Let Us Look to God

Here is a new posting from Kylee

Where do you receive your sense of self-worth? Is your self-worth, your value, built on your ability to please others or on the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ? So often we can find ourselves looking for our significance in our accomplishments, relationships, or our work instead of in God alone. Looking into the Bible we find so much about who we are according to God and we can begin to truly see ourselves as God sees us. As believers in Christ we read that we are God's children (1 John 3:1), Christ's friend (John 15:14-15), part of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27), chosen by God (Eph.1:4), forgiven and justified by God (Rom. 5:1), and totally accepted by God (Rom. 15:7) just to name a few. How great is God's love for us that He loved us while we were still sinners! He created us in His image and His love for us is indisputable. Our value, our true identity, is found in Him. No relationship or occupation or hobby or amount of wealth or type of achievement or ministry involvement can satisfy us or determine our real self-worth. It is Christ alone.

This past Wednesday evening I started to lead the house mothers in their cell group at Hawane through an excellent Christian book called The Search For Significance by Robert McGee. I'm so excited about what God is going to teach us during the next several weeks as we look into God's Word to study His answers- justification, reconciliation, propitiation, and regeneration- to the false beliefs we often hold about ourselves. Some lies from the enemy we believe are:

- I must meet certain standards in order to feel good about myself.
- I must be approved (accepted) by certain others to feel good about myself.
- Those who fail are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished.
- I am what I am. I cannot change. I am hopeless.

May we all saturate ourselves with God's truth so we might accept and live according to who we truly are in Him. Then we can serve Him with confidence and lead others in living the abundant life Christ came to give us (John 10:10).

The mothers and aunts here pour themselves out to love the children in their homes. I am learning much about a real life of faith and sacrifice by interacting with them. A couple weeks ago, Pastor Kevin directed them to submit suggestions of topics for me to teach them about as he wanted us to implement a training session on Monday mornings after the staff's regular meeting. Although many different ideas came forth from the group, the #1 desired topic to learn about was spiritual growth. I just smiled as I realized the most important thing to them is growing in the Lord.

May we allow their desire to be a challenge to us and may we lay aside whatever needs to be in order to first seek to know God so we can grow in Him. " 'You are my witnesses,' declares the LORD, 'and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.'" (Isa. 43:10).