Annie

I am thankful for my daughter Annie, she's the one in the green apron.  Annie put in two sixteen hour days just so we could gather around her table for Thanksgiving dinner.  The first four hours of each day were spent working at her Starbucks job, the busiest Starbucks in Gig Harbor, and the last twelve hours of each day were spent at home getting ready for her Thanksgiving company.  Ruhiyyih (Annie's sister-in-law, the one on the right) and Matt, the very happy and adorable newlyweds, came over the mountains from the Tri-Cities to join us.  My son-in-law's parents were there as well as his two brothers.  Daniel was the entertainment.  He is getting so big.  He's grabbing for things now and he has found his voice.  He loves to squeal, loudly.  I thought you'd enjoy the album  of pictures I took from our fun day.  (Daniel fills up the second half.  Sorry, it's a gramma/photographer thing.) Annie, thanks for all your hard work.  It was a wonderful day!      

THANKSGIVING WISH

Have a blessed Thanksgiving as you gather at your table with family and friends -  rejoicing in the goodness, lovingkindness, and faithfulness of the Lord.

Psalm 100:4,5  "Enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise.  Give thanks to Him; bless His name.  For the LORD is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting, and His faithfulness to all generations."

For You Gals - Last One

This will be my last "For You Gals" post until we meet again in January.  A quick reminder gals - We were created for God's pleasure, not our own.  (Now if we could just remember that, 100% of the time, right?!) True happiness and abundant life comes from setting our minds, our eyes, our hopes, and our desires on Christ...and keeping them there!  Our thought-life truly is a spiritual discipline for from our thoughts flow our actions and attitudes.  When we fall into the mindset that life is about our needs, we have fallen back into worldly thinking.  The Holy Spirit makes us new people on the inside by the Word.  He transforms us into thinkers for God's pleasure when we choose to saturate our minds with the Word.  He transforms us into doers for God's pleasure when we choose to act on His Word.

When we let bitterness and resentment simmer in our thoughts because of the hurts of others against us, are we happy?  We are miserable, aren't we?  If we choose to bless a hurt against us with kindness, we are living for God's pleasure...and we can have joy in the midst of difficult circumstances.

The Lord has created us so that we experience the highest pleasure and the greatest joy when we live for His pleasure, even under the severest of circumstances, what an amazing, wonderful Lord!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We've so much to be thankful for, don't we?!

For You Gals - 5

I want to talk to you gals who may be in a difficult marriage.  By a difficult marriage I mean one in which your spouse lives only to please himself.  We gals at DBC chuckled when we were watching the Piper sermon in which John called the shortcomings, annoyances, and sins in our marriages "cow-pies."  When we first married, our expectations were always green pastures weren’t they, with very few cow-pies?  Your Prince Charming would always remain charming and you would always be his lovely princess. 

Then reality sets in and our dreams come to a screeching halt.

We are all guilty of cow-pies because we are all sinful and flawed.  We are all guilty of being that self-absorbed spouse, of wanting things our way, with no room for the consideration of the other person.  It may not have lasted long depending on our sensitivity to the Holy Spirit’s convicting work and our choosing to repent, to confess our sin to the Lord and seek the forgiveness of our spouse.  Or, we may have indulged in this sin for hours, or perhaps even days before choosing to do that which pleases the Lord.  What do we do when a husband has become self-absorbed and has little or no interest in pleasing the Lord?  Perhaps his affirmations and actions of love to you have all but dried up and your affirmations and actions of love to him  go unrecognized. 

You run to the One whose affirmations and actions of love to you spring from a well that never ceases.  This was the choice that Jeremiah made when he struggled with hopelessness and despair.

“This I recall to mind, therefore I have hope.  The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I have hope in Him.  The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him.”  (Lamentations 3:21-25)

Our natural, fleshly tendency towards an unloving spouse would be to lash out in anger but remember, there is no room in marriage for wrath.  When we are hurt by the sinfulness of our spouse the reaction that pleases the Lord is to bless our husbands by choosing to show goodness and kindness to them, not choosing to get even by throwing an insult back, or to sulk, or to pout, or to yell, or to become embittered, or to withhold our love, or to be fearful, or to go to someone and complain and gossip about our husbands.  (I Peter 3:9)  We are commanded to bear with patience the disturbances created by others.  (Phil. 4:5)  We are commanded not to be overcome by evil but to overcome evil with good.  (Romans 12:21)  Write your husband a note.  Fix him his favorite meal.  Fill his car up with gas.  Bless an insult with kindness.  Treat an unkindness with goodness.  What we are commanded to do the Lord faithfully supplies the strength.  We may feel like we can’t endure under such circumstances, but God says we can, even if our husband never changes.  Our strength comes from the knowledge that God’s faithfulness is great.  His compassion's are fresh, every morning! 

