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Lessons 32-34 have to do with trusting God to provide for you. Whether it’s knowing what to let go and let God deal with, or activating his enabling grace in your life, or allowing others to be His hands to bless you … developing faith in God is crucial not only to your happiness but also your salvation.

I would love to hear how your faith in Jesus Christ has grown over the last few months. In what ways have you been blessed? In what ways have you let go and allowed God to impact your life?

Perhaps there is no greater skill we can acquire in life than learning to identify and listen to the voice of the Spirit. God continually speaks to us; the pity is that so few of us hear Him. And the reason we don’t hear Him is because we’re either distracted or have never learned to distinguish the voice of the Spirit from our own imagination or the voices of the world. Think of all the sounds, images, and information that clutter our lives. For starters, there’s television, music, newspapers, ringing phones, and the internet. There are the legitimate demands for our attention by our family, employment and friends.

One could feasibly go through his/her entire life and never learn to hear the still, small voice of the Spirit. Unfortunately, living without the Spirit leaves us to our own devices. Alone, we lack God’s direction and end up making mistakes we could have avoided had we heard God’s forewarning messages. When we go it alone, we deny ourselves the sweet peace that only the Comforter can bring.

Lessons 28-31 discuss ways you can learn to identify and hear the voice of the Spirit. As you work on this area of your life, feel free to post insights and understanding you receive here… so that all may be edified.

The only reason we want things or events to happen in our lives is because we want the feelings associated with them. Think about it … we want to feel love, happiness, success, harmony, security, romance, excitement, pleasure, or some other emotion. In our minds, we’ve identified objects, people, relationships or ideas with these emotions. For example, we might want to feel loved and we equate that with a romantic relationship. Or we might wish to feel important, and we equate that with nice clothes or an expensive car. We might want to feel successful and we equate that with a fine home.

It’s important to examine our desired emotions. Some emotions are more worthwhile than others. We should prayerfully identify and evaluate our root desires to determine which ones are worth pursuing and which are not. For example, is your desire for a fine home linked to a desire to feel superior to other people? Or is it because you equate a fine home with harmony? Everyone is “wired” differently. For example, I equate a nice orderly home with both financial prosperity and spiritual harmony. You may not see it that way at all.

Once you’ve identified your desired emotions and what they represent in the physical world, start opening up your mind to the possibility that you can feel those feelings without the physical counterparts. For example, it’s possible to feel loved without having a spouse. It’s possible to feel successful without living in a 4,500 square foot home. Open your heart and mind to the possibility that God could give you the desired feelings of your heart in a way you hadn’t considered.

Start seeking to feel worthwhile feelings as much as you can in your present environment – even if you can only feel them on paper or in your imagination. As you do this, you will draw the people, events and things to you that promote those feelings.

Also, remember to take action on your external environment in ways that support your desired results. There is a distinct correlation between our outside environment and our internal mind and heart. For example, once I realized that I equated an orderly home with success and spiritual harmony, I was able to bring my home into order and thus create that sensation of success and spiritual harmony internally. As I did this, I began to see a significant improvement in our finances and in how our children behaved. In essence, my home told me, “We’re prosperous. We take care of what God gives us, and we live in spiritual harmony.” It verified what I’d been telling myself internally but hadn’t quite believed until my eyes could see some “evidence.”
What is your “why”? The feelings you want to experience? How can you feel those feelings now?