Don't forget, I've defeated you before

      There is always that one thing that each of us feel like we can never get rid of. And as soon as I said that, that one thing popped into your mind. It's the battle that we feel like we won and then it comes back and we're like "WHAT THE HECK! I thought I beat you!". Recently, my one thing has tried to ease it's way back into my life and unfortunately I succumbed to it. The Holy Spirit brought it to my attention and led me to get help and I did, but a battle is never won without a fight. Fighting is hard, it's exhausting, it's so much work! But we can't beat our struggles if we just let them beat us. We have to fight back. There was a point where I was feeling completely powerless and I shared with a friend and her and two others sat down and prayed with me. We asked the Holy Spirit to speak but all I could hear in my mind was "You will not win this". They asked me what I was hearing and I told them. My one friend said, ok were gonna acknowledge the enemy and say yeah I may not beat you today and I may not even beat you tomorrow, but just know I will keep fighting until I take you down. Battles are rarely fought in one day. Especially when you have allowed it to become a part of you, but if you keep fighting you WILL win!

Another thing that I was really struggling with was the thought that I had thought I beat this thing for good. I never wanted to deal with it again. But here is truth. The enemy knows what pushes your buttons and he knows what's gotten to you before, so why wouldn't he throw the same struggle back in your face! Why wouldn't he come back for revenge! But our response cannot be defeat that it came back, that gives him even more ammo to use against us! We have to learn to see the attack when it comes and fight it straight away. Don't allow the fact that it's back to make you shrink back, use it to fuel your fight even more!
I was watching Wizards of Waverly Place today (no surprise there! haha!) and there was a quote that Alex said that just really hit this concept home for me. She had fought and defeated this evil guy before and surprise! He returned for revenge (just like the enemy). She looked at him in the face and says to him "Don't forget I've defeated you before". Yes! That is the stance we have to take. Instead of allowing self-pity to destroy us, we have to remember the battles we have already won! It's for that reason that in the Bible when Israel won a battle, God had them build monuments so that they would remember the battles they won. You are a winner! You know how to fight! A problem cant come back unless you have already defeated it before. We have to fight like winners! It makes me think of when God spoke that simple phrase to me "Self pity destroys hope"! It's so true. If you act defeated, you will be defeated. Remember your wins, and stare the enemy in the face and say "Don't forget, I've defeated you before".....

Beauty & the Beast in 3D = Revelation for Sarah

      Go figure that I go to watch Beauty and the Beast in 3D tonight and I come back gaining more revelation on the topic that I will never cease to pursue with all my heart. It's inevitable for you to watch a princess movie without seeing it as a love story. I mean, it's every girls dream! A prince comes and sweeps you off your feet, la di da di da. But this is not that kind of love story. There was a whole lot of selflessness that took place in this movie. It wasn't a "love at first sight" emotion that drew Belle and the Beast together. It was pure selfless love.

