Walking in the Word with Breast Cancer

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 The kind of rest referred to in these passages can only come from God. His peace comes from a deep rooted Hope in knowing that despite what we see in front of us, we have the confidence He reins over all. It comes when we know He promises that He is working all things for our good.  Rest in our trials does not come when He takes our burden - though there is relief and cause for celebration when our trial ends, the kind of rest He offers here comes from the confident expectation that He is at work in all things. The key to finding that rest is the trust that He is good. You need to have a rock solid, foundational trust that He is good if you are ever to find the kind of peace that He offers when trials hit.  Li

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 Reflecting today on our need to rest.   Our culture doesn’t value rest the way God values rest.  No, our world values accomplishments and a busy schedule over rest - the more you get done, the more worthy you are. The problem is there are so many things we need to accomplish in any given week to earn that title of worthy, that we can often feel overwhelmed when we look at our packed schedules, much less when we try to move through them.  W e're either boasting about our busy schedule, or we're complaining about it - boasting about it to earn those accolades from others, or complaining that we have way too much on our plates.   We have responsibilities for our job that spill over into our free time, our c

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus offers us rest when we’ve had too much, when we’re exhausted, overworked, and burdened. He doesn’t tell us to get our act together first, He doesn’t expect us to fix our problems, He simply says come to me and I will give you rest. So many of us come and find that rest in Him, but the rest is temporary. As soon as we leave His presence, we find we’ve picked our burdens right back up and are carrying them around again. For us to experience the kind of rest that lasts, He offers us a lesson in how to carry our burdens - He suggests we carry our burdens as He does, with gentleness and humility, and we will discover our burdens become easier to carry.  When we carry burdens that involve other people, we lighten

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus doesn’t struggle with being heavily burdened because he doesn’t carry things like we do. We add so much weight to our burdens because of the way we choose to carry them. He tells us to learn from Him, His yoke is easy because He is gentle and lowly of heart. He gives us two ways we lighten our load:  when our burden involves other people, we are to be gentle, and when our burden is personal, we are to be humble.  Gentleness is defined as a sensitivity of disposition and kindness of behavior, founded on strength and prompted by love.  So, when we are struggling in a trial with someone else, our disposition should be one of kindness and love, not overly rigorous, not unduly concerned with our own rights,

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus invites us to come to Him for rest when we are exhausted from carrying our heavy loads. Notice there is no condemnation in His offer, He doesn’t point out that we’ve been carrying our burdens all wrong, He doesn’t ask what has taken us so long to bring to Him, He doesn’t expect us to do or fix anything first, He just says come as you are and I will give you rest. Religion tells us we have to do certain things first to belong, but Jesus has never said that. He just says come. Our God is full of compassion and abounding in mercy, and He deeply desires to give us the rest we long for. He never grows impatient with us or walks away in disgust. He never grows tired of us, and He will never quit because He’s had

28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 I love that the invitation in these verses is for everyone. Come to me ALL - there are no exceptions to that invite, it’s for every one of us who labor or are heavily burdened.  It’s for you. It’s for me. When Jesus issues that directive, He is not anticipating a fractional response. He’s expecting every one of us who struggle under the weight of our trials to come to Him.  When it’s too much to carry on our own, He says come to me.  We labor when we work, and so the first group invited are those who are physically tired from work. We’ve all been there, some of us far too often. It’s the fatigue that comes at the end of a day of work, after managing our hectic schedules, when we just want to plop ourselves on

I haven't been feeling very well this week, so I haven't gotten around to posting a medical update, but I thought I would send out a quick note to let everyone know how I'm doing before I enter round 4 tomorrow. Physically, this has been a challenging week for me; but emotionally, I'm still hanging in there.  I did end up catching the virus my grandbabies had last week - woke up last Tuesday morning with a nasty sore throat that progressed to a chest cold.  Because of my compromised immune system, they immediately put me on antibiotics to ward off any infection that might develop.  I wish I could say that helped me to fight the cold; but as we all know, antibiotics do nothing for viruses, so I've been down with a cough for over a week now.  I would be lying if I didn't admit a few moments of frustration at the fact that this cold stole much of my energy on the good days both last week and this week; but for the most part, I'm doing just fine and remain p

28  Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." - Matthew 11:28-30 While I am sad to be taking a week off from the Psalm 107 study this week, I am truly excited to spend the week in these verses, reviewing the sermon from this weekend. It was an incredibly powerful message for me, and spending the week reflecting on all that I have learned will encourage a lasting impact on my heart.  This has always been one of my all time favorite verses in Scripture...just reading in brings rest to my soul.  He really is the God of all comfort and He can bring peace into our lives when there is chaos.  We only need to trust that He will. He is able and willing to meet us in times of need - even when that need is self-inflicted. He will never mock us or tell us, I told you so. He is just

20 He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.  21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!  - Psalm 107:20-21 We can’t leave this passage without returning to the recurrent theme of this psalm. Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!  - Psalm 107:21. So much packed into this verse...so much to cling to when the world is challenging and the enemy is lurking. I love how God wrote this verse over and over in this psalm - He knew we’d need the reminder multiple times. In Hebrew, steadfast means "an eager and ardent desire" and reminds us that God's love never gives up.  When we’re living in rebellious sin and we are far from Him, this is what always brings us back, isn’t it?  His love never gives up. No matter what. His love for us is unqualified and unconditional. He accepts us without reserve. He doesn’t say to us, “fix th

20 He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.  21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!  - Psalm 107:20-21 At the root of so much of our sin is an attitude of discontentment - the reality is we are often ruled by our desire for more in this life. We want what we want and we’re willing to sin to get it. We see what others have - whether it’s material possessions, a skinny waistline, or the family togetherness we see in pictures on Facebook - and we either get frustrated because we don’t have what they have so we lash out at the people nearest to us, or we set about getting that which is lacking in our lives, sacrificing the very gifts that have been given to us in the process. We want that job, we want obedient children, we want a loving spouse, we want a better body, we want things to go smoothly for our children, we want financial stability, we want fulfilling relationships or meaning

20 He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.  21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!  - Psalm 107:20-21 Two distinct truths have struck me as I’ve been sitting in quiet reflection today. The first one is continued from yesterday —> we don't live in the big moments of our lives - in the few biggest decisions or most pivotal moments of our lives. No, the reality is that we live in the ten thousand little moments of our days. It's in those little moments where the character of our relationships are set.  And because we all bring sin with us into those relationships, they can get messy. We all bring self-absorbed, self-focused attitudes into our relationships with the people in our lives. We can't help it, it's part of our DNA. We'd love to be able to point our finger at the other person as carrying all the blame, but if we're being completely honest with each

20 He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.  21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!  - Psalm 107:20-21 So, why do we need to get into the Word every single day?  Because that is where He reveals the deception of our hearts to us. Let’s be real - confession is not natural for us.  We’re more comfortable thinking we’re righteous than we are thinking we’re wrong in any way. It’s easier to point the finger out than to point the finger in, to blame others of our circumstances, to point out bigger sinners than we are, and to minimize our actual sin. It’s natural for us to be blind to the depth of our sin against God, it’s natural for us to dismiss it as only a little something, it’s natural for us to harden our heart against the grief we should be feeling because we’re using the world as our standard. Getting into Scripture every day is how we continue to measure ourselves against the tr