For today's Lenton reading, I chose Matthew chapters 7-9. These chapters list several major miracles that Jesus did. I was trying to choose one to discuss here and each of them has one important common thread...great faith! In chapter 8 we read of the centurian who came to Jesus and told Him that his servant was at home, paralyzed and in terrible suffering. 7 Jesus said to him, "I will go and heal him." 8The centurian replied,"Lord I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go', and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant,'Do this,' and he does it." When Jesus heard this, He was astonished and said to those following Him,"I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith." In the 23rd verse of the same chapter Jesus got into a boat with His disciples, He was going to take a rest while they crossed to the other side 24Without warning, a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. 25The disciples went and woke him, saying "Lord, save us! We're going to drown!"26 He replied, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.  The centurian believed Jesus could do the miracle so strongly that he didn't even need Him to go to his house, just speak the Word! The disciples were with Him every day, SAW Him do all the miracles, starting with turning water into the best wine of the day at a wedding, healing lame, raising dead, opening deaf ears, delivering people from demons..and yet there they were on the boat WITH Him and they were afraid they were going to drown, now I have a problem with that! Of course it happens today also, we get answers to our prayers and when a crisis, large or small, occurs, we panic, "HELP! I don't know WHAT I am going to do!" Well during the rest of this forty day period, while we are reading about all His wonderful works, let's try to see ourselves as the centurian, with so much faith that we don't have to have hands layed on us or be anointed with oil or even be at church (although I highly recommend ALL the above), we can say "God, I need (insert your need, physical, financial, mental) and Jesus died on the cross so that I could approach Your throne boldly, so I am asking you in the name and through the blood of Jesus, to (heal me,supply my need, give me clarity of thought). I can promise you that your faith will not go unanswered. God is faithful. The old hymn says "Great is Thy faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see, all I have needed your hand has provided, Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord unto me."

Be blessed, pray and if your faith seems weak, cry out to the Lord as the father did in Mark 9:24 Lord I believe, please help my unbelief! God will not get mad at you for admitting it, He will give you the help you need! We are His children and He gave his only Son so that we could come to Him any time we want to!

Today is the second day of Lent and I want to read about Jesus and His life on earth. A good starting place was Matthew 4:1-11 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread." Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God." Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple."If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written:"'He will command his angels concerning you,  and they will lift you up in their hands,  so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'" Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."Jesus said to him, "Away from me, Satan! For it is written: 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.'" Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.  In this reading the words that stuck out most were "It is written." Jesus was using the Word of God on the devil himself. If the very Son of God used the Holy Word rather than just zapping Satan off the face of the earth, then what example is that for us? If you saw that I had underscored "For it is written"..that was the devil trying to screw around with the Word of God for his own purposes! He took some words from Psalm 91 and bent them to fit his need..however, you see that Jesus KNEW the Word and answered accordingly..saying "It is ALSO written". In your everyday life you are faced with trials, temptations, people messing with the meaning of the Word and YOU HAVE to know the difference for yourself so that no one can make you believe a lie. The most powerful help you can have is the Holy Spirit! Mark 13:11 ...don't worry about what you'll say. When the time comes, say what's on your heart-the Holy Spirit will make his witness in and through you. If you haven't studied, you won't pass the test, if you haven't invited the Holy Spirit to live in you, then He won't be there to help you. Start in Matthew, read all the words of Jesus and when you have learned His words and read His parables you will get a knowledge that no one can take away. Then when the devil comes at you, or sends his little demons, whatever form they take ,your boss, friends, the driver in back of you, the slow cashier..you can fill in the blanks..you know exactly what I mean. You may be having a wonderful day and suddenly the devil has presented something that absolutely blocks out the sunshine of your day. We don't have a weapon except the Word, follow the example of Jesus and USE it! 2Corinthians 10:4 We use God's mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. And that mighty weapon IS the Word.

Be Blessed, Pray, walk with me through the New Testament for the next 38 days and learn the Word so that you are better able to fight and win in this battle called life!

The word Manna came to me today and I got out my Bible and found that there are seventeen references to Manna. Manna was the heavenly bread supplied to the Children of Israel while they were in the desert for forty years! They had complained that in leaving Egypt (guess they weren't thinking about the fact they were slaves) they left the "garlic and leeks"! Moses, I am sure, got tired of their complaining and went to God. God saw their need and sent the Manna. When the dew fell every evening, so did the Manna. All they had to do was to go out and pick up enough to supply their family's food for the day, if they picked up more than they needed it would rot! God wanted them to learn to have faith, not to fear and to not be greedy! Maybe Jesus thought about that when He said "give us this day our daily bread" when He gave the Lord's Prayer! After all Matthew 6:25-26 says "If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds. He shows us in this verse how much we are cared for! I know He cares for our physical needs but as we enter this Lenten season, let us think more about the Bread of life than the loaf of bread. Matthew 26:26 As they were eating, Jesus took some bread and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take this and eat it, for this is my body.”  1Corinthians 11:25-26 On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread  and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this to remember me.”  In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this to remember me as often as you drink it.” For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again. We should realize that Jesus becomes our heavenly Manna, the supplier of our needs, the healer of our bodies and our Bread of Life!

