God’s Desire for Our Hearts in the Midst of Uncertainty | 920

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’m struggling in this. God’s desire is that our hearts would be refreshed and encouraged right now, even though on some days that seems impossible. We know that God is a god of provision. He is Jehovah Jireh, Our Provider. He is Jehovah Rapha, Our Healer. El Roi, The God Who Sees. We serve an amazing god and He has not changed during COVID 19.   Join me today, and let’s be reminded where we need to set our eyes.

Transcribed version of podcast is below.

Today’s Scripture Writing Challenge Verse

  • Colossians 1:21-23

Mentioned In Podcast

Scripture Mentioned 

  • Deuteronomy 11:13

All Things Heidi

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TRANSCRIPTION:

This podcast is brought to you by our friends at Faithful Counseling.

Hey, everybody. How are you doing? How are you guys doing? This is Heidi St. John. Welcome to the podcast. Today is Wednesday, May 6th. This is episode number 920. And today we’re going to get a little bit real about what’s going on around you and what it means to invite the Lord into every aspect of our lives. Stick around, I think you’re going to be encouraged.

So, I hope you guys are doing good. I feel like the weeks are going by kind of slow right now, like we’re just sort of hanging on for dear life and trying to just follow the Lord in the moment, and follow Him. I know you guys are doing the same thing. This has been a rough season for us for obvious reasons, a rough season for lots of you, and I am particularly grateful for the sponsoring businesses here at the podcast which really are kind of our bread and butter right now. We couldn’t produce the show without them.

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Faithful Counseling. I’ve been telling you guys about Faithful Counseling for some time now, but if you’re new to the podcast, let me introduce them to you. Faithful Counseling is a solution for people who are looking for professional counseling services but want the guidance to come from the perspective of a Christian. The counselors at Faithful Counseling are specifically chosen for you based on your situation, and we know how important that is, right?

You guys can log into your account. You can message your counselor anytime. Because the service is available online, you’ve got a wide range of professionals to choose from. And the service is offered worldwide. So, that’s pretty cool, especially during COVID-19. It’s more affordable than traditional, in-person counseling, and financial aid is available if you need it. It’s not a crisis line. It’s not self-help. It’s professional counseling done securely online.

You guys can learn more at faithfulcounseling.com/heidi. Listeners of the podcast will receive 10% off the first month. So, it’s really important that you guys use that link. It’s a very tangible way for you to support the podcast by supporting our sponsor. So, thank you to Faithful Counseling. And, boy, this is a great time for some counseling. I think I might need it. It’s been rough, you guys.

I’ve been in the middle of writing a book, and I think I told you guys last week. I kind of went through a season where I felt like everything I said online— I was being attacked. And I’m not any different than you guys. I mean, I have days that I feel like I’m doing really good and days when I’m like, “What is going on?”, and days when I feel like “Thank you, Father. I have so much patience,” and days when I wake up and I have a hard time even just opening my Bible because I’m just so tired and so emotionally tired.

I guess I want to start there today because I’m getting a lot of questions from you guys here at the podcast, which I love them. Keep them coming. You can go to heidistjohn.com/mailboxmonday, and you can turn in a question there. I’d love for you guys to do that.

But lately, I’ve been just asking the Lord to send the rain. Here in the Northwest, we get a fair amount of that. I love this time of year, you guys. It rains, and the grass smells so good. I was outside the other night, and I was just noticing how the birds are not bothered by COVID-19. The squirrels are still chasing around out in the yard, the cats out there killing the baby bunnies. This is the baby bunny killing season at my house. Horrible.

But I was reading out of Deuteronomy 11, and I thought I would share it with you because I think it’s important for us to sort of gain perspective. Deuteronomy 11, starting in verse 13 says, “If you carefully obey the commands I am giving you today, and if you love the Lord your God and serve him with all your heart and soul, then he will send the rains in their proper seasons—the early and late rains—so you can bring in your harvests of grain, new wine, and olive oil.” Deuteronomy 11:13-14

I think about the rain here in the Pacific Northwest and how important it is to us. I don’t know how many of you guys have ever visited out here, but the Northwest is a wonderland of sorts. We have waterfalls and beautiful hiking trails. Jay and I have started, in COVID-19, biking, which we’re super excited about. I’m trying to get into an exercise regimen that I enjoy. Mount Hood is right off to the east of us. Mount St. Helens graces the landscape to the north.

