Category Archives: Blogs

20
Jun

Abba Father

Abba’-“Father”, also used as the term of tender endearment by a beloved child-i.e. In an affectionate dependent relationship with their father, “daddy,” “papa.” (Bible hub.com).

When I think of the word daddy I think of two of the most incredible men that I have ever known. My daddy and my husband.  I have never known a sweeter love than seeing my husband’s love for our four littles.  I also experienced that kind of love with my own daddy growing up.

My dad is still my hero.  He is definitely a one of a kind.  He’s a rancher by trade, he adores my mom, and he loves God, he’s stubborn, and he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.  But as a a little girl growing up he was my whole world.  I wanted nothing more than to make him proud, but whether we were successful or failed, on or off the court, he was there and was our biggest fan. (Well except for my mom, and for all of my teammates growing up know that no one out cheered my mom.)  He was always there for us and we fist bumped before fist bumping was cool. It was his way of saying good job, rough game, or I love you without saying a word.  He has never lied to us about our successes or failures, but he’s always there waiting with a wink and a nod or a fist bump. I love you’s may not have been said everyday, but we knew he loved us and still does.  He wasn’t a perfect dad, but he is amazing and I wouldn’t change a thing.  (And alas, I think I drove him crazy with all my talking, my never ending stories, and my unending energy growing up.)

The only time he hasn’t physically been there for us girls is when we were having our babies.  That may seem harsh, but he couldn’t bear to see his girls in pain.  But it was amazing how quickly he got to the hospital once those babies were here.  Just as I believe it was hard for God to watch his own precious son be in pain and be tortured so that we could all have salvation.  He knew the sacrifice Christ was making and He knew the pain only a parent can know watching their children hurt and die.

We see Christ praying in Gethsemane before He was crucified he called out to His daddy His Abba Father.  And He was saying, “Abba! Father! All things are possible for you; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36.)  Shouldn’t we too call out to our Heavenly Father, our Abba?

I strive everyday to have this same relationship with my Heavenly Father.  Just like my Daddy, our Heavenly Father is there for us when we fall down, when we fail, and when we succeed.  I know that God is cheering us on throughout our lives and He’s also holding us in our valleys.  Just like He was for Jesus, His son.  After Jesus was baptized we see in Matthew 3:17,”This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (NIV)  He is our father, our Abba.  Let us cling to the precious love He has for us and become the sons and daughters that He is wanting us to be.

Be bold, Be brave, Be blessed!

Whitney

15
Jun

He Walked On Our Dirt

The Bible is awesome. It seems no matter how long I study it, read it, memorize it and mediate on it, this book will forever amaze me. One of the most amazing things about the Bible I tend to forget to think about: scripture is filled with prophesies that have already been fulfilled. One of the most beautiful prophetic Scriptures is Isaiah 7:14.

“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Emmanuel.”

The name Emmanuel means “God with us.” I don’t feel like this is a totally foreign concept to many people. Regularly we ask that God go with us in our walk with Him or that God would be with someone who is suffering. During these moments I am considering the Holy Spirit to be accompanying me on my walk with Him. But in Isaiah the name Emmanuel, God With Us, is proclaiming something amazing. The God that Israel had worshipped for centuries would take on human flesh and walk on earth among us. Hundreds of years after Isaiah wrote those words, this prophecy was fulfilled when a virgin named Mary gave birth to Jesus. In Matthew’s gospel he retells the series of events that lead to the prophesy being fulfilled and then he points it out to his Jewish brothers and sisters.

Matthew 1:23 says, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel (which means “God with us).”

There are three things that catch my attention about this name when I think about God being with us. First, God walked on earth during history. We can look up specific dates in history and can identify that the God of the universe was walking on dirt roads, eating fish, laughing, and breathing the air we breathe. Historically speaking, God chose to be with us and intersected our world a little over 2000 years ago.

Second, God was human. God came, not just in the form of the Holy Spirit, to be with us. He took on human flesh, without leaving any of his godliness behind. By becoming a human He experienced so many things we do. He had emotions. He had pain. He got tired. He was tempted. He had human desires to do things his own way. Yet, he did not sin. Jesus was fully God and fully human.