Be blessed, Pray, read the Word of God, which never grows old, and accept Jesus as your Bread of Life, you will never be "hungry" again!

An air of superiority-there is nothing that gets under my skin any quicker than someone that carries an air of "I'm better than you." No one has the right to put you down over ANYthing. I heard a lady this week on TV talking about why she had weight loss surgery. She said she was tired of being made fun of, or just feeling invisible. She was willing to go through a major life style changing procedure, just to shut them up and, to me even worse, to gain their approval. When I was in elementary school there was a two year period of my life that I was totally miserable when I was out of the safety of my own home or at church. At school, there was a girl who was a bully and the ring leader of all the wannabe girls who were either really just like her, or afraid to come against her in order to protect me for fear of being bullied themselves. They made fun of me on a daily basis and chased me around the play yard calling out insults because my skin was darker than theirs and my hair was very black. My dad is a first generation American by birth and Armenian by blood which washed out any influence my English-German mother's genes could have on my looks. This miserable act of meaness gave me an empathy for anyone that is being bullied, put down, talked about, the under-dog and I promised God, as a young girl, that if God would help me I would always defend anyone I saw in that situation. No one deserves to be slighted no matter their ethnicity, age, gender, religion or weight! When Jesus died for ONE, He died for ALL-we are all equal in His sight. When my dad's people left Armenia it was BECAUSE they were Christians, being persecuted for their belief in Christ as the Son of God, by the Muslims. Some were skinned alive because they said that Christ was not put on like a coat but was a part of their skin and blood. They were strung up by their thumbs with a fire built under their feet, just big enough to begin roasting their toes and feet but not killing them..just long hours of torture. Another favorite punishment was to cut unborn babies from their mother's womb in front of the horrified father's eyes and then toss the baby from sword to sword asking how they could serve a Christ Who would let this happen.Hebrews 11:37-40 Women received their loved ones back from the dead. There were those who, under torture, refused to give in and go free, preferring something better: resurrection. Others braved abuse and whips, and, yes, chains and dungeons. We have stories of those who were stoned, sawed in two, murdered in cold blood; stories of vagrants wandering the earth in animal skins, homeless, friendless, powerless—the world didn't deserve them!—making their way as best they could on the cruel edges of the world. Not one of these people, even though their lives of faith were exemplary, got their hands on what was promised. God had a better plan for us: that their faith and our faith would come together to make one completed whole,, their lives of faith not complete apart from ours. Jesus was mocked and hung on a cross, WHY? Because He loved us all! You are equal to anyone, and special to God.

Be blessed, Pray and treat everyone the way YOU want to be treated! In the words of Jesus: Luke 6:31 Here is a simple rule of thumb for behavior: Ask yourself what you want people to do for you; then grab the initiative and do it for them!

The lyrics to this song, which was recorded by Whitney Houston, started going through my mind...I haven't heard it in a long time and yet those words, "One moment in time" kept playing in my brain. I was thinking how one small incident can change the course of your whole life, and it makes you want to be very careful and prayerful every day of your life. One moment before I was rear ended while sitting motionless wating to make a left turn, I was happily listening to my radio and going to my office in the church to do some work, my car was smashed, but I was not harmed! It happens to many people every day in every place on earth. I was telling someone today about the summer that lightning struck my house. I was working in the kitchen and suddenly out of nowhere a thunderbolt sounded and my house seemed to rock on it's foundation. I could smell smoke and went to find it, the power had gone off so I was just trying to feel my way around and ended up in my bedroom where everything was all over the floor from the power of the strike hitting right behind a book case. The fire department finally found us and determined that the fire was out. Next day in the day light I could see where the beam,inside where the sheet rock had been blown off, the wood had been on fire and was charred and had supernaturally gone out. The insurance man couldn't believe his eyes and it gave me another opportunity to witness to him about God's miracle in stopping my fully cedar wood house from burning to the ground. I pray Psalm 91 over my household and family.Here are a few verses from it:That's right—he rescues you from hidden traps, shields you from deadly hazards. His huge outstretched arms protect you-under them you're perfectly safe;his arms fend off all harm.Fear nothing—not wild wolves in the night,not flying arrows in the day,Not disease that prowls through the darkness,not disaster that erupts at high noon.He ordered his angels to guard you wherever you go.If you stumble, they'll catch you;their job is to keep you from falling. You'll walk unharmed among lions and snakes and kick young lions and serpents from the path. It is true that one moment you may be happy and tragedy strike, then just as well you may be in trouble and suddenly you get a miracle and everything is all right once more! Lack of space in this forum keeps me limited from giving a long list! Remember that God can use YOU as an angel to someone in need. Always look for someone that needs an encouraging word or a prayer. How do you want to remember your 'One Moment In Time'?  "Each day I live I want to be a day to give the best of me. I'm only one but not alone, My finest day is yet unknown!

Be blessed, Pray and make all your 'moments in time' the best you can, remembering that you can do all things through Christ which strengthens you! Philippians 4:13