BeyondSeeLevel

Psalms 69:16
Answer me, Lord, out of the goodness of Your Love; in your great Mercy turn to me.

Lord, I thank You For being a God that informs, instructs and admonishes your children out of love. I thank you for being a listening ear. I thank you for hearing the concerns of our hearts. Lord, help me to approach Your throne in humility, always seeking to hear Your answer–and not my own answer. I know that You will always lead us in the paths of righteousness for Your name’s sake. And because You love us, You always seek our good. Help us fully trust in Your precious promises and your answers for our lives. You are a trustworthy Savior. We will not lean unto our own understanding, but we will fully trust You for guidance in our lives unto death.

In Jesus’s name I pray

Amen

*Tressa Jo

For You are my hope; O Lord God, You are my confidence from my youth. By You I have been sustained from my birth; You are He who took me from my mother’s womb; My praise is continually of You. Psalm 71:5-6

Lord, I thank You before being my Father and my God. You are such and awesome God, and worthy to be praise. Thank You for loving me in spite of me. Thank you for using me as a vessel for Your glory. Thank You for creating me on purpose and with purpose. Help me to always recognize any walk in my identity, value and worth in You, God. Help me resist the world’s attempts to conform me and assign me its identity and draw me away from You.

Thank You for being my hope. Thank You for not leaving me to what I only can see in this life. Thank You for Your precious promises for eternal life with You in glory forever. Forgive me for putting my hope, faith and trust in things of the world. Help me to hope in You always.

Thank you for being my confidence. I have no fear. I boldly walk in Your Light, fully trusting Your strength and power. Even when I’m in the valleys of life, I’m confident that Your power will cover me and protect me. Thank You for never being intimidated by any force of darkness or any storm that comes into my life. You are All Powerful! You are my strength and my refuge! And even when I’m too weak to do anything for myself, You tell me in Your Word that Your strength is made perfect in my weakness. Thank you Lord for that! I don’t have to know it all. I don’t have to have it all. I don’t always have to have strength. For when I am weak, then You are strong. Help me learn how to be weak in You and not lean to my own understanding or trust my own strength. Help me submit to Your guidance for my life in everything.

Lord, You’ve sustained me from my birth. And You sustain me now! You sustain me! You’ve kept me in times when I didn’t even have enough sense to know I needed to be kept! Bless Your holy name!!

You are simply an amazing God! There’s none above You! Thank You for calling me out of this dark world into Your marvelous Light. Thank You for working in me, both to will and do what pleases You. Any and everything good in me, is because of You, Lord. And I thank You. Thank You for being mindful of my most pitiful self from the beginning of time. Thank You for affording me this opportunity of a life time to share in the likeness of Your Son, Jesus! I pray that You increase my appetite to love You, to worship You, to serve You and to praise You all the days of my life.

In Jesus’s name I pray,

Amen

*Tressa Jo

It’s obvious that the martial union is under attack by the devil. The devil knows that marriage between a man and a woman was Divinely designed by God to exemplify His love and relationship with His bride, the Church. No wonder there are so many divorces among children of God. It’s a direct attack against the Kingdom of God.

We know that the enemy attacks from the outside-in. He seeks to use worldly systems to infect the heart of our marriages. (Primarily in the before marriage stages) He uses perverse agendas to deviate people of God away from biblical and godly stewarding of their marriages. In other words, he convinces us that we can infuse our marriages with the ways of the world and still manifest God’s design. He blinds us to the fact that the world’s systems may feel good to us, but they aren’t good for us. And they surely won’t bring God any glory.

What happens when the forces against us and our marriages aren’t coming from the outside, but they’re actually coming from the inside–not spouse against spouse, by self against marriage? What happens when you have a blessed union, but your inner man is opposing what God has put together?

The world isn’t against your marriage. You are! You may have good intentions. But consider for a moment that you may actually be a problem within your marriage. One ploy of the enemy is to consume you with the beam in your spouse’s eye so that you can’t see the plank in your own.

Does finding the “me” in the mess of your marriage mean that you exonerate your spouse of any wrong doing? Absolutely not! What it does is open the door for you to work on you and your marriage at the same time. You can’t have a better marriage without becoming better individuals.

The reality is that all marriages aren’t ending in divorce because of infidelity, abandonment or abuse. Many are ending because the “I” is bigger than the “us”. Whenever the “I” is bigger than the “us”, one or both are being lead by a spirit of individualism, pride and self-centeredness.

