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Write Your Life Forward" Christmas Edition!

Today's Reading: Genesis 12

The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
​ I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:1-3, NIV)

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Living by Faith

“Faith is the gift of God. So is the air, but you have to breathe it; so is bread, but you have to eat it; so is water, but you have to drink it.” — D.L. Moody

The gift that comes in the midst of your hard, through the uncertain times, and amidst tear-stained face is always — I will show you, I will make you, I will bless you.

“I will”, says God, the Father of all compassion and the God of all comfort, who steps in to pick up your bruised heart and hold your battered trust, who loves you through and through, and holds you like no one else can.

He takes every broken piece, every painful circumstance, and gently works with them.

He slowly concocts, gently simmers, and meticulously prepares you for a life where your own pitcher can always be full.

There’s no kidding it —- life can feel empty, dried up, broken and busted. Yet, there’s a way to be full again.

Because opening your heart after crawling through tunnels of trauma or braving life after dysfunction can feel like opening up the valves of a bleeding heart, pulsing slowly in the fragile rhythm of life.

And we know —-they don’t always hold funerals for the living.

Life doesn’t always give you permission to sit and weep, to stand and mourn.

But when God comes, He rains blessings on places too poor, too parched, too painful.

He comes not to break you but to bless you.

Christmas is magical because Christ is manifested.

And so today we read about Abram —- how God called him out of the certainty of Ur into the uncertainty of the Promised Land, with just an instruction and an assurance.

“I will bless you”, says the God who made you.

I had read this while the kids were spooning pikelets onto their plates, dripping them with honey.

And in allowing what we read to read into me — and into the failures and fractures I can’t fix — I found that I’m the one licking the honey, I’m the one savouring the sweet of the promise.

“I will bless you…and you shall be a blessing” — I read it again, slowly this time and told the kids:

These blessings? — they come as a Person. They come as a baby wrapped in a manger, who became a Saviour on the Cross. They come personified in Christ and personalised for us.

“I will show you, I will bless you, I will make you …”

The weight of what has been hard and ridiculously impossible this year can melt like thinning snow in the heat of His love.

Christmas whispers that even in the hard and uncertain, God is still able to bless you and to make you into a blessing.

And in being a blessing to this world, you first need to be filled with the blessings in your world.

You have to have your own pitcher full before you can pour yourself out into others.

Spurgeon wrote, “It is no use for you to attempt to sow out of an empty basket, for that would be sowing nothing but the wind”.

Faith, then, is this quiet knowing:

“I am blessed by the Lord — by the One who shields and surrounds and surprises me with His favour and His love.”

That promise holds, no matter how hard the year has been.

You can cling on to it too:

Hard Year = High Yield

There’s a way to turn what’s been hard in your year into what’s higher for your future.

And this Christmas —-

Christ comes to remove our burden, redeem the broken-hearted, and restore all of our bruised hearts so we can experience His blessings beyond our hardest reality.

And like Abraham, we too can dare to trust.

Abraham looked at the impossibility of his barren body, stepped into the darkness of the night and counted all that scattered in the sky. He stepped out in faith.

We too can dare our own smallness and pray:

“Lord, help me to walk in faith, just like Abraham did. Help me see that the very places that pain me are the exact places that prepare me. Let me live in the lightness of your grace. Be my shield today. Let me linger long in the experience of Your love this Christmas. In Jesus name.”

P.S:

Dear Friends, we are travelling today -- this gift of "holy-days" -- and my email may come in drips and drabs, so thank you for your prayer for us.

xx Liza

Family Get Together

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