for me~!

reading through 'He loves me' [see post below to download a free pdf of the 1st edition:] - these are praise & prayer points for me as i journey on in The Great Adventure of Discovering New Horizons of God's Amazing Grace!
.. as i was reading i went downstairs to see Isabelle [my niece, we ike to call her Bell-Bell] sleeping on my mother's shoulder. what a beautiful picture of what i see Father trying to say to me through this book -- "my beautiful, precious child, REST in Me. REST in my love for you. REST in all I am - and I am for you! REST in all i've done to show you this beyond any shadow of a doubt!"

God doesn’t need us to serve Him as a means to attain His love or affection. He wants us serving Him out of the love and affection He already holds in His heart for us. If you have never tasted that reality, you cannot imagine the freedom that is yours.
-- He Loves Me! p66

"Once God is known as Father all methods to attain to security, prosperity and assurance in the world are exposed as useless enslavement. If one knows God as Father then there is security about everything."
David Boan and John Yates in an unpublished manuscript
:D PRAISE! :D
:D He can take me by the hand and teach me just how much i am loved so that i no longer have to pursue my own way and protect myself in ways that only seem to backfire, hurting me and others around me!
:D every failure He's let me have is just a doorway to learn to trust Him who is MCH BIGGER than ALL MY FAILURES!!

:D Father is able to work in me and through me despite what i lack!
:D Father enjoys taking fearful slaves to sin and teaching them how to live as beloved sons and daughters.
:D He knows how to peel off layers of selfishness and shame to shape his image in us!

* pray*
* i'd let go of my fears and let His love capture my heart as my sole motivation for following after Him.
* it'd truly sink in that there is nothing i can do to make him love me any more today, and nothing i can do that will make him love me any less. He just loves me!
* He'd teach me how true these realities are so i can live in freedom!
* i'd Realize the only way to grow in trust is to grow in the knowledge of His love.
* rearrange my thinking and help me understand His love for me goes far beyond any gift i can bring Him!
* teach me how to live every day and through every circumstance trusting that He loves me!
* He'd teach me how to grow in trust and how to fix your hope on Him in a way that runs deeper than my circumstances or feelings.


*-*-*-*-*- He'd continue to show me:

* who He really is.
* how i live less-loved.
* the depth of his love to me and in doing so teach me how to trust Him more!
* How i'm trying to earn His favor :
* how much He takes delight in me as a loving Father, to see Him exalting and dancing with joy over me! (Zephaniah 43:17)
* where wedges of mistrust have been inserted between Him and i, Where i find myself doubting His love for me or His intentions towards me.
* how to embrace a relationship with Him His way and not my own way.
* how appeasement-based thinking distorts myrelationship with Him and s o free me from it so i can participate in what He wants to do in me!


"Do you see God’s wrath directed at sin, or directed at you? It is one thing to say God loves the sinner and hates the sin, but sometimes we feel that God is out to get us as well. Wherever you see that in your thinking, ask God to help you change your mind and see things the way he does. He wants you to know that everything he has done in your life is to bring you into the fullness of his love. Where you don’t understand that, ask him to show you."
-- at this point i realised i have had a MEGA identity crisis for most of my "christian" life where i thought sin & i were one and the same :( how sad when He plainly says "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have disappeared, and-look!-all things have become new!" -- 2 Cor 5:17

Spend a few moments thinking where you are still trying to earn points with a God who's no longer keeping score. do you keep scrore of your failures? Minutes in prayer? Number of converts? If you find yourself doing those things, ask God to help you receive what he has already given you. Stop doing anything that seeks to earn his love and learn to do what you do simply because you already have his love. This is quite a change of mind that only God’s Spirit can produce.
* ask God to draw you closer to him so that your love for him will produce a desire to be like him. Also, look for ways that you put righteousness before relationship, thinking that your performance makes you more acceptable to God. Ask him to teach you what it means to trust him in the pressing details of your life right now.
*
Trusting the Father’s love for you simply means that every day, in every circumstance you can rest assured God knows who you are, cares more deeply about you than you do yourself and is capable of working out his glory in you.
only by facing my own inadequacies and the foolishness of my own desires can I really experience the glory of God’s kingdom. We don’t come easily to those moments, but when we finally give up trying to save ourselves, that’s where we taste of his immeasurable glory.
p159

Where are you being stretched to the end of your rope? Where is God exposing the weaknesses of your own strength and the foolishness of your best wisdom? Give up the idea that your failures have brought you to this moment - for it is an incredible work of God calling you to trust him more than you have in the past. Ask God to teach you how to give up self-sufficiency and learn to trust him. Then do whatever it is that trusting God’s love would lead you to do and learn to ignore the ravings of your anxieties and fears.

Ask God how shame-based behaviors are manifesting themselves in your relationship with him. Look for him to identify where boasting, blaming, gossip, self-pity, and worrying about what others think are causing you to live to shame instead of living to him. Also ask him to reveal to you all the places where covering up for shame hurts your relationships with others. Ask God to draw you close enough to him so that you will no longer need to live in bondage to shame.