What if your mindset about marriage is the problem? What if how you see your spouse has created an unfair and unreasonable approach toward your spouse and your marriage? Could your reasoning be part of the problem even when your behaviours aren’t?

Consider these two thoughts: (there are more):

>You must manage your expectations of your spouse.
>You must make sure that God is your primary source for fulfillment and sustainment.

“Manage your expectations.”

Make sure that you’re not expecting your spouse to be something for you that they shouldn’t be. Too often, we hold our spouses responsible for what we’re responsible for — our happiness, our peace of mind, our emotional wellness, our self-esteem, etc. Your spouse affects and influences these things. They are not responsible for them.

Make sure that you’re not expecting your spouse to be for you what somebody else is for their spouse. Many of us have taken Satan’s bait of fantasy. We’ve fantasized about the perfect mate and the perfect spouse so long that we’ve made it impossible to enter into any relationship with realistic expectations.

We look at the movies, read the books and listen to the love songs and use them as references as we map out the future for our relationships. Then we look at images of the happy couple next door or on the television and say to ourselves “I want that kind of love.” #RelationshipGoals #PowerCouple

As we continue to gaze on the lives of others and fantasize about what could be, we pull ourselves farther and farther away from reality and contentment. And we don’t even realize that we’ve embraced our spouse with an expectation that they’ll eventually be the culmination of those we’ve imagined and fantasized about for years. You didn’t marry your spouse. You married your fantasy and imagination. Now you blame them for your disappointment for not measuring up to what’s in your imagination.

“And make sure that God is your primary source for fulfillment and sustainment.”

God should be your primary source for every level of emotional, mental, and spiritual health and stability. You set yourself up for disappointments when you transfer that responsibility onto your spouse. Your spouse is your partner, not your God. And remember, they’re just as human as you are.

The Bible teaches us that “every man is right in his own sight”. Walk with a humble spirit in life and in your marriage. You both are works in progress and subject to be wrong, even when you feel you’re right. Pray and ask God to show you “YOU”. Especially, when your relationship with your spouse is strained. God may reveal to you that you’ve been submitting your spouse to Him to fix, but you haven’t been submitting your own heart to God to fix.

Marriage is a beautiful thing. It’s a holy union.  Marriage can bring out the best in you. But it can also expose you to the worst in you. Submit yourself to God. Then submit your marriage to God. You can’t expect God to work on your marriage when you won’t allow Him to work on you first.

*Tressa Jo

When I was younger, I remember distinctly being able to hear the birds chirping in the morning and throughout the day. I paid attention to them. It was easy. As I child, I spent lots of time outside playing. I was carefree. I didn’t have many worries or responsibilities then. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that I don’t hear the birds as distinctly as I used to. I see them all the time, but I don’t hear them. As a matter of fact, for the longest, I haven’t paid much attention to them at all, unless they poop on my car.

I realized that just because I don’t hear the birds, doesn’t mean they aren’t chirping. On Saturday mornings, I wake up but lay in the bed for a while. My home is surrounded by trees and when the house is still and quiet, I hear the birds loud and clear. And after I hear them, I pay attention to them. I can hear the different ranges of serenades from the outside.

Of course this had me thinking. When life speaks to us, what distractions in life have made it difficult to hear? Life around us and in us is communicating with us constantly. But what are we actually listening to? What are we sitting still long enough to actually hear? Are we too busy and distracted to hear what we need to hear because we’re too consumed with life?

It’s interesting. Once the house wakes up, the sounds of the birds seem to become more distant and faint. It’s not the birds that shift that makes them become distant. It’s my attention that shifts. The birds are still there. They’re still singing and chirping. But I’ve stopped paying attention to them.

Sometimes in life, we become so cavalier with those consistently around us, it’s easy for their voices to get lost in the crowd of life’s distractions. We hear them talking but we’re not listening. Why? Perhaps familiarity breeds contentment. We’ve become so used to the voices that we’ve stop paying attention to what’s being said. Unfortunately, too often, desiring to hear that voice won’t become a priority until that voice is no longer around to speak.

What about God’s voice? He speaks all the time. But do we hear His voice? Or has His voice been lost in the daily chaos of our lives. Has the voice of God become so familiar to us that we can no longer distinctly hear Him? Are we able to decipher His voice from another’s? Are we even paying Him any attention? Are we sitting still long enough to hear what He wants to say to us?

My sheep hear My voice. – John 10:27

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. – Luke 5:16

…Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
– Luke 6:12

*Tressa Jo