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Guard Against Discontentment

11/19/2013

A dear lady who wishes to remain anonymous has given me permission to share the following words of wisdom from her to all of us.

We need to guard ourselves and our hearts daily against discontentment.

Before Satan brings temptation or before you would consider a temptation he has to make you discontent in your current circumstances. If we are 100 percent content in our lives - in all aspects - imagine how difficult getting us to stumble would be.

Because most bad choices start with us wishing we had something we do not. If our enemy will have his way to destroy our joy, peace, families, lives and testimonies, he must first work on our contentment with things in our life. Once he has us regretting decisions, wondering "what if" or wishing we had taken a different path...he has us right where he wants us and we are much easier prey.

So count your blessings, rejoice in what we have been given, find joy in each day and in the small things. Remember that we have been given life and our Father wants us to live it more abundantly.

His Blogger

11/14/2013

My friend's husband is a very cool Godly guy who has the following words printed on his company's van: His Plumber. I love that he is boldly proclaiming his faith and is not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.

Well, ever since I got the message from the Lord that He wanted me to begin this blog undertaking, I've been asking Him stuff. The name for example. I had a lot of ideas that were making me yawn. Servants' Hearts, yawn. Hearts at Home, yawn. I asked the Lord if He thought it would offend any Christians for me to spice it up a lil bit and call us Triumphant Chicks. I think He said okay, but if you visit the blog tomorrow and it's called Servants' Hearts at Home you'll know He called me into his office and gave me a talkin' to.

I asked Him if I could use a fun name because I started to feel like Elmer the elephant.

A children's book called Elmer is the story of a colorful, patchwork elephant. One day he was standing among all the other elephants and they were all so absolutely still, motionless and serious that it made him want to laugh. "Boo!" he said and they all jumped into the air in surprise. He livened things up a bit. Christians take their faith really seriously and they should. We know that life is spiritual warfare. But maybe we are taking ourselves so seriously that we've lost perspective. Especially homeschoolers, sorry y'all you know I am crazy about you and you're my very heart, but my we can be a serious bunch. I want to remind us that other women aren't the only ones having fun. Ladies like us are cool and we know stuff and we're having a blast.

I have also been praying about remembering that it is not my blog but rather His. He called me to do it, not my idea. One day, the number of visits to my blog was more than just the two of you kindly reading right now. I got a little excited. I got a little weird for a while there. It was like someone reading a stock market chart and placing all this emotion in those numbers. I'll tell you what I think happened. I had sent out a mass e-mail that some spammers picked up, and a lot of guys saw the name "chicks" in our title. They came to the website, then saw what it actually was and went, "Oh."

"Nevermind. This is boring."

But in any case, for whatever reason the blog's numbers took a big spike one day and I got excited. I used to work in public relations before I had children and so I know how the whole news release thing works. I got caught up in going PR blitz for this blog one day to keep that momentum going. I forgot the world is harsh. People really didn't care, they thought it was facebook, or they told me to buy an ad. Excuse me, I'm not selling anything, I'm writing for the Lord here. And the three people who read this thing really love it.

I realized this inner turmoil silliness was happening and so I had a chat with God who told me to shake the dust off my feet. I'm pretty sure this is what I got from this conversation with Him: "Jennifer, you do the writing, I'll bring the people."

Now I try not to care if my readers are 600 people, or just you and my Mom. I'm His blogger, not my own.

The Birth of the Blog

11/12/2013

Pop quiz. What have you not found on the Triumphant Chicks website?
a) Clever insightfulness
b) Warnings against using a tazer gun on your dog
c) A salute to admirable military wives, or
d) An explanation of why this blog got started in the first place.

The answer is d).

So I say, it's high time. A year ago, I was ready to take on glorifying God publicly. I had received and taken to heart many things the Lord had taught me in the 12 or so years since I'd become a born again Christian. I started to feel this itch to glorify Him, not just in my own family but out there in the world.

I thought He wanted me to sing Lead Me to the Cross in church. I practiced it for a year. It's in my limited voice range. And the words resonate with me. I argued with God for a year over this song, concerned that it was just my big idea and not His. And I was not sure that I was really ready to do something like that out of humility rather than pride. The last time I sang on stage was 20 years ago while I was living a sinful lifestyle. It would be like a born again ex-con going to minister in a prison for the first time. I wondered if I was worthy to sing in church.

