Hope For Today

Dear Friends, Jesus Invites You To Rest Today's devotional first appeared in the Advent/Christmas 2018 'COME (Christians Overcoming ME) Together' Newsletter. I want to share it with you all here too as there are valuable truths for each one of us. The word “REST” has been on my mind a great deal lately. Probably because at the time of writing this I really am not feeling at all well and need more rest than usual. But rest is something we all need, whether we’re in poor health or not.  For too long, society has encouraged us to be busy, keep doing more, keep adding to an already full diary, keep taking on more responsibilities. In the past, in many churches, particularly in the ones I grew up in, works and serving others was emphasized as being vitally important, as was attending all the church meetings, not just on a Sunday morning but during the week too. This was the way I used to live, and my relationship with God was put in second place, although I was ...

If you would like to listen to this devotional, please click  here Dear Friends, Who Are You Following? Who are you following? We all follow someone or something. It may be a sports personality, a pop group, a film star, some other celebrity, etc. With social media, there are more and more ways to follow others, such as via Facebook or Twitter. Who or what we follow shows where our real interests lie, it shows what's important to us. We learn everything we can about the person we are following. We copy them and are influenced by them. We spend time and money in our pursuit of following them.  These things become a problem when they take the place of the only one who is worth following. When they take the place of Jesus in our life. Following Jesus means: 1. Hearing and Responding to His Call When Jesus walked this earth, he called people to follow him, to be his disciples. For example in Matthew 9:9 we read As Jesus was walking along, he s...

If you would like to listen to today's devotional instead of reading, then please click  here Dear Friends,  Rest: A Necessity or A Luxury? We live in such a fast-paced world, where we hardly take a moment to stop and take a breath. We feel pressured to move at the pace of everyone else. Whenever I've had to get the train to London, the moment I step off the train and onto the platform, I find myself swept along in the frantic pace set by those around me. Everyone is rushing and without realising it, it's easy to get caught up in the rush. We tend to feel guilty if we admit we need to have a rest. We find it hard to accept our own limitations. We put a huge amount of pressure on ourselves to keep going. We view rest as a luxury and tell ourselves "I'd love to be able to have a rest, I just don't have the time." But rest is not a luxury, it is, in truth a necessity. We need rest. I believe that if we continually ignore our need to rest, Go...

Dear Friends, For many of us, rest does not come easily. We've bought in to the lie that we should be busy all the time. That acceptance and approval of us comes from our performance. That if we take a break we are wasting valuable time. We worry what others will think of us if we rest. And to top it all, if we do rest, we tend to then feel guilty for doing so. Yet we need rest for our overall health and wellbeing. Rest brings refreshment and renewal and a chance to reconnect with God. We need to learn how to rest as it doesn't come naturally to many of us. God knows how essential rest is to our wellbeing, he knows it is an essential part of our lives. He is the one who brought order out of chaos, he created rhythm with day and night, weeks, months, seasons, planting and harvesting, work and rest, etc. Jesus knew the value of rest, he demonstrated this to us by the way he lived. He lived out the rhythm of rest and activity. He also encourages us to find o...

Dear Friends,   I often find that when God wants me to pay attention to what he is saying, he will reinforce it several times.   It was certainly so a few weeks ago.   I had already decided to write about resting in God, based on my meditations on Psalm 23:2-3 “ He makes me to lie down in green pastures…He restores my soul;” (NKJV).   The verses that also came to mind were from Matthew 11:28-30 ‘Then Jesus said, “Come to me all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.   Take my yoke upon you.   Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.   For my yoke is easy to bear and the burden I give you is light.”’ It was these verses that God kept bringing to my attention through a variety of means.   So I’m writing this as much for myself as I am for you, dear friends. The Message paraphrases it as “The words of Jesus: ‘Are you tired?   Worn ou...

Dear Friends, I've been a perfectionist for as long as I can remember.  I used to think it was a good characteristic to have until God showed me differently.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Although I wasn't really aware at the time, I had made life all about being perfect in everything I did and this put a tremendous pressure on me.  I hasten to add at this point that this pressure wasn't from anyone else but myself.  So I was constantly pushing myself hard at school to achieve, then again when I was at university studying to be a teacher, and being very hard on myself when I didn't do as well as I thought I should at teaching practices.  As a wife and later a mother I again strove for perfection and was so critical and judgemental of myself.  I had a strict routine which I "had" to follow, so for example, Mondays were the days I had to clean my home from top to bottom, and I had set days for washing dark clothes and light clothes....