When most people think of the Pacific Northwest, the first thing they think about is rain. So, this was a perfect verse, because in truth it does rain here quite a bit, particularly in the spring and the winter months. But for those of us who are used to it, we don’t mind. The rain brings a blessing, and there’s nothing quite like the smell of the earth after a rainstorm. You see, the rain means that the grass is going to be green and the flowers are going to be blooming and the air is going to be fresh and clean. Rain, really, is a sign of God’s blessing.

Several years ago when my husband and I were in a season of great decision, we stood in front of a building where we’d hoped to open the Homeschool Resource Center. We were standing there with a dear friend of ours. We were crying out to the Lord for direction and provision. Together, we just stood there, and we lifted our hands to the heavens. The rain was coming down in sheets. The wind was blowing. And our friend laid his hands on us, and he prayed a prayer that I’ll never forget.

You see, after we had asked the Lord for direction, and after we had given the situation to the Lord, our friend said, “Lord, send the rain. Send the rain.” The rain he was talking about was the blessing of God. It was God’s blessing. He was asking the heavens to open up and just shower our endeavor with blessing. And you guys, this is what happened. Not two hours later we received an answer to many, many years of prayer, and the Lord provided the building which now hosts our wonderful outreach to homeschooling families, the Homeschool Resource Center here.

You guys are praying for lots of things right now. As a nation, we’re praying for our leaders. We are considering what it is that God wants us to do. We’re asking God to sustain us in times of financial crisis. We’re asking for the Lord’s blessing over our marriages and over our relationships. And the Bible teaches us that if we carefully obey the commands of the Lord, if we love the Lord our God and serve Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all of our strength … And he doesn’t say, “Do it when you feel good.”

I’m watching my friend, and actually at the time that this podcast airs I don’t even know if he’s still going to be with us. I’ve been watching my friend Jay McKinney. A lot of you are from this area, and you’ve been watching him too, in his late forties, suffering terribly with a tumor in his bowels. It’s incredibly painful to watch. I’m watching him even in the midst of his suffering, and every day he knows the Lord could take him home at any minute. He is serving the Lord. All his heart, all his soul, all his strength, all of his might. And he knows that he can trust the Lord. He knows that God is going to send the rain in its proper season.

Sometimes the rain doesn’t look like we want it to look like. Sometimes we think it comes too late. Sometimes we think it comes too hard. The rain just pours down. You see, the Lord knows all this stuff, and He asks us to serve Him wholeheartedly in whatever season of life that we’re in. The Lord’s rain is different from the rain that we are used to. His rain comes so that we can bring in a harvest of souls for the kingdom. Right? But it’s also for our enjoyment and refreshment.

So, I know a lot of us are in a season of frustration right now, and I just want to encourage you guys to look up, because God’s heart is for you. His heart is for you. His desire is that you would be refreshed and encouraged— no matter what you’re facing right now. And you don’t even need to understand. You don’t have to have a grasp on it. You don’t need to try to figure it out. I think sometimes we’re just in a season where we can’t figure it out. So, we’re working overtime.

I think that’s maybe why we get so emotionally tired. At least, that’s why I get tired. I get tired when I put myself in a position of trying to figure out something that there’s no way I can actually figure out. I think that’s when we start to get tired. That’s when we kind of move away from the direction of the Lord, and we start moving into a season where we’re relying on our own wit and our own understanding and our own knowledge. And yet the Bible says, in all our ways to acknowledge Him, and He directs our path. That’s His promise for you. So, if you’re in a season of frustration, look up, because God’s Heart is for you. His desire is that you be refreshed and encouraged.

Wherever we are right now, whatever we’re going through, we can keep our eyes on the rainmaker, and we can say, “Lord, send the rain. Send the rain.” I’ve been praying for a fresh move of God’s Spirit over our nation. Lord, send the rain in the midst of a pandemic. Send the fire of Your Holy Spirit to wake up Your church and wake up Your people. Lord, help us to walk with You.

Someone asked me the other day if I thought that our nation was in a season of judgment. And I don’t know. I don’t know what He’s doing. I don’t understand. But I can tell you, we can certainly see that our nation’s ripe for judgment, and we can certainly see how that could be the case. And if that’s the case, and if our nation is being chastised, I mean, the Lord says He disciplines who? Those he loves. We discipline our kids because we love them, and the Lord disciplines those He loves as well.

