Pressure Your Pressure

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to talk about something that has been in my spirit for a little while.  Are there things in your life that you are believing God to make happen?  Maybe you are trying to lose weight, get out of debt or make better grades.  It's possible you are dealing with something even much more serious - a loved one who you want to know Christ, deliverance from drugs or something else.  That's what I want  to deal with today.

Have you ever worked hard on something and don't really see results?  You say, I have tried to study more or I have tried to lose that weight and no matter what I do, it won't come off?  Are you feeling pressured to quit the diet, quit studying, stop believing for your loved one?  Well we have all been there.  I know I have.  That pressure is really heavy right?  On top of that, nothing seems to be moving right?

Well there is a law in physics that says something like every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  When you push down on a table, the pressure you put on it will actually cause you to rise.  But if you increase the pressure you are putting on that table, it may look like nothing is happening.  So you push down some more and still nothing happens.  Then you push even harder and nothing happens.  You keep increasing the pressure and finally you hear the table legs start to creek and this encouragement causes you to put even more pressure on the table.  Why hasn't the table broken?  It is putting as much pressure back on you as you are putting on it.

But at some point, if you keep increasing the pressure, the table will buckle.  One minute you are pushing on it and it is pushing back on you.  The next minute the table is not able to exert enough pressure back on you to stand and it falls.

That's the way it is with the problems in life.  The reason we don't see immediate victory is because our problems are pressuring us but guess what, there is no movement.  That means we are putting pressure on our problem!  If we keep it up, sooner or later, the problem will buckle because it can't handle the pressure you are putting on it.

So I want to encourage you.  If you are trying to loose weight, keep at it.  You might not see the results you want immediately but keep pressuring your pressure.  Those pounds will come off.  If you want to get out of debt, keep the pressure on your debt.  It will leave.

If you are using your faith and believing God to bring a loved one into the kingdom or something else in your life then keep at it.  To use a line from a song I heard the Crabb family sing, "Just hold on.  My God will show up and He will take you through the fire again!"

Well, I've blogged myself happy again.  That's another Opinion of the Minion.

To Fear or Not to Fear

Hello everyone, 

Today I want to talk about fear.  Now we could discuss all kinds of phobias and it seems like there is a phobia for almost everything.  There is even phobia of success.  Can you believe it!  If you Google it, there are a lot of things to say about it.  There's also the fear of failure which is the opposite.  We run around a lot wondering about what happens if we fail.  What happens if we try out for something and don't make it?  Most of the time, nothing really bad happens.  We might get embarrassed if we fail or we might not get something we had our heart set to do.  But other than that, what negative really happens?

Let me ask you this.  What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?  Would you become a professional athlete?  Maybe you would run for President or run some big corporation.  I am digressing from my topic for tonight so I will save this discussion for another day.

Let's talk about fear itself.  It can grip us and stop us in our tracks.  Some people believe that a little fear is healthy for you.  That's almost as intelligent as saying a little cancer is healthy for you or a few broken bones are good for you.  After all, they might teach you something right?  Nope.  A little fear is not good for you because fear connects you to the devil and that's not a connection you need to make. 

Now I can hear some of you saying, "Well Mr. Minion, the Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Yes, there are some translations of the Bible that use those words but what it really means that the reverence of the Lord and the respect for the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  It doesn't mean that being terrified of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  For the record, God doesn't want you to be afraid of Him.  That thought is just plain ridiculous.  Are any of you parents?  Are any of you in a relationship?  Do you want your children, spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend to be afraid of you?  Of course not,  I have five children and I don't want any of them to be afraid of me, not even a little bit.

If you think about it for a few minutes, we use the word fear a lot and can make connections to it.  Have you ever said, "That scared me to death?"  how about sayings like, "That ____ will be the death of me yet?"  Some people even sit around and talk about all the bad things that can happen to them.

So is fear a good thing?  Not on any level.  So if fear is so bad for you, what's the opposite of fear?  The answer is faith.  Faith in what?  First and foremost, faith in God.  Second faith in yourself.  Third faith in the plan God has for your life.  When you turn from fear, you're left with faith.  

I can already hear some of you saying, "Well what about what's going on right now in my life?  What if it doesn't work out?"  Not too long ago, I was afraid of losing my job and I was afraid that my new wife wouldn't care for me anymore.  That she might even not want to be with me anymore.  That fear was gripping.  But here's what I finally realized.  Regardless of what she did or didn't do, God would be with me.  He will see me through to the place of victory he has for me.  For those of you who know me personally, you should know that my wife has very strong moral character and I truly believe that she is deeply in love with me and committed to me.  The only thing that freed me from it's grip was to turn to faith in God.  If all those bad things happened, I would still be OK.  

But one thing I learned while sitting in that fear was that I didn't enjoy life.  I was sitting at a place watching everyone around me having a good time and I wasn't.  Why?  Because that fear had a grip on me.  Once I got out of that grip through faith, I started having a good time again.  So if your at this place right now, let me encourage you.  Take a step out of fear and take a step of faith!

That's another Opinion of the Minion