When you walk with God, when you live under His control, when you are in His hands, nothing can stifle you.

God has allowed the negative, and He's going to use it to propel you. It's not evident at first because we have limited perspective.

We're like the boy who was trying to work a puzzle. He couldn't even get two pieces to come together. His father came, and after a couple of minutes, put the whole puzzle together.

The boy asked, "Dad, how did you do that?"

"Son, you were looking at the pieces. I saw the whole picture."

-- TH

So much is made of the Spiritual and the spiritual world that often the physical nature of God, who is a Spirit, is often glossed over.

Wait a minute -- or wait a "cotton-picking minute," as my dear Paw Paw Larkin used to say. If God is a Spirit, what, then, is this about God having a physical nature, anyway?

By the way, a cotton-picking minute was an arduous minute spent very carefully and as efficiently as possible removing the cotton itself from the cotton boll and then placing the cotton in a bag you were toting behind you in the field. You had to pay attention to what you were picking and how you were doing it. So, again, if you have a cotton-picking minute, I want you to do something.

TODD HORNE

The physical nature of God is man.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth".[1] Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis (φύσις), which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord.

God created man perfect and in His own image. God, a Spirit, created man as a physical being. Man was, therefore, created by God as a physical being in His own image. I believe this. I believe, just like the Bible tells us, that God created man a perfect being, forming him with his own hands from the dust of the earth, and that the Lord Himself literally breathed life into this vessel of clay He had formed. For me it is most literally an inspiring thought to know that God breathed His Spirit into a physical being He created in His own image -- me.

God's very spirit was and is residing inside my physical body, and inside your physical body, too. We each have in us God's innate disposition and his essential qualities.

My seventh-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Patterson, used to have a saying. Over and over again, she would make us say it. It ended with "because God don't make no junk." The focus of the thought was obviously that we are worth something because God made us. And, of course, that is true. But knowing that God made us IN HIS IMAGE, FILLED WITH HIS SPIRIT, and that we are like God innately and essentially takes it to a completely different and higher level.

Paul is pointing out to us in 2 Corinthians 4:16 our intrinsic and God-like value. This is the reality of who we are and the importance of life, which is everlasting -- not just in the spiritual sense, but also in the physical. So, no matter how deceptively decrepit our life becomes, even unto the point of death, we are being constantly renewed from the inside out. That's the heart of hope.

It was my dream car -- a 1969 Chevelle. It was used but it was mine. God had allowed yet another desire of my heart to become a reality. I had it a couple of years before Deb and I were married and for about a year after we were married.

What Jesus meant by those words was that everything that hinders us from following Him must be cast away. Since the days of owning that car God has changed the desires of my heart. I no longer desire things, gifts and so forth. Oh, it's nice to have those things, but my true heart's desire is that I want what He wants. When we can make our heart desire to be formed to His will, then we are following Him. Everything else we might as well consider given away.

Jerry D. Ousley is the Author of five books, "Soul Challenge", "Soul Journey" "Ordeal" "The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional" and his first novel "The Shoe Tree." Listen to the daily broadcast Spirit Bread. Find out more by visiting www.spiritbread.com
or email us at jousley@spiritbread.com

Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com CHRISTIAN WRITERS

When things are going terribly for us, we have not just the ability but the obligation to ignore the “facts” and pull our hope from the knowledge that there is a spiritual reality beyond the limitations of our senses.

Has there ever been a time when a bunch of people laughed at you? Not at a joke you made or a gag you pulled, but at you personally? Do you remember the hot indignation that lit up your face, the frustration at the way everyone else knew something you didn't, even a twinge of pain as they mocked you?

In a faith built around the impossible, hope seems to be the greatest impossibility of all: to reject the seemingly unrejectable evidence of circumstances, to dispute that our eyes tell us the only truth about the world. When things are going terribly for us, we have not just the ability but the obligation to ignore the "facts" and pull our hope from the knowledge that there is a spiritual reality beyond the limitations of our senses. What we can see and touch only provides us a partial picture. The craving of our inner beings for hope shows the rest of the picture. When that thing inside us reaches out desperately seeking something to hope in, it takes the first step toward a God who invites us into a relationship with him, an invitation to believe the impossible and shatter the dictatorship of the five senses. Do you have the strength to live that kind of hope, especially when it looks like foolishness? God is inviting you even now.

Jim Barringer is a 26-year-old writer, musician, and teacher serving at The Church of Life (.com) in Orlando, FL. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer and ExtantMagazine.com. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

By Todd Horne

In 1 Corinthians 1:26-31, Paul is in the middle of a discussion about God's wisdom. But Paul threw down the proverbial gauntlet in the previous verse saying that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."

If you are paying attention, you might think that there's not much else left to say. People who think they know more than God are sunk right then and there. Paul debunks them. Why waste any more God-given breath on the matter?

Yet, Paul does continue. Paul is not talking to non-believers. He is not trying to convert anyone here. He is talking straight to the heart of believers. Paul is attempting to sanitize believers and transform them into true disciples.

Pay attention. In these next six verses Paul teaches us one of the greatest truths of all: believers only have hope in victory if they are humble at heart because only then can they see things the way God sees them. There is no other way.

26 For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble;

31 so that, just as it is written, " LET HIM WHO BOASTS, BOAST IN THE LORD."

Some 2,000 years before Paul's message to the church at Corinth, the prophet Isaiah, writing in Isaiah 2, encourages believers by linking hope with humility as the key transforming power of God in the human heart. Isaiah links hope with humility because he knows that man, by nature, always uses the idol of self-advancement to stabilize ourselves. But Isaiah spends virtually his entire second chapter pointing out that in order to walk in the light of the Lord -- in order to replace our fallen nature-bred fear and pride with hope and humility we have to do more than just roll out of bed every morning and enter the fray of a world that stimulates itself with idols at every turn.

If he were writing in today's context as one of our contemporaries, Isaiah would tell us that as we come alive to God's promised future, which has nothing to do with corner offices, nice cars, and houses on hills or mountaintops, we dethrone our self-built, fleshly idols, and the Lord alone is exalted within us.

Isaiah looks from the beauty of the beginning, through the wreckage of history, all the way forward to the glory of the consummation of God's plan - the last days. Many believers in Christ think that we are living in those last days right now. One thing is certain: we are much closer to the last days now than we were when Isaiah penned his thoughts and related his vision. A case could also be made, and Paul certainly stated that this was his belief, that when Paul was writing his epistles and preaching to the Gentiles the countdown to the last days had begun in earnest. Another couple of things are also certain, too. God's plan and His ways have never changed, while man does not think, act or behave like God unless Jesus Christ resides in that heart.

When Isaiah forsees the last days, what does he see?

Isaiah sees the worship of God enthused over, while all the religions of man are humbled into nothing. In Isaiah’s day people located their shrines on hills and mountaintops, closer to Heaven. But God chose a measly little hilltop in the land of Israel to be the place where he should be worshiped. It wasn't impressive by the usual standards. And today the church is rarely impressive to man, which brings us right back to where we started -- 1 Corinthians 1:26. But in the latter days the nations will abandon their worldviews and ideologies and gladly give to the church as the world's leader in worship.

He is promising a worldwide miracle as the nations, far from being forced, gladly hurry to worship him and learn his ways. They set no preconditions. They are eager and open. This miracle has already begun. It started at Pentecost 2,000 years ago (Acts 2), it is going on today through Christian missions, and it will be consummated in the latter days with an overflowing river of conversions to Christ.