I know, because I’m watching so many of you … I mean, the internet’s a weird place right now, and I haven’t handled this whole thing with 100% awesomeness. There’s a whole lot of things that are happening right now that we just cannot wrap our heads around. I was talking to a mom the other day who is homeschooling now, and I tried to tell her, “You’re not actually homeschooling. You’re trying to do school at home in the middle of a pandemic. You didn’t plan for it. You didn’t prepare for it. You’re too hard on yourself. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

I also think let’s give each other some grace. There are some good ways and some bad ways to handle this thing, and, like I said, I haven’t handled it gracefully, graciously even at times, because just like you guys sometimes my emotions get the best of me and I struggle to say the thing I wanted to say. And I get angry, and I say the thing I wish I hadn’t said. We need to give each other some grace.

I said online the other day, after a particularly grueling day of social media, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had said I believe one way or the other, because I think there’s so much tension in the air right now and so much frustration in the culture. There’s really no winning in this environment. So, it’s good for us to remember that good people can disagree. We don’t need to be hateful. I keep thinking a house divided against itself cannot stand. So, I’m going to call us back today to a place of kindness.

We have so much to be thankful for right now, and we know that God’s a God of provision. He is Jehovah-Jireh, our provider. He’s Jehovah-Rapha, our healer. He’s El Roi, the God who sees. We serve an amazing God, and He has not changed during COVID-19. He’s not changed. He’s not different. He’s not surprised. He’s not worried. And yet, we’re in the middle of what feels like, in some cases, a catastrophic change. I’m being encouraged every day to just lean into the Lord, finish what God’s put in front of me, because just like I’m writing an actual story, an actual book right now, the Holy Spirit, our Father in Heaven, is writing a story on all of our hearts.

Just like my friend Jay McKinney said to us last week, he said, “Some people are on death row. I’m on life row,” because he knows he’s going home to Heaven. That’s where we’re all going. We want to stand before the Lord one day, and we want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” So, what does that look like? Lord show me, and then send the rain. Send the rain. The Lord says follow Him, follow His decrees and commands, and He’ll send the rain, and the rain brings blessing with it. The rain brings a blessing.

Now, I wanted to thank you guys in particular, especially right now. I mean, I’m always really thankful for the many, many of you who are over at MomStrong International with me. But we’re more thankful for it now. That ministry is literally keeping us afloat. So, we thank you so much for joining us there. Your little $8 a month’s going a whole long way. And, we’re studying God’s Word together. There’s a team that works on that Bible study. It’s not just me. I am not the one who writes all those Bible studies. I’m the one who oversees the ministry. While I’m writing books, the writing team really comes in and helps with that. Then I go through and, obviously, read through it and things like that.

I was talking to the team last week, and I was saying, “Look …” We sat down at the beginning … Or, the end, rather, I guess, of last year. And we were like, “Lord, what do you want us to do with MomStrong International this year? What is it that you’re asking us to do?” So, we do kind of a rough draft. We say, “Well, we think we’ll study this in January, and we’ll do this in February, and this is …”

So, it’s May, and we’re doing a study in Colossians. It’s called Jesus Only. I’m thinking to myself as I’m reading through, and my heart is just singing. As I wrote the introduction, I was talking about what the Lord’s been doing in my life, and I said … I asked the moms, I said, “How are you guys doing?” A lot of you are subscribing to the Bible Study, so you’ve probably already read this, but for those of you who haven’t this is what I wrote.

I said, I’ll be honest. I’ve been struggling. Thanks to COVID-19, I missed the precious opportunity to see our new granddaughter come into the world. Not four days after her birth, my mother-in-law suffered a heart attack, and we were denied the opportunity to comfort her or even advocate for her as she lay in a hospital bed in Portland, Oregon. And while I appreciated the sentiments offered by friends and family, words like “You’ll have more grandchildren, and your mother-in-law’s in good hands,” I struggled to let go of my frustration and anger. You guys, I wanted to cry. I wanted to say, “I’m not going to get this change again. Let me be a human and grieve over it.”

It kind of reminded me of the Christianese that we’re so quick to speak when we’re not going through deep water. I know, because I have done it too. Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says God is my copilot? How about the mug that says Jesus and coffee are all that I need? We say these things to be sort of a Christian mix of encouraging and casual, while we share a very real and sincere love for the Lord. But where in our lives are we functionally living with God as our copilot rather than the pilot?

