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T.O.D.A.Y.'S ENCOURAGEMENT for Aug. 29, 2008
Good
Morning! It
is my 'joyful expectation' that Luanne will be back with us sometime next
week. What a blessing that will be! But since this may be the last
Encouragement that I will write for her, for a while anyway, I just want to
take a line or two to thank all of you for bearing with me as Luanne healed.
I appreciate all the kind words that you have sent to me while I was filling
in for her. It has been an honor and a privilege. I
want to begin discussing the "blessings" aspect of renewing our
CHOICES daily. I looked in my thesaurus for some synonyms so that we can
understand what a "blessing" really is. Here are just a few:
advantage, benefit, bounty, favor, gain, gift, Godsend, good fortune, help,
and kindness. These are the kinds of things we are expecting when we
CHOOSE BLESSINGS and not curses as we renew our decision to stay on the
path that God has chosen for us and we CHOOSE LIFE and CHOOSE BLESSINGS. Jesus
gave a powerful speech in Matthew chapter 5 in the Sermon on the Mount. These
are known as the Beatitudes. I encourage you to read it. It starts at
verse 3 and runs through verse 12. He talks about WHO will be blessed,
and HOW they will be blessed. Ezekiel 34:26 promises "showers of
blessing". Proverbs 28:20 says, "A faithful man will be richly
blessed…" My personal favorite is in Isaiah 44:3 where God
promises, "I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my
blessing on your descendants." When
God was establishing his Covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, He promised to
bless Abraham and told him that all the people on earth would be blessed through
him. And WE are heirs of that Covenant today! And so we know that
blessings are not just to be received. Blessings are to be bestowed as
well. In Acts 20:35 Luke reminds us of Jesus' words, "It is more
blessed to give than to receive." We can BE THE SOURCE of blessings
to others, and in so doing, reap a greater blessing! I think that is
part of the CHOICE I make every morning as well. I make myself available
to God to use me to bless others as He directs. It happens almost
automatically, I don't really even think about it. We've all held a door open
for someone behind us or bent to pick up something that another person
dropped. We think of them as courtesies or 'just being polite' . . . but
to the recipient of such acts, it is a blessing. Sometimes it's something a
little bit bigger. I remember a day when I was in a restaurant with my
daughter. I saw her looking at an older gentleman who was sitting by
himself. Suddenly she got up in the middle of her meal with her purse
and left the table. When she came back, she said she had just felt
''called" to pay for his meal. She had written "From a very
blessed child of God - Have a nice day!" on his paid receipt. We
will never know what her act of kindness did for him or how he reacted to it.
But I'm glad she did it. We should all hope to be that sensitive to the
Spirit's call. Yield to that urge to do something nice for someone else when
it comes! It's just the Holy Spirit wanting to bless someone through
you. Have
a Blessed Day!!
(We have been Blessed to BE a Blessing)
In His Love, Luanne's Friend Judith
Luttrell “A
pen of a ready writer” for T.O.D.A.Y. Ministries Psalm
45:1
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