The Personal God
Good Morning
Stand with me and lift up your bible and repeat after me.
This is my Bible.
I am what it says I am.
I can do what it says I can do.
I am going to learn how to be what it says I can be.
Today I will learn more of the word of God.
The indestructible, never ending, living word Of God.
I will never be the same.
I will never be the same.
In Jesus Name
Sometimes we need to;
Pause at the beginning of each day,
Listen to the needs of our heart,
Think about the personal relationship we have with God,
And to discover more of an intimacy with Jesus and taste His life fresh and new.
This message is a little longer than usual today because of what the Lord wanted me to share.
Amen?
Open your bibles to Proverbs 18:24 and say, “Amen” when you are there.
The second part of the verse says; “But there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
I am going to read a story to you and I will try not who to cry as I read it.
"THE SMELL OF RAIN”
A cold March wind danced around the dead of night in Dallas as the Doctor walked into the small hospital room of Diana Blessing. Still groggy from surgery, her husband David held her hand as they braced themselves for the latest news.
That afternoon of March 10, 1991, complications had forced Diana, only 24-weeks pregnant, to undergo an emergency cesarean to deliver the couple's new daughter, Danae Lu Blessing. At 12 inches long and weighing only one pound and nine ounces, they already knew she was perilously premature.
Still, the doctor's soft words dropped like bombs. "I don't think she's going to make it," he said, as kindly as he could. "There's only a 10-percent chance she will live through the night, and even then, if by
some slim chance she does make it, her future could be a very cruel one".
Numb with disbelief, David and Diana listened as the doctor described the devastating problems Danae would likely face if she survived. She would never walk, she would never talk, she would probably be blind, and she would certainly be prone to other catastrophic conditions from cerebral palsy to complete mental retardation, and on and on.
"No! No," was all Diana could say. She and David with their 5-year-old son Dustin, had long dreamed of the day they would have a daughter to become a family of four. Now, within a matter of hours, that dream was slipping away. Through the dark hours of morning as Danae held onto life
by the thinnest thread, Diana slipped in and out of sleep, growing more and more determined that their tiny daughter would live and live to be a healthy, happy young girl. But David, fully awake and listening to
additional dire details of their daughter's chances of ever leaving the hospital alive, much less healthy, knew he must confront his wife with the inevitable.
David walked in and said that we needed to talk about making funeral arrangements. Diana remembers 'I felt so bad for him because he was doing everything trying to include me in what was going on, but I just wouldn't listen, I couldn't listen. I said, "No, that is not going to happen, no way! I don't care what the doctors say. Danae is not going to die! One day she will be just fine, and she will be coming home with us!"
As if willed to live by Diana's determination, Danae clung to life hour after hour, with the help of every medical machine and marvel her miniature body could endure. But as those first days passed, a new agony set in for David and Diana. Because Danae's underdeveloped nervous system was essentially 'raw,' the lightest kiss or caress only intensified her discomfort, so they couldn't even cradle their tiny baby girl against their chests to offer the strength of their love.
All they could do, as Danae struggled alone beneath the ultraviolet light in the tangle of tubes and wires, was to pray that God would stay close to their precious little girl. There was never a moment when Danae suddenly grew stronger. But as the weeks went by, she did slowly gain an ounce of weight here and an ounce of strength there.
At last, when Danae turned two months old, her parents were able to hold her in their arms for the
very first time. And two months later, though doctors continued to gently but grimly warn that her chance of surviving, much less living any kind of normal life, were next to zero. Danae went home from the hospital, just as her mother had predicted.
Five years later, Danae was a petite but feisty young girl with glittering gray eyes and an un-quenchable zest for life. She showed no signs, whatsoever, of any mental or physical impairment. Simply, she is
everything a little girl can be and more, but that happy ending is far from the end of her story. One blistering afternoon in the summer of 1996 near her home in Irving, Texas, Danae was sitting in her mother's lap in the bleachers of a local ballpark where her brother Dustin's baseball team was practicing.
