Bold, Brave, & Daring

Laying a solid foundation for your marriage is key for longevity. We build our marriage day by day, month by month, year by year. We do that by what we say, how we say it, and loving our spouse because we just love them. Period. Not expecting them to be perfect or loving them because of what they do for us or thinking they need to be perfect. Expectations like those kill a marriage. What builds and sustains a marriage is choosing to love the other person for who they are and loving them because God loves them unconditionally. Thank you so much for listening! I pray this helps your marriage, just like it has mine.

When you feel God pulling you to do the unexpected, and even when it doesn't work out, we must still obey. When God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac that he had waited years for, he obeyed. When God told David he'd be king, but he ran for his life in the wilderness for 20 years before ever being crowned, he obeyed. When Jesus came down to Earth to do the hardest, most heartbreaking thing a person could ever do and gave up his life for us to live forever with Him, he obeyed. We're called to obey God, sometimes without our questions asked. And most of the time, not knowing the outcome. It's all worth it when we know Who holds our future.

The last letter of The Screwtape Letters is about the patient dying and making it to heaven. When he gets to heaven, he realizes all of the deceiving Wormwood tempted him with his whole life. He also realizes that God was there all along. He realizes he never should have doubted God's existence and how incredible heaven is. All of the pieces of his life come together, and everything makes sense. I pray that you know this peace will come to you when you get to heaven. God will show us why everything happened the way it did, and the puzzle will be complete. In the meantime, we have to stay true to God. Living on earth is only temporary. Our home is heaven, and when we get there it's going to be an incredible new beginning.

Fatigue can either make us gentle and kind, or angered and impatient. We can be tempted and deceived when we’re fatigued as well. We have to keep our guard up when we’re tired, and still show love to the people around us. We also need to know what around us is real and what’s false. Hatred and pain are real emotions, but love covers all. God is real, our relationship with Him is real, and they need to be more real to us than the pain and suffering we’ve seen and experienced in our lifetime. That’s what Letter 30 is all about!

Why does God allow dangerous circumstances to happen? God allows us to live in a dangerous world so that we don't become numb to good and evil. We keep our values and stand up for what's right when danger arises. War, famine, earthly disasters, covid, they all make us rise up and become brave! We reach deep inside ourselves and become courageous again. We're made to be courageous. That's what Letter 29 is all about. 

Letter 28 is all about Wormwood needing to protect his patient from dying so that he can keep tempting him and trying to deceive him. The longer he lives, the harder it is for him to resist temptation. Getting older doesn’t mean resisting gets easier, but we can have perseverance. We can keep our relationship with God and resist the devil. God put it inside of us to persevere! Everyday that we live is another day we can get closer to our Creator. How can you get closer to Him today?

Do you ever feel like your prayers don’t matter? That God doesn’t answer them, or if He does answer them you feel like it would have happened anyways because of circumstances falling into place? This letter addresses our concerns on if our prayers matter and how they affect our lives. God is always listening to our prayers. This letter also talks about how reading old books, like The Screwtape Letters, have the answers we are looking for. The demons try to cut off generations from each other. But we need each other! There’s nothing new under the sun, and your answers are out there. You can find them in a book, or ask someone older than you. Wisdom wants to be found. Seek her. 

This letter is about how to get men and women irritated at each other. Being unselfish is part of who God asks us to be. The way men and women view being unselfish is totally opposite of each other. And then when we serve each other continuously, everyday, for years, we can start to get self-righteous and get the wrong motive for serving one another. We can enjoy serving one another without ill feelings by remembering our spouse is a gift. It takes a conscious everyday effort to be grateful for our spouse and serve them with the right motive. How's your heart today? Are you serving your spouse with the right motive?

Letter 25 is about change! Change and permanence are natural parts of life. God created us as humans to love change and permanence, both. It creates a rhythm in our lives that we all have the gift of enjoying. When the seasons change, when holidays and events come every year, these are all part of the rhythm that we get to enjoy. How can you embrace change and permanence today?

Spiritual Pride: to believe that you’re better than someone else because of your beliefs; believing that because your beliefs are “right” and that you’re better than nonbelievers. What a trap we can fall into thinking that we know better than nonbelievers and therefore superior. We’re all created the same, all loved the same amount by the same God. No one is worth more than the next person. Loving our neighbors no matter their beliefs is really hard. But we can do it. We’re made to love! When the Holy Spirit is inside of us, we can love like He does. 