   Lets recap on the movie a bit. So beginning of the movie it's the prince's selfishness that gets him into his little enchanted predicament. Then you add self pity on top of selfishness, this guy really is a beast! Poor enchanted objects, they gotta put up with this guy. Then here Belle comes along already doing a selfless act to save her father. Then we have selfless act #2 where she takes the place of her father so that he can live. (Who does that sound like? *cough* JESUS *cough*). Then after all this, the Beast acts out of his selfishness and tries to force Belle to do things with him. We all know in the back of his mind he was just using her to break the spell. How does Belle react? She continues to show compassion for him! She chooses to look past his self pity induced grumpiness thats added on to the already present selfishness. She saw him for who he was! Not what he was acting like. Now don't get me wrong, the beast was totally in the wrong. There is nothing right about mistreating people to get your way. Selfishness is never love, but here is what Belle knew (and Jesus I might add).
"Love loves to love and the reward of love is love." Love will love even the most difficult and undeserving people. Love will treat someone as though they've never been hurt. And when you sow love, you're going to reap love. The reward of love is love! You can't sow love and get hate. It just doesn't work. It may take days, weeks, months and even years but love ALWAYS reaps love.
(Insert Galatians 6:9 - "Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.")
We see this happen in the movie. Finally, Belle's constant portrayal of love starts to melt the Beast's heart. He doesn't seem to care about himself and breaking the spell, he begins to care about her heart and her desires. When she expresses that she really misses her father and would love to see him, he gives her a way. And when she sees that she's needed, he lets her go.
Let me just say at this point in the movie I began to tear up. All this revelation of what God has been teaching me was being unraveled before my very eyes and it was just the most beautiful thing ever! (and it wasn't just the 3D glasses). After the beast let's Belle go, and Cogsworth comes in and asks why he let her go what is his answer? "Because I love her"!!!!!!! At that moment my entire being lept within me and screamed "HE LEARNED TO LOVE!!!!!!!!!!" It was no longer about breaking the spell for him. He genuinely loved her enough to put her before himself, even if it cost him everything! If it came down to the end and Jesus looked him in the face and asked the Beast if he learned to love, he would be able to say YES! It doesn't even matter that his past was spent as a selfish beast, he learned to love and THAT is what it's all about. You can be the most successful person in the world but if you don't learn to love, it's all for nothing.
Well, we all knew that Belle already loved him. She showed him love and her love didn't return void. It's the best happily ever after there can be! Their love is a love that can last because unlike Cinderella, it's not a love based on a one night stand. It's rooted in selflessness. Ugh! Now THAT is a love story!

Your destiny isn't tomorrow. It's today.

    Lately I've had to face a lot of closed doors. It seems like every door possible in my life closed in a matter of just a few months. I went from the fast pace of leading a School of Worship, to leading 6 weeks of prayer and worship and recording an album, and working like a maniac to being trapped in my house pretty much 24/7. Clearly God is trying to say something and I think it's about time I listen, but I'll be honest, all these instances have left me with a great sense of loss. Most of us know, especially in this economy, how hard it is to count your blessings when the list appears to keep getting smaller and smaller. It's easy to praise God and trust him when everything is going good and you have everything you need, but it's a whole other story when you're searching frantically to find something to be thankful for. I guess it's through experiences like this that Paul learned to say that he was able to be content with a lot but also with little. (I would say nothing, but that's never true because no matter how bad off we are, as long as we still have breath we have something to be thankful for.)

       God has really been teaching me that instead of looking ahead at where I want to be (or really just where I think I should be) I need to focus more on what I can do right now with what I've been given. It's so easy to get caught up in striving to reach goals when that's where your eyes are fixed. But that's not what God tells us to do. He says that when we seek His Kingdom first and make that priority, everything else just falls into place. 

  So lets look at the parable of the talents for a minute. Most know the story, God gave them each a certain amount of talents. One buried his, another doubled his and the other like really multiplied it. (like more then the second guy because he was trusted with more). My point with this is, God gives stuff to us all. Some have more then others but we all have been entrusted with something. Even if all you have is breath in your lungs, you have something to offer the world. You have something to help bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth. That is the goal. I really feel like instead of always looking ahead at where we are not at, or what we don't have, it makes us a slave to the future. If we focus on what we have been given right here, right now and steward it well (meaning do everything possible to bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth with what we have right now) then God can trust us with more. But if we are always focused on what we don't have, its like burying what we do have. It's a lie from the enemy to believe that you're not useful until you've reached your "destiny" because you will always feel like you need to be better at something or have more of other things. But what if your destiny is everyday waking up and looking at what you have in your hands and saying "God, thank you for everything you've entrusted me with. How do I bring your Kingdom to earth with all this?" This mindset frees us from the lie that we haven't yet arrived and are useless until we do. It also frees us from the expectations and opinions of where others think we should be. There is a reason you are alive today. You have a destiny. Don't wait for conditions to be perfect for you to walk in it because they never will be. Do it NOW!

Refuse to be hurt

    Well as I'm winding down on the end of my 22nd year of life, I thought it'd be nice to look back over this year and reflect on how much God has taught me and done in my life. So here we go!

