Women Are Important To God

Strong Women: May we know them. May we raise them. May we be them.

We live with less power than we have available to us. We can gain access to that power by continuing to learn who we are in Christ and then applying what we learn to how we live.

Beth Moore has said, “We can know so much more than we know”.

Women are important to God and He has a purpose for each of us and wants us to know Him more fully.

We have all experience closed doors and open doors in our life. That is God’s way of leading us. God has a plan for each of us.

11 In him we were also chosen,[a] having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, 12 in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. Ephesians 1:11-12 (NIV)

God chose us and it is through Him that we find out who we are and what our purpose is. He knew us before we knew Him and had plans for us that would give us hope and joy. He will work all things together for His overall purpose and His glory.


Paul during his 1st missionary trip was enjoying success. And then he looked to the north, south, and east but had road blocks. Those closed doors led to an open door in the west. Lydia was there and responded to Paul’s message.

Max Lucado wrote “Is Lydia the reason the Holy Spirit blocked Paul’s path? Was God ready to highlight the value of his daughters? Perhaps. In a culture that enslaved and degraded women, God elevated them to salvation coheirs with men. Proof? The first person in the Western world to receive the Christian promise or host a Christian missionary was a female.”

We are all loved and valued by a gracious God that wants us to know that we are loved. The more we learn about God and draw closer to God, the more we will realize the love He has for us.

Jack Hayford says that those who answer Christ’s call are the freed. The freed then become the freers.

He writes, “Christ’s light seem  to penetrate gradually. Boldness does not come quickly, but only as the freed learn the truth. Ongoing patterns of discovery, then, are needful–a constant challenging of old patterns of thought through growth in the truth. Ignorance is rampant, even among the enlightened. Bondage straps minds, even among the freed. There are power-releasing truths to be discovered. Truths which will become implemented as keys, as the freed become the freers.”

 When we realize what we have in Christ, we need to share it with those that need it. It is something that we should desire for everyone. It is by this process that we can take back ground that was once ours that Satan has stolen from us.

God is working. There is power within reach and if we continue to desire to have more of God in our life, we will see that power work. He won’t just give it to us. God wants us to have it but we have to want it, ask for it and seek it.

Some notes from listening to Dr. James Diehl

His Sermon was from Revelation 1, John being put on the island of Patmos. He compared it to Alcatraz. We all have our Alcatraz, our tough times we have to go through. He told us the story of losing his son to cancer. Nearly all of us will face an Alcatraz of some type. We were never promised to not have an Alcatraz, but we are promised that Jesus would go through it with us and we will survive. We do win. We do come out on the other side victorious. We may not get the answers to our why’s. We have to give it to God over and over if necessary. satan (no that is not a typo, satan is little and I have come to a conclusion that I am no longer going to consider his name proper even if it is the start of a sentence) uses our Alcatraz to try to steal our joy and we can’t let him do that. We have to keep asking God to fill us. John was in the Spirit on that island with no choir to sing to him, no music to listen to and no one to talk to but God. God came and spoke to him. If we seek God in our car, our work place, our school, etc., we can also hear from God. The Holy Spirit will talk to us in our Alcatraz. We do not have to allow satan to use our Alcatraz to steal our joy. We can’t give up even if we feel like it at times. We can have joy through Jesus Christ no matter what we go through. John didn’t die there. God will be exalted. We should exalt Him and He will work. We can be on the winning side. God is bigger than all our problems and any Alcatraz that we must face. God is good.

Life Is Not Easy

We don’t always know why things happen. God always has a reason for allowing things to happen and causing things to happen. There is always a lesson to be learned. It could be as simple as an attempt to get our attention or sparing us of something worse that could have happened. It could be to work in a situation that we may not be aware of and may never know this side of eternity. God has the bigger picture and can be trusted to use all that happens for His glory and our betterment. He is God.

God also has a way of teaching us because we don’t like to follow rules. Breaking rules has consequences. We may consider some rules to be trivial, but God tests us in little things to see if we can handle bigger stuff. Often times, if not always, we know what we did wrong.

It may be that we didn’t follow through on a promise or something we knew we should have done. We don’t always know the correlation between our disobedience and the consequences we face but we do know there are consequences to disobedience.

When things happen that we don’t want to deal with, we as humans tend to want to fluff it off and minimize its importance. God wants us to deal with things, do what is right, follow through. The more we do that, the more satisfied we will be with life, ourselves and with other people.

God will reveal the lesson to be learned if we ask Him. The quicker we learn, the less we have to face similar situations that try to teach us the same lesson. Life has consequences and we have rules for a reason. God’s rules are definitely for our protection and benefit. Following rules (especially God’s) and doing what is right always pays off. God gave us a mind and access to the Holy spirit to know the difference between what is right and our own foolishness.

Life is not easy. We get out of life what we put into it. Following God is not easy. Our relationship with God and our quality of life will amount to what we put into it. God is there. He is committed. He will not forsake us. It is our side of the relationship that falls short. The quality of our relationship is based on our level of commitment. He wants the best for us. It is our choice to accept His best or to settle for less than the best.