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface in a blog post regarding everything that needs to be addressed on this topic of living in a difficult marriage.  What I am going to do is point you to a book that every Christian wife should have on her bookshelf.  “The Excellent Wife” by Martha Peace.  Martha has you look at yourself through the lens of scripture and helps you identify and begin to correct the areas in which you are not pleasing the Lord in your marriage.  Martha also gives biblical counsel on how to deal with the mistreatment of a sinful husband.  It is easy to fall into the sin of harboring bitterness, a result of being overcome by evil.  We are instructed to put away bitterness and to replace the bitter thoughts with righteous thoughts and kind acts.  (Ephesians 4:31,32.)  Yes, it takes work, but as you choose to overcome evil with good you will experience God's grace to overcome the bitterness, anger, or resentment that may have taken root. 

Within the body of Christ also are women to whom you can go that will come alongside and give you biblical counsel and encouragement.  Go to those who will get you into the Word. 

The Lord will keep in perfect peace those whose minds remain on Him.  (Isaiah 26:3)  He is our strength and the never-ending source of our graciousness in the midst of all disturbances.   God's divine power has granted us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence.  (2 Peter 1:3)   Be in His love letter, it's our power source for righteous and godly living!

For You Gals - 4

If this is your first visit to Overcomer and you are a DBC gal, I'm glad you are here!  If you are a different gal, I'm glad you are here too!  My thoughts from our Titus 2 mentoring study begin a few posts ago.  Just scroll down and you will find the first one with the title..."For You Gals."

In my first post I talked of how we should not treat our husbands based on whether or not they deserve it.  That is the heart of what grace is - treating people better than they deserve.  Our Heavenly Father treated us better than we deserved...way better!  We deserved His wrath.  With marriage being a picture of the relationship Christ has with His church and since that relationship is based on grace, our marriages are to be based on grace.   If you are a believer, Christ bore the wrath that was aimed at you for your sinfulness.  If your husband is a believer, Christ bore the wrath for all of his sins.  There is no room for wrath towards our spouse in marriage, towards anyone for that matter, because the Lord says that is His area - Romans 12:19.  All that is left for us is forgiveness and forbearance, exactly what the Father's grace has provided for us.  The Lord instructs us that we are not to take revenge but we are to overcome evil with good - Romans 12:21.  I'm going to get into the practical aspects of just what that looks like in my next post.  As we've been forgiven by the Lord, we must also forgive our spouses.  As the Lord bears with us, we should bear with our spouses.  Isn't this a great quote by John Piper?  "The distance between what Christ expects of you and what you achieve is infinitely greater than the distance between what you expect of your spouse and what he achieves."  In other words, the chasm between our performance and what Christ expects of us is far, FAR greater than what we expect from our husbands and their performance.  We can even put it this way...Christ always forgives more and endures more than we do.  Way more.  Grace has been lavished upon us, let's bend it toward our husbands!

The Year in Review at DBC

Every year, on the Sunday evening before Thanksgiving, we gather and turn back the gracious blessings of the Lord in praise to Him.  It's always a blessed time.  We also watch a slide show from images over the past year.  It is my great joy and privilege to capture a lot of what happens at Discovery.  Click here to view an album of the year in review at Discovery Baptist.  It's always fun to view pictures with music.  Before you view the album, open another window and click here for some praise music to go along with the slideshow.

It's been a wonderful, blessed year, hasn't it? 

God of all, we lift Your name on high in all the earth!

For You Gals - 3

We were given a challenge the other night at our Titus 2 Bible Study.  When we are asked by our husbands to do something - respond immediately with the word, "Sure." 

Boy am I certainly guilty of a much lesser response at times, and so thankful for the Lord's forgiveness!

When the Lord asks His bride to do something what type of a response pleases Him, what does He expect?

"Yes Lord, with all of my heart!"

You say, "Now wait a minute, Christ is perfect and therefore what He asks (actually commands) us to do is always for our benefit.  My husband is not perfect!"

(The first thing we need to remember is, neither are we.)

We can put our marriage on display as a picture of the covenant keeping relationship between Christ and the church by joyfully doing what our husbands ask.  Is there a time when we should not say, "Sure?"  Of course, it is when our husbands ask us to do something that is contrary to the will of God.  Honestly answer this question...how many times has your husband asked you to do something that was sinful?  I can't think of one time in the nearly thirty years I've been married to my sweet husband that he has ever asked me to do something that would not please the Lord.  Are you worried about your husband taking advantage of you?  Another question for you...how likely is that to happen when he sees your gracious response to his requests each and every time you are given the opportunity to be his help meet?

Make it a habit to always respond with "sure" and then if you need to for some reason, you can make a gracious appeal.  Better yet, make it a habit to ask your husband if there is something you can do for him!