things to do!! He is coming back!! Don't you want to be fulfilling the things for His glory!? Don't believe all the lies from the enemy! You belong to your DAD, God in Heaven!!
Krista This has got to be one of the most beautiful pictures of worship that I can think of in the bible! I love this story! This story is in every one of the gospels and when I say that I mean, the book of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each gives a little more detail about the story. This woman was considered to be an immoral woman, known as a prostitute, looked down upon and considered a sinner! The amazing thing though is that, she, aside from everyone else around really got a true picture of who Jesus was and desired to worship Him and humble herself before Him because she knew what He was capable of. He was the one who could remove her scars, who could wipe her sin away and could look past her past and see something more in her. She got enough courage to enter a house full of men, a Pharisee's house at that and carry herself, even through all the accusations and the harsh things that were said she kept on with her eyes on Jesus, to get "At His Feet", to pour her love, her praise back on Him! What a beautiful picture!! Jesus is so worthy of our praise and our worship and deserves so much more than we can even give. I can't begin to have enough words to thank Him for what He saved me from.
I'll never forget the day Jesus turned my life around! I was always raised in church, come from a whole family line of preachers and teachers of the bible and was filled with scripture and grew up singing in church. I knew how to play the church game real well. I have to admit though, my life never really reflected nothing of Jesus, I could get up and sing and smile and talk to everyone and act like I had it all together but my life at school and around my friends was something completely different. My parents went through a divorce when I was 9 and it hit me very hard and I just went a little crazy after that. I kept a lot of things to myself and didn't share a whole lot and by the time I hit high school, my actions were pretty wild. My way of dealing with things were to try and drown them, and I just wanted to feel numb. Needless to say, my answer to my problems was to drink them away or smoke them away. It came time for college and I couldn't wait to just get away and that about ruined me. Thankfully, I chose to come home after a semester away, things still weren't right, but I remember one morning I had woke up from a night of craziness and my boyfriend, fiance at the time, who is my husband now, had had it with me. I was just in this place of feeling at the lowest that I could possibly feel and I knew that God had been dealing with me. Something in me broke that morning, I'll never forget it! It was March 17, 1997, I called my mom crying my eyes out and she came to where I was with my sister and right there in my living room, I prayed and turned my life around!! That was my moment of running to the Savior, I was dirty and filthy and a sinner and in a place just like this woman who was immoral, but I knew there was someone with His arms stretched out wide who paid a price for me. That's why I can't help but to give Him all of my worship and all of my praise. He saved me and cleaned me up and I just want to set at His feet and thank Him for His love and His mercy. This woman in the story of the gospels got it, and I got it that morning, on March 17, back 18 years ago. I don't ever want to forget what He did for me!! He is so worthy of all the honor! I wouldn't trade knowing Jesus for anything. He is my EVERYTHING!! Going to church is not what saves you, having a family full of preachers is not what saves you! You must have a relationship with Jesus, believe on the name of Jesus, that He is the Son of God and He died for your sins and raised on the third day and now sits at the right hand of the Father and makes intercession for you and for me! Romans 10:9-10 Jesus is worth it all!! Krista
My prayer this week has been that God has spoken to your heart directly about guarding your heart! The Lord showed me this scripture a few years ago and I felt the importance of it then. I have this place marked in my bible and refer to it often. I feel like this is such an important part of our christian walk. We must choose to fill ourselves with more of Jesus everyday, this is what helps us to grow and guard against the enemy. The bible says in John 10:10 that the thief's purpose is to steal, kill and destroy, so we must guard against the enemy and the ways we do that is by feeding ourselves on the Word of God and by things like accepting the 30 day challenge of listening to christian music! I love the rest of the verse in John 10:10, if you continue to read it, and by the way it is written in red, but it says that Jesus purpose is to give us a rich and satisfying life. **God loves us so much, thats why this is so important that He wants us to guard our hearts, cause He wants the best for His children! That is a true Father! **Self-Check- Pay attention to the things we are saying and take inventory to the things that are entering our hearts!! Luke 6:45, What you say flows from what is in your heart. Matthew 12:34, For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. Heart- central most vital part of your body God takes heart pretty seriously! In 1 Samuel 16:7, it says, "People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." God was telling Samuel to go and anoint David as king, but Samuel kept looking at the outward appearance and kept thinking he was to anoint one of the brothers of David, because David was small in stature, but God seen his heart. The bible says that David was a man after Gods own heart! This is my desire to be a woman after Gods heart and to crave more of Him and less of the world!! I challenge you to seek Him more, read His word daily and hunger and thirst after Him! He is worth it all!--Krista pur
If you prayed Romans 10:9-10, first of all PRAISE THE LORD!! Welcome to the family of the Lord. Please message me, I would love to just continue to keep you in prayer and encourage you. We are now family, you are my brother or sister in Christ. Tell somebody what just happened in your life. Please find a church that teaches the Word of God and get in fellowship with the believers! God bless you and Merry Christmas!!
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Krista Lesher"Hangin' with Krista" Archives
August 2018
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