Eight Principles for a Joyful LIfe - #1

This is the first in a series called Eight Principles. These are things God has taught me over the last 31 years as his child. I trust these truths will benefit you as much as they do me as I revisit them.

Principle #1 - Understanding God’s Love for You will Change your Life!

Ding dong! I wiped my wet eyes and answered the door.

“Do you need help? Is there anything I can do?” The man standing there looked at me sympathetically. Embarrassed, I managed to whisper no.

After he left, I went back to bed and let the silent sobs shake my body. I didn’t want him to hear me crying again. “He doesn’t really care,” I told myself. “Nobody cares. Nobody loves me.”

Pain tore at my heart as I made a desperate decision. I got out of bed, pulled out the pills I had been saving up, and got a big glass of water. As I swallowed pill after pill, I felt relief that the pain would end soon.

But I didn’t count on God saving me from myself. When I didn’t show up at work the next day, someone called my dad who was listed as my emergency contact. I woke up in the hospital three days later and was told that I had been in a coma. If my dad had not found me, I would have died. The 80 pills I ingested would have done their work.

I lost count of the number of times I attempted to take my life, somewhere around four or five. Hopelessness and despair weighed me down like a cement coat. Counseling, careers, men, and positive thinking had done nothing to relieve the feeling that no one loved me or cared about me.

Fast forward three years. Through a series of events, I met a pastor who told me that God loved me and that Jesus could change my life. He talked to me about the sin in my life, and asked if I would like to trust Christ as my Savior. I was a 32 year old mess, and I recognized that my efforts to make life work had failed miserably. I prayed and asked God to forgive me and asked Jesus to be my Savior.

My life took a 180 degree turn, and I stopped drinking and running around with the wild crowd at work. Although I was a new person in Christ, feelings of love and joy did not immediately descend on me.

As a new Christian, I experienced a crisis in my life that drove me into God’s Word. I devoured the Bible, marking it up and going “wow.” Over and over I read about God’s love and about Jesus dying for me because He loves me. I came to see God as my Father. The Creator of the universe – my Father! Slowly it sunk in that God really did love me, and it changed my life. One day I felt something that I had never felt before. It turned out to be joy.

Joy is characterized by delight, pleasure, peace, contentment, cheerfulness. None of that described me before I met Jesus. It would take years for God to heal the hurts, the emotional devastation, and the pain of my early life. But little by little, as I continued to grow in my relationship with Jesus, joy began to replace the pain. Now joy overwhelms me as God continues to shower me with His great love. First John 4:10 says,

This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

God is the initiator in our salvation, our faith, and our continuing relationship with Him. When we fail to stay close to Him, He is constantly wooing us back. God desires to have an intimate relationship with His children. He is always there. We are the ones who pull away.

Relationships suffer in our busy, bustling, beckoning world and none more so than our relationship with our heavenly Father. We get so busy doing for God that we forfeit intimacy with Him. But our doing means nothing without a close relationship with Him that flows into relationships with others. You would think because of my background that I would understand the necessity of never straying far from God. Not so!

Several years ago I was asked to teach a session for women during an in-church retreat. I knew I should have turned it down because I struggled at that time with not just my health, but with spending time with God. I stopped journaling and reading my Bible every day. I had nothing to offer the women. Yet I said yes out of pride. What a mistake! It was a disaster, although some of the women were gracious enough to say they enjoyed it. I learned through this humiliating experience the truth of Jesus’ words in John 15:5.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.

That experience taught me that nothing is worth giving up my time with the Lord. I flounder, fail, and fall on my face when I'm far from God.

Our love for God will grow in proportion to how much time we spend with Him in His Word and in prayer. Because I often have a foggy brain from living with fibromyalgia, writing a letter to God every day helps me focus. My daily time with God consists of the following:

1. Reading a portion of Scripture, and then asking God to teach me, discipline me, or show me what he wants me to learn from that passage.
2. Writing out the passage.
3. Writing a short commentary on the passage.
4. Asking God how to put that passage into practice.
5. Confessing sin and asking for forgiveness.
6. Praying for those on my prayer list and others God puts on my heart.
7. Telling God about my hurts, worries, and desires.
8. Praising Him, often with a passage from Psalms.
9. Expressing my love for Him.
10. I end my letter with "Maranatha!" which means, "Come quickly, Lord!"

I don't believe in formulas when it comes to our relationship with God. Each person has to develop their own way of growing in Christ through spending time in the Bible and prayer. We can learn from others, but ultimately it's about making the commitment to spend time on a daily basis with our Father. He will grow us when we do that. I pray that we will view time with our heavenly Father in His Word and in prayer as a time of abundant delight, not one of duty. This is the greatest definition of joy - basking in the glow of God’s love as we sit at His feet.

Think about a human relationship that brings you intense joy. That joy grows pale in comparison to the bright joy found in Christ. The joy in Christ cheers, comforts, and gladdens even in difficult times. . .especially in difficult times.

God is love. Let's be people whom God can pour His love into and then watch as His love pours out of us to others. What a great privilege God has given us!

Thinking about Love

If I speak in the tongues of mean and of angels,
but have not love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging symbol.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but have not love,
I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor
and surrender my body to the flames,
but have not love,
I gain nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3

Henri Nouwen wrote that we have nothing to offer others if we don’t know that we are loved by God. It’s often assumed that Christians know they are loved by God. However, it is not unusual to meet Christians who struggle with not only God’s love for them, but also His goodness, faithfulness, and grace.

We must have a heart knowledge, not just a head knowledge, of God's love for us before we can pass that love on to others. God is love! We have no other source from which we can have our hearts filled with love. Think of living on a farm with one well as the only source of water. If you don’t draw water from that well and drink it, you will die. And if you don’t water your garden from that well, your crops will die. Likewise, if we don’t get our love from God’s unending well of love, we will shrivel up and wither spiritually. That means that people around us will wither too.

Because of the way my parents were raised, they didn’t know how to express love except through taking care of our physical needs. I don’t remember my parents hugging me or telling me they loved me. Until I met Christ at age 32, I thought I was unlovable. As a new Christian, I went through a crisis that forced me to dig into Scripture. I clung to verses like Romans 8:38-39, that familiar passage that tells us nothing can ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I began to believe that God truly loved me. It changed my life!

Someone gave me a plaque several years ago that has sentences all over it about what our heavenly Father says about us. I added verses to each one. Below are half of them. I’ll print the other half in the next blog. Please read these slowly and think about the great depth of God’s love for you. He sent His Son to die for us. . .what greater love is there?

Encouragement for the Journey
I love you with an everlasting love (Psalm 36:5; 103:17)
I am your provider (Hebrews 1:3)
Trust Me, I will not fail you in any way (Psalm 91:4)
Your times are in My hands (Psalm 139:16)
I hold you with My hand (Psalm 37:24:63:8
You are my child (John 1:12; 1 John 3:1)
I am for you. Who can be against you? (Romans 8:31)