I kept praying about it, practicing singing the song, and arguing with God. I finally said to Him, Okay okay I'll ask about singing the song. As my friend and mentor Pam says, when you are pretty sure the Lord is telling you to do something, you better do it. I got up the courage one Sunday to ask our church's music director if he would consider my singing Lead Me to the Cross in church. It's so embarrassing to ask something like that out of the blue. He'd never heard me sing before (he's not missing much). And hey, I get it, it's kind of presumptuous to ask for a solo in church and I'm not even in the choir. This is not karaoke. I got up my nerve though and asked.

It's the craziest thing but he had just prepared that very song for my friend Dede and she'd been practicing it already.

Song's taken, sorry. I was sad and felt like a goober for even asking. But I said to the Lord, "Okay I'm confused. I thought You told me to sing this song, I obeyed You and asked about it, I thought I was humble enough to do it, what's the deal. Does my life not glorify you enough? Is there something else you want me to do? What's going on here? I just want to do Your will and I want to glorify You."

My friend Dede was going to be singing that song and she had no idea that I had been praying about singing it. She still doesn't, until she reads this blog. I never told her I had asked the director about singing it. I accepted the answer "no" from the Lord and waited for Him to tell me what to do. The Lord bounced a message back to me in the following way. After church the following Sunday Dede said to me, "You should have a blog."

Other people had said that to me before, after reading the wacky five-page e-mails I send them. Dede had asked me about morning sickness for one of her friends. I had written her an e-mail about it really fast and didn't even proofread it, or inject an abundant supply of cleverness into it, and you girls will be proud that I didn't write at the end of it, "P.S. You stole my song."

No big deal to me as far as writing goes, but to Dede, she saw that I should write a blog. I just smiled and said maybe someday, and went home. Seriously, does the world really need another blog? Seen one blog you've seen 'em all.

But then you know how you get that warm feeling from the Lord in your heart? I prayed about it and thought He might be saying to me, "Let your light shine, don't hide it under a bushel."

God was saying to me through Dede, "I don't want you to sing for me. I want you to write for me."

So I am.

The Body of Christ: Who Gets the Glory?

11/10/2013

Christians feel the urgency of how broken the world is. We see the danger as people ignore God's word and ways. We fear for our children and our grandchildren if our land continues to ignore Him. And so we start doing stuff. We start doing stuff before we asked God if it was what He specifically wanted us to do. Then we ask other people to help and they don't ask Him either, and before you know it, lots of people are busy doing nice things but not the things the Lord asked them to do.

Then they're not available when God does give them a job.

Debbie, missionary to the Ethiopians, told a ladies' Bible study I once attended that the sin of the people in the book of Jeremiah is that they didn't listen. It's everywhere in the book of Jeremiah once you start looking for it. Or, em, listening for it. God says to obey His voice, and walk in the ways He commanded them, that it would be well with them, "Yet they hearkened not unto me," the King James puts it. (Jeremiah 7:26) Sometimes it says, "They would not hear." (Jeremiah 13:11) And also, "You have not heard my words" or another translation actually says "you have not obeyed my words." Jeremiah 25:8.

If our hearts are in the right place, and God thinks we are ready, He wants to use us. He'll tell us what to do and when. In Ezekiel 22:30 God tells us, "And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none." He is speaking of the desolate and rebellious state of the land. God couldn't find anyone to stand in the gap for him. So many of us see that in our own land today and the cry of our heart is that we would be that person for Him.

We want to stand in the gap. Our hearts are right but we don't wait for His order. It would be like if our house was burning down, and the children wanted to help so they started organizing their stuffed animals or sweeping the floor.

You remember how king Saul got antsy and couldn't wait for God's order, but went ahead and acted on his own? He lost the kingdom after that. You know how Sarah knew God had told her she would birth a son to begin a great nation? But she couldn't wait for God to act and took it upon herself to go out and get Abraham to father a child through someone else. We're still feeling the sinful ripples of that lineage today.

We feel the urgency. That's good. Acting on it without God's direction, though, is not good. When we act on our own ideas or plans, we get the glory. When we act on God's ideas and plans, He makes it happen, He sees it through, He equips us. And He gets the glory.

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