Wednesday Morning Bible Study

I learned some profound things today in Bible Study. It was one of those sessions that felt like she was speaking directly to me. It was about the importance of speaking our belief not just thinking it. (We are doing Beth Moore's Believing God Bible study DVD series). She said thinking things is not exercising Biblical authority. "For reasons ultimately known to God alone, He has ordained that spoken words carry a power, authority, and effectiveness that exceed words we simply think." She says we need to put the Word with our prayer, yet speak it, not think it. She says we are not meant for defeat. It takes a lot of energy to remain defeated and we should throw all our excess energy into our prayer because the enemy is looking to keep us quiet. Our spirits are flammable and all we need to do is light up with the fire of the Word of God and the enemy will notice the Spirit is within us. "Is not my Word like fire, declares the Lord." (Jer 23:29) We are to walk by faith not by sight. And, while we may speak the words we hear from God and they are spoken in our voices, it still sounds like God to the devil. When we speak our prayers, we cast our burdens onto God and the Word. Her whole motto for the session was "I believe therefore I speak." I got so much out of her session today. I couldn't take enough notes. She was truly inspiring!


So then, at home over lunch, with the wild man comfortably ensconced in his chair watching PBS, I picked up So Long, Insecurity (by Beth Moore, of course) and started reading where I had left off. Yet another long moment of feeling like she was writing directly to my heart.

First, she talked about how we can make our own personal crisis just by being insecure from having a real crisis from our past. We have something bad happen and we begin to wait for the other shoe to drop. We end up trapping ourselves in more self-inflicted insecurity that breeds into a vicious circle. She says, "When we become psychologically dependent upon crisis, it actually becomes our life motivator, and if we don't have a present crisis, we'll learn to create one." I couldn't help but draw some parallels there. Ultimately she says these crisis create changes in us and God wants us to use these changes for positive things.

Second, she went straight to the heart of my insecurities and after reading what she wrote I felt a sense of relief (that I'm not the only one) and understanding that my circumstances combined with my personality make me more sensitive to things than most people and how that can really affect my feeling insecure about things (in general). She moved me to tears when she wrote, "He does not take lightly that some of us were raised in a veritable madhouse, he does not take lightly that some of us have been mentally berated or physically beaten or sexually abused or simply abandoned. He does not take lightly that some of us are still trying to recover from that midnight phone call. He does not take lightly that some of us were born with legs that don't work. Or eyes that can't see. Or ears that can't hear. He does not take lightly that some of us have endured the cancer treatment of our very own children. He does not take lightly that some of us, Lord help us, have buried our own children. He knows it's scary to be us."

I had to stop reading at that point and come in here to write down my thoughts because they were all swirling around in my head. My receptors must be on high alert today because everything she's said has hit me right in the heart. In two unrelated areas! I'll have to let all this digest because I don't think I can handle reading anymore today!