Third, Emmanuel chose out of His love for us to make a sacrifice for us. In fact, God being with us, incarnate, was essential to His redemption plan for all of humanity. There would be no need for Christmas if Easter wasn’t already on the agenda in his plan for our salvation. Jesus, Emmanuel, came and experienced His humanness as He divinely offered Himself as a sacrifice. Simultaneously, out of love for us he died, resurrected and gave us each an opportunity to experience eternal life with Him.

There is a Christmas song that I listen to all year long that carries the name Emmanuel. Below is a link to this song. I love thinking about how amazing it is that the God who created the world, physically came to it in order to provide a way for us to live with Him forever. Hopefully you too will be able to experience the knowledge of God with YOU as you reflect on His name, Emmanuel.

Amy

14
Jun

Anticipation

Emmanuel means “God with us.” A baby boy was born and the prophecies were fulfilled. Christ’s coming was foretold hundreds of years before his birth and His task had been set. “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” (which means, God with us.) Matthew 1:28.

I know that while I was pregnant my husband and I couldn’t wait until our precious littles were born. When everything we had hoped for and dreamed was finally realized. Until we could see what they would look like, what their personality would be and what their future would hold. The anticipation was almost too much, until they laid each of our miracles into our arms.

How would it have been for God as He waited for the perfect time to welcome His son to Earth? Finally, as He ordained, Christ was to be born and salvation for all of His people would be soon realized upon the cross. The Israelites didn’t know that Christ would come as a lowly babe in a manger. They expected a King! What they received didn’t match their expectations, but what they couldn’t yet see was that He was in fact the savior that they had waited and prayed for. God was now with them and He was truly the fulfillment of His very name.

In our lives, He is here with us as well. We can see Him in a cancer that was healed when doctors said there was no hope, in the returning of our own prodigal sons and daughters that have been prayed for for so many years, or in a word of hope or affirmation that was given when only God heard our prayers of need. We also see him in our heart breaking moments of life like in loss of a child or a spouse, in the job promotion we wanted but didn’t get, or the end of dream that we have fought so hard for. Christ is here with us and because He was sent as that lowly babe and died upon that cross so that each of us can KNOW Him!

We all have a story to tell about how God has touched our lives in the lowliest of valleys or on the highest of mountaintops, but He is here with us everyday even in the most mundane times. I pray that each of us will start to see Him in our everyday moments and recognize His ever- loving fingerprints that He places on our lives. We, at #IKnowHIM, want to hear all of your stories from the small moments that impacted your life or the lives around you to the big moments that you felt time stood still as God moved in your lives. He is with us, for He is Emmanuel.

Be bold, Be brave, Be blessed!

Whitney

13
Jun

With Us to Redeem Us

A big part of the mission here at #IKnowHim is to share stories that reveal that God is real, God is here, and He is good.  This is one of my favorite privileges that I inherited when I became a follower of Jesus.  When I accepted God’s gift of forgiveness and made Him Lord of my life, I immediately began a relationship with the Creator of the world.  And because it is a relationship, I know that He is always with me.  I do not serve a god that remains far off and distant.  Nor is he deceased and buried beneath the ground.  He is not man-made and put on a shelf, but rather alive in every sense of the word and physically present to me at all times.  He moves in power and does big things that demonstrate His glory and goodness.

One of the names of God we see throughout the Bible is Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”  This has always been particularly beautiful to me. Matthew 1:22-23 says,  “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which means, God with us).”

Leviticus 26:11-12 says “I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you.  And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.”  Despite our sin and our depravity, God in His unchanging character remains steadfastly with us.  He chooses to be a God that is not far off, stagnant and uninvolved, but One who walks with us.  He chooses to dwell with sinners, something we see in Jesus’ earthly ministry as well.

We read in Scripture that this specific name was prophesied by Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth in Isaiah 7:14.  This is no coincidence.  The infant King’s name would reveal the majesty of heaven coming to earth after 400 years of silence from God.  The magnitude of this is beautifully explained in Philippians 2:5-11.

“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

After a spiritual drought God’s people are being told that the very presence of God dwells with them, not just His voice speaking through prophets.  Jesus stepped down from the throne of Heaven, in the most humbling form of man to be obedient to the point of death.  Even to His very own death on the cross.  Friends, God came to be with us because He is for us.  His whole purpose of coming to dwell with us was and still is to redeem us.