    I feel like God has taught me so much this year, but if anything the biggest lesson I think I've learned is greater understanding on how to love. I know I probably say this every time, but I realized that I really have a tendency to just love people that love me. It is so much work to put effort into someone who continuously hurts you, but I read a verse last night that really makes sense:


Matthew 5:46 "for if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?"


   If you always just love the people that are easy to love, then you haven't really learned to love. Love loves to love, and the reward of love is love. Love loves to love EVERYBODY!!!! No exceptions (this is where the word unconditional comes in). My tendency is to remove myself from a relationship when I keep getting hurt by the person, but as I've been studying the life of Jesus, I've found that he never did that! Not once. He never refused to give love to a person even though they hurt him, but what he did do was refuse to be hurt. He had a view of people that we can only have if we allow God to transform our minds. Hurt people, hurt people! It's an ongoing cycle of hurt because someone is hurting so they end up hurting someone else who then hurts someone else ect.... get the picture? So how do we stop this cycle? We have to refuse to take on hurt, we have to learn to see people through the compassionate eyes of Christ and see where the hurt that they tried to pin on us came from. If we choose to see the hurt in the one that hurt us, it enables us to say "I know your hurting and I refuse to allow your hurt to hurt me". Often if we look at the way someone has hurt us and then look at how that person is struggling, you can clearly see why they did what they did. Our hurt NEVER gives us an excuse to hurt others, but we are responsible for the way we respond to hurt. 


   This lesson has been and will be an ongoing process for me, but I know God will be faithful to give me the strength to refuse to be hurt so that I can love like He does. 22 has been amazing! What a challenging but wonderful year, look out 23! I'm coming at ya!
  
   
    

Change in America will start with Music

   Once again God is expanding on my purpose for my life. It's amazing how I've known that I was meant to be a musician since I was 13 but that was all I knew. Now here I sit with greater revelation on why He's entrusted me with this gift and how I'm supposed to use it, and I know I haven't even come close to the fullness of it!
 
    This morning I saw a tweet about music being a runway to God encounters. God took that simple phrase and began to expand on it. Here's what He's been speaking to me.
   As a musician, I automatically have a platform. Even in the Bible the musicians were the ones to go in front of the army. Why?
  1. To send a message to the opposing army that they were on they're way. To announce the coming of war! To communicate to the opposing team!
   We have the ability to send a message to the opposing team! But when we decide we want to blend in and make the same noise and sound that everyone around us is making, how can we even be heard! We have been given a voice but if we just say what everyone else is already saying, then we chose to give up our voice and support the message of someone else. Saying something different will always cause friction, because it causes people to chose. "When you have options, division is the next step", but if we dont give them a reason to choose what is right then we are responsible for the lack of change. What do you want to see happen in the world? Sing about that!

    2. They also at the same time would pump up their army! Music has a way of connecting with your emotions and causes you to feel something. There was a sense of victory that attached itself to the music and helped the soldiers to fight with everything in them.
    I believe that it is the same way with music today. Musicians still have a huge platform and how we chose to use that platform determines the outcome of our society.
   Now lets look at the current state of our society. What is the statistic for the age kids start having sex? I know the age keeps getting lower and lower. And what do they think love is? How do they treat one another? What kind of music are they listening to? It's all about relationships, sex, hurt, anger, revenge and we wonder why our children are struggling so badly! What you expose yourself to is what your going to learn from. The future of our country lies in the hands of our children and we continue to dump all our hurts and anger on them through the platform of music. And we wonder why our nation is in such bad shape.
 
     Musicians, it's time we recognize our responsibility to our nation and the world. America has such a huge influence on the rest of the world too! We are way to powerful to take our gift lightly. It's time we rise up and use our gifts to encourage our world. Not just sell songs and write hits to glorify ourselves. We have been entrusted with too much to be selfish. But we will only write from the overflow of our hearts. What we dwell on is what we limit ourselves too. If we choose to be influenced by the same music that is influencing the world, we will only continue to give the world what it already has. I refuse to contribute to the current state of our nation but the way to start to create change, is to change me.

God, continue to show me how to live in such a way that when this gift comes out of me it will be a runway to You.