We wrote in the study this month that it’s a win for the enemy when we live with a Jesus-and, like Jesus and coffee, Jesus is my copilot, so I’m a pilot and He’s a pilot, rather than walking proudly as a Jesus-only disciple. I think one of the things God’s doing right now in COVID-19 is He’s bringing us back to what’s really important. We’ve got to stop living with the Jesus-and mentality and start seeing Jesus as the only way to live.

Because here’s the thing, when we live for Jesus only, it doesn’t mean that we’re immune to the pain and suffering of this world. It doesn’t. It means that at the end of the day we know that He is our only hope. When we walk with our eyes on Jesus, the end result is that we become keenly aware of our struggles. We become keenly aware of our struggles with our own self, with our sin nature. And when we walk with Jesus, when we keep our eyes on Him only, we realize that He will not leave us in our sin; He’ll discipline us.

And I think this comes back to people asking me, “What’s going on right now?” You guys, we’ve got discipline coming. We really do. Are you feeling the effects of it? Something tells me that we all are. This brings us to a very, very timely look at the Book of Colossians, and that’s where we are in the study this month at MomStrong International. I’m so excited about it. We just started it a couple of days ago.

In the Book of Colossians, Epaphras was shouting the same morning to his church family in Colossae, and he finally went to Paul who was his mentor for backup. You see, Paul had never visited the Colossian church, but his heart ached for them. Epaphras came to faith in the city of Ephesus under Paul’s teaching. Then after he was mentored, he went back home to Colossae, and he planted a small church. Now, listen, you guys, it wasn’t a megachurch. He didn’t have the latest bells and the whistles. But it had believers who were hungry for Jesus.

Epaphras who was wise to the danger of the times was watching young believers being swayed by a Jesus-and thinking, and he was hollering to get their attention. Because of that, we’ve been blessed with the precious letter to the church in Colossae that speaks mountains of timely truth into our lives today.

So, for the month of May, we’re going to take a deep breath and dive into studying the Book of Colossians, Jesus Only. Oh, that our hearts could be in agreement. Jesus only! That’s my heart for you. It’s my heart for my family, for myself, that we would walk with Jesus only. The entire Bible Study team at MomStrong International is absolutely engaged in this passionate pursuit of God’s word that we would be Jesus-only people. God has something that he’s doing even in the midst of COVID-19. Doesn’t matter what’s happening around us. God is working in us, and that’s where we want to keep our eyes focused.

So, I hope you guys will join us over at MomStrong International. I hope that you’ll check it out. The Scripture Writing Challenge is there. There’s handwriting copywork for your children. There’s so many awesome opportunities for you to engage with us there. Then check my schedule. I’m actually going to be speaking at CHAP in Pennsylvania, barring anything happening, and I’ll be at FPEA, and there’s several things that we’re doing. A couple Teach Them Diligently conferences have been rescheduled. We are looking forward to getting back together with you guys and walking in community.

Until we meet again, until we meet again in person, let’s commit ourselves to becoming the men and women of God that God would have us be. Let’s become Jesus-only people. And when we hang onto Jesus, just like my friend Jay is showing us how, if we hang onto Jesus, the world really does pale. It grows dim, because we see that he is really all that we need. So, hang in there, you guys. We sure love you.

If you’ve got questions and you want to address them here to me at the podcast, you can fill out the form at heidistjohn.com/mailboxmonday. Also, there’s a speaking form there at heidistjohn.com. Just go there, check it out. We’ve got a brand new shirt in the store right now. It says “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.” This is the motto of my life, and I’m hoping it will become the motto of many of your lives as well, that your faith would be a faith that speaks. Thanks for listening, you guys. I’ll see you over at MomStrong International, and I’ll see you back here with my friend Dr. Kathy Koch on Friday.

 

Write to Heidi:
Heidi St. John
c/o Firmly Planted Family
11100 NE 34th Cir, Vancouver, WA 98682

Support this ministry by donating through E-giving. You can also send donations to: 11100 NE34th Cir, Vancouver, WA 98682

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About Heidi St. John

Heidi has been married to her husband Jay since 1989. Together they have seven children and three grandchildren! The St. Johns homeschooled their kids all the way through high school. Heidi is the the author of seven books, host of the popular podcast "Off the Bench," and the founder of MomStrong International, an online community of women learning God's Word and how to apply it to every day life. She and her husband Jay are also the founders of Firmly Planted Family and the Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center, located in Vancouver, Washington.