The name Emmanuel tells us that God is with us, always.  The cross that Emmanuel came to die on tells us that God is for us.  The fact that God sees us worth redeeming should alter the way we respond to Him, it should change the way we live.

Would people know that God is with you by the way you live your life?  Why or why not?

I will be boldly praying that our lives reflect that God is with us.  I’d love for you to join me!

—Rachel

08
Jun

Steadfast Savior

I am a wife. I am a mother. I am happy. I am tired. (Amen?!) I am all of these things now, but I have not always been these things, and I will not always be all of these things. Sometimes, I work out and decide to eat more salads. Then, sometimes I get home from said gym and eat cookie dough. I am never the same it seems, and apparently I really like change. But there is a very real part of my being that desires consistency, something constant. After following Jesus for several years, I know now that this is because I was made by a God that never changes.

This is a huge concept for me to grasp, and maybe it is for you too. No matter what is going on in the world, no matter how awesome we have been or how much we have messed up, God remains constant in His character. One of my most favorite things to meditate on is that God loves me just as much on my very best day as He does on my very worst day. !
In Exodus 3:14, God describes Himself as “I AM.” This Scripture has always intrigued me and until recently, I don’t know that I was able to really grasp the weight that this specific verse carries. In a sermon, C. Kingsley, M.A. describes it this way:

“Everybody and everything else in the world becomes: but God is. We are all becoming something from our birth to our death — changing continually and becoming something different from what we were a minute before; first of all we were created and made, and so became men; and since that we have been every moment changing, becoming older, becoming wiser, or alas! foolisher; becoming stronger or weaker; becoming better or worse. Even our bodies are changing and becoming different day by day. But God never changes or becomes anything different from what He is now. What He is, that He was, and ever will be.”*

God is the only one that can claim to be “I AM” because He is the only one that will ever just BE. He is Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End (Revelation 22:13). He is THE way, truth and the life (John 14:6). Apart from Him there is no other (Isaiah 45:6).

God alone is existential, eternal, and unchangeable. It is a powerful thing to realize that this God, this all knowing, all being, never changing God is not swayed by the things of man or enemies of Christ. And not only that He has this steadfast nature, but that He cares for us. Despite all the things He made, He chooses to love us the most. And chose to allow us alone, sinful and flawed as we are, to bear His image (Genesis 1:27). This is a privilege, friend. I encourage you to boldly walk in the truth that the Great I AM will never change in His love for you today.

—Rachel

How does knowing that God could not love you any more or any less than He does right this second make you feel? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section!

* http://biblehub.com/sermons/auth/kingsley/god_the_great_i_am.htm

07
Jun

The Great I AM

I have spoken a few times of my four kiddos, but never individually.  My middle little girl is amazing, funny, smart and beautiful, but above all else she is inquisitive! Her mind works so much like mine that I often see my mom and dad with smiles on their faces when she is pushing my buttons.  She wants and needs to know how things work and what our plans are for this minute, the next hour, and even the next week.  But the times that she asks me questions about God often leave me breathless. I have frequently had to seek counsel on how to explain something as amazing as the Holy Spirit to a five year old!  That was a few years ago, but the questions haven’t gotten any easier.  Her unwavering love of God is something to watch and I am frequently in awe of her.

A few months ago we were driving to school and the song “Great I AM” by Phillips Craig and Dean came on the radio. The last lyrics of the song repeats The Great I AM, The Great I AM, The Great I AM. After it finished I heard her say, “Momma who is The Great I AM?”  So I tell her it is God. He has many names like Jehovah , Abba Father, Yahweh, but the name “I AM” came from when Moses asked God what his name was and God replied “I AM WHO I AM.” Exodus 3:14.  She then replied , “So I can call God I AM?”  I told her yes she could.  That night when we were saying our prayers my sweet little girl asked me if she could say her prayer, and of course I said yes.  She then prayed the most precious prayer I have ever heard and it started with “Dear I AM.”  I giggled at first, but wasn’t surprised at all.  It fit her personality perfectly and in the innocence of a precious child of God she called to her Heavenly Father…Dear I AM.

I pray that each of us will call out to our Father today and run into the arms of the Great I AM.

“God said to Moses,’I Am WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.” Exodus 3:14

Be bold, Be brave, Be blessed!

Whitney