Distorting our view of Jesus and who He is, that's what this letter is all about. The demons try to make Jesus just a historical figure. But He is God! He's our Savior! And focusing on the resurrection and redemption puts our view of Jesus in the right perspective. Remembering what He did for us on the cross and rising from the dead keeps us focusing on what’s most important and being able to share our redemptive story with everyone! Share with people your story of how you met Jesus. Not just facts and stories about him, but what he's done to give us life.

What causes chaos in your life? What is the noise that’s so loud that it disrupts your peace? We are in charge of how much peace we have in our life. Peace is a gift from the Holy Spirit that we have in us, but the world can get so loud through tv and our phones that they disrupt our peace. This letter shares how to keep your peace. Showing love and affection to everyone you come in contact with is also a key to showing people Jesus everyday. The demons don't know love, but we do. It's our gift to share with the world God's love through how we walk, talk, and live.

Letter 21 is about time and us believing that we own our time. Time is a gift from God; we actually don’t own anything. Wormwood and Screwtape share in this letter about getting the human to believe “My time is my own," while heaven and hell laugh at us for believing this assumption. We all have the same 24 hours a day given to us by God, so how can we serve him with our time? In the words of Jesus, our thought process needs to move toward “Not my will but Yours be done,” every chance we get. See your life as a gift today.

Do you believe the lie that you don’t have the “in” look? That you don’t look the way the world is telling you that you should look? This letter expels that lie by exposing how the demons change “what’s in” in each era through the fashionistas, the celebrities, and set the standard to impossible so that no human can achieve it! We have to protect our minds and get these false images out of our head. God made you YOU! You’re not supposed to look like anyone other than you. There’s never been anyone during any time in history that looks like you. It’s time to be proud of that! It’s time to be grateful that our Creator made you who you are.

Why do you believe God made us? Why did He create our world, us humans, the animals, all of creation? It's because of love. Because He loves us and wants us to love Him back. The devil and the demons don't understand love. So they try to distort love and warp it into something it's not. They take the true design of love and over romanticize it, make it a reward for people to earn, make people become bitter and cynical about love. It leads to tragedy when love is seen as the definition above instead of how God made it to be. God made love; He is love. His version of love is unconditional and so incredible that there aren't human words that could describe the magnitude of it. You are loved today and always have been by God. Ask Him to show you His love today. It's all around you if you look for it. 

Letter 18 is my favorite so far! This letter is all about marriage and how the demons have deceived us into thinking that the only grounds for getting married is when you’re in the state of “being in love”.  And that this state of "being in love" needs to be permanent, otherwise you don't need to be married anymore. That is not the only reason to get married contrary to this distortion that the devil has made so prevalent. God designed marriage to make us holy, to help us become mature believers, to be tenderly devoted to each other, to love one another through all things, and to fulfill our sexual desires in a covenant relationship. We're breaking down lie after lie in each letter that we read through. I hope this helps you and you are being freed from these lies that so easily trip us up! We are made to be free. We are free!

Food can be such a topic that speaks to you nowadays. It’s everywhere and we can learn anything we want to about what’s healthy and what’s not and what to eat. But if we’re making our bodies and our bellies more important than God, then we are being deceived into a lie. A lie that food consumes us instead of us controlling our minds and urges that we need something when we’ll be just fine without it. The only One we should be consumed with is God.

Are you showing up to church being a critic or a student? Are you excited to learn or judging everything from the clothes to the lights to the music? We are called as believers to go to church, be the church, united as one! That’s what Letter 16 is all about. Church is for everyone and we are called to be accepting, not criticizing or categorizing one another. Our pastor's messages should be helping us grow, and challenging us as we grow with God. Get what you need but be a student, not a critic.

Are you enjoying the present? Right now. Are you happy, filled with knowledge and grace, and living peacefully? All of these things are gifts from God when we enjoy the moments that we have each day. Worrying about our futures won’t add a single thing to our life. It’s a trap that this letter talks about the demons using to get humans focused on their future with fear. We don’t need to fear the future. God’s already taken care of us in our future, just like He has in our past. So how can you live in the present right now? Enjoy it. Each moment is a gift. 

God created us to love ourselves and see ourselves the way He sees us. Humility is what this letter is all about, but humility has been distorted by the demons. Having a low self-image is not humility because our Creator made us in His image. So believing we are beautiful, handsome, smart, and lovable are all part of how God wants us to live! As long as believe it and don't dwell on our amazingness but see it in God and others, we can live humbly. How can you see the beauty or talent in someone else today? Call it out in them. Share with them that our Creator made them exactly how He wanted them to be.