All of Your Promises

Close your eyes. Dream. Picture your life the way you want it to be now. Picture the way you want it to be in five years, 10 years. Just dream about it.


Now open your ears. Hear this. "I am able to do 'superabundantly, far over and above all that we dare ask or think, infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams'." This is a promise -  a promise from God, a promise that will be kept. No matter what.


There's just one problem (from our point of view anyway). He doesn't always keep those promises in the time we would like Him to keep them. That's where trust comes in. That's where faith comes in. That's where patience comes in.

Think about this. A friend promises to bring you lunch, but you don't think he or she will follow through. Instead of waiting for their promise, you run to McDonald's to grab a quick burger. An hour later, your friend shows up with steak and a baked potato. You didn't trust him or her. Now you're too full to eat the food he or she brought you, and it's because you settled for a cheap substitute instead of waiting.

It seems crazy right? Why wouldn't you trust a friend? After all, he or she has proven trustworthy enough to earn your friendship.

We do this with God though. He promises to give us better than we can imagine. Yet we settle. We see how happy we think our plans will make us. We see how we can be happy right now. We don't trust that God has something better. If we can be happy, why wouldn't He want us to have it? Even if we do believe he has better, we don't have the patience to wait for it.

So we settle. We settle with what we have now, even if it's not God's best. We pursue things that may not be God's perfect will for our lives, and though they may be good, we're still settling for less than we could have if we wait.

Instead of settling, all we need to do is have faith. We need to have a faith that is complemented with patience. God does fulfill His promises. And He does it in His own timing, timing that will make those plans even better.

Nothing compares to His promises. We need to grasp that. When we grasp that, we'll have patience. We'll trust Him. And He will bring those promises into our lives.

Close your eyes. Dream. Picture your life the way you want it to be now. Picture the way you want it to be in five years, 10 years.

Now know this. It will be far better than what you just imagined. All you have to do is trust God's promises and have the patience to wait for them to come to pass.

Living Love

A small child stands in front of his mom. She looks down at him as he stretches his arms as wide as he can. "I love you THIS much," he says. She smiles because she knows he's telling the truth.

We all did that when we were little. We tried to show our moms and dads, brothers and sisters how much we loved them. And well, the only way we knew to do that was to stretch our arms out wide and say, "THIS much" with a giant grin on our faces.

How many of us still do that? How many of us still try to show those around us how much we really love them? I know I don't, at least not as often as I could. Why don't we?

For me personally, there are several reasons. First of all, it's hard. Showing love is showing emotion, and that's never easy to do. It's not always easy to see how love is received, and not knowing how it's received makes it hard to give. Secondly, I don't always want to. I'd rather receive love than give it. I'd rather sit back and take it easy. Third, sometimes, it just doesn't seem like people deserve it.

However, God doesn't care about all those excuses. (Yes, I called them excuses, because that's what they are. They're not reasons.) It was hard for Him to show us His love; He had to die. He didn't want to die. We didn't deserve for Him to die for us. He just did it. So we should too.

Here's a few lessons we can learn about love that might help.

1. We have to make a decision to love someone else. If we don't make the decision to love them, we don't have anything to show.
2. Love is active. People can't see words. People can see actions. If our actions don't match our words we're not showing anybody anything. Our actions will show people what we mean when we say, "I love you THIS much!"
3. Love is deliberate. This combines the first two points. We can't be deliberate about something if you haven't made a decision on what to be deliberate about, and if we're deliberate about something, we do it on purpose. Deliberate love makes a conscious effort to put love into action. It thinks about what it is doing. If an action doesn't match the decision to love another, deliberate love will change what it is doing.
4. Love is living. Anything living should be growing. The more effort you put into loving someone else, the more you're going to love them. You're going to benefit from watching them receive your love, and it's going to help you show them more love.

Living love takes time and practice. We can't expect to get it right as soon as we start trying. But we can start trying. We can make a decision to love those around us unconditionally, deliberately and actively. No matter how hard it is.

I want to be like that little child, always letting people see how much I love them. I may not stand up, looking up into their eyes to see their reaction and stretch my arms as far as I can. I may not always see their reaction right away like the child sees his mother smile and scoop him up into her arms in a giant hug.

But I want my actions to say, "I love you THIS much."