As always, Danae was chattering nonstop with her mother and several other adults sitting nearby when she suddenly fell silent.
Hugging her arms across her chest, Danae asked, "Do you smell that?"
Smelling the air and detecting the approach of a thunderstorm, Diana replied, "Yes, it smells like rain." Danae closed her eyes and again asked, "Do you smell that?" Once again, her mother replied, "Yes, I think we're about to get wet, it smells like rain. Still caught in the moment, Danae shook her head, patted her thin shoulders with her small hands and loudly announced, "No, it smells like Him. It smells like God when you lay your head on His chest."
Tears blurred Diana's eyes as Danae then happily hopped down to play with the other children. Before the rains came, her daughter's words confirmed what Diana and all the members of the extended Blessing family had known, at least in their hearts, all along. During those long days and nights of her first two months of her life, when her nerves were too sensitive for them to touch her, God was holding Danae on His chest and it is His loving scent that she remembers so well.
Author Unknown
That story was shared with me a while back and it still makes me cry when I read it. Our God is with Us before we are born and He has a purpose for each of us in life.
Now, what is the personal good?
It is for a purpose that is for the personal good and our calling by Him..
The personal good can be in our life or He may use us for the personal good for someone else. Sometimes life is tough and it is also for our personal good.
Each of us have gotten through things in life that sometimes may have seemed insurmountable.
Things occur that seem like they should never happen in our lives. We have walked through the days of life and thought we were by ourselves in what we were going through sometimes.
Many people in the Bible had tough times and also there were those who were blessed for what they went through.
We were bearing it all on our shoulders without understanding anything about why. But all the while it may be helping us in ways we do not understand until later in life.
We have habits in our lives which may cloud the walk sometimes.
Our habits are like fads. They come and go. Amen?
We need to make changes in our personal good but it is not about the fads or the diets or the clothes we wear.
Discipline is the big change that needs to be made.
Richard Foster wrote in his book, Celebration of Discipline, with this observation;
“Superficiality is the curse of our age. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people but for deep people.”
Deep people are people that are deep in the walk with God.
They focus on the walk.
Mercy Me has a song out recently called, “Grace Got You”
It starts with,
“Have you ever met those who, keep humming when the songs through.
It’s liiiike their living life to a whole different tune.
And have you seen those who, keep hoping when it’s hopeless,
It’s liiiiike they figured out what the rest haven’t yet.
The second you realize what you have inside.....
It’s only just a matter of time ‘til you.”
When we ask Jesus into our heart, life changes and He is with us all the time.
The Christian music group, “JJ Weeks band”, shared a song a while back called, “Let them see you.”,
Part of it goes like this,
“Let them see you in me
Let them hear you when I speak
Let them feel you when I sing,
Let them see you,
Let them see You in me.....”
Do people see Jesus in you?
In the story I shared about Danae, she saw Jesus and people see Jesus in her all of the time now in her life. She is happily married and the mother of three children.
She believes in the personal good in her life through the One who lives in her.
So, do I.
I encourage you to look at life a little bit differently when you realize who gives you the air you breath and the lungs to do it.
Our past is what we see and we would give anything to change it but we cannot do so. The other thing about changes now in life, is that changes are hard.
We may never know just how close God was to us throughout our lifetime here on earth, but I am sure God will be faithful to reveal it to us when we meet Him in heaven.
What does the “Personal Good” mean?
It means that whatever we long for in life, whatever we want to be, whoever we spend time with, we must do it for the “Personal Good”
The “Personal Good” is our relationship that we have with the One who gave His life for us and all of our sins. The One who lives in you with every heart beat and every breath we take.
I encourage you to never doubt God when trials come, but rather rest in His strength and remember His promise found in Joshua 1:5 "I will never leave you nor forsake you”
Let us go to the Lord in prayer.
