Devotional for friends // Devocional para as amigas

Can you choose to be   Joyful? (Full of joy) Peaceful? (full of peace) Patient? (full of patience) Kind? (full of kindness) Good? (full of goodness) Faithful? (full of faith) Gentle? (full of gentleness) Generous? (full of generosity) Self-controlled? (totally self-controlled) Can you choose to be like that all the time? To everyone?   What other religion would promise you that? I am not saying that all Christians are like that all the time. No, we are not, unfortunately. However, we are prone to be more successful than others, do you know why?  When Jesus was lifted to the heavens after his resurrection, he promised that a few days later, His Spirit would come to live in us. The Holy Spirit is our helper. When we live a godly life, a prayer life, and are filled with the Holy Spirit, those are the characteristics that should be seen in us—if not all of them, at least most of them.  Would you like to live like that? To treat people like that? Well, I suppose so. ...

Everybody has what looks like a perpetual problem. Most likely, the problem is inside your family.     I can assure you it is a relationship kind of problem. Most of our problems have to do with someone else. I don’t know what you think about that person. But I am sure that you think that you are right and that person is wrong.  Have you read The Sermon on the Mount? It is written in Matthew 5 – 7. The majority of what Jesus is talking about is about relationships.  He started saying that God cares about even the most vulnerable people in the world. He has prepared a special place/reward to those who struggle during their lifetime. We all struggle during our lifetime. We have good seasons and not-so-good seasons. We have abundance and sometimes we are in need.  Today, people need relationships—good, durable ones, relationships in which they can trust the other person. The statistics are horrific. The number of people who are lonely, depressed, and...

  Anxiety   It is a prison. It captures your thoughts and keeps them in a vicious cycle of insecurities and a false “need to know,” as if you could control the things that will happen, but then comes the insecurity because you can’t know the future.    It is a prison.  There is a way out. Instead of believing that you will be able to foresee the future and control all the variables, why not believe in the one who has prepared your future? Knowing that He loves you very much and that everything you will go through will be for the best, even when it doesn’t look like it. Because in the end, He has won all the battles; if you only trust Him, you will have peace, and the future won’t bother you anymore.    Jesus is the Way out of this prison. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” You may think, but I don’t believe in Jesus or in God, and I tell you, but you do believe that anxiety will tell you the future and you will control it, don’t you? Don...

    "O fardo mais pesado que carregamos são os pensamentos em nossa cabeça." Troubles. Troubles with people, places, troubles in our minds, within ourselves. All kinds of troubles. We all have them. Sometimes, people say things to us, and we get sad or even disappointed, and we take this disappointment with us and carry it everywhere we go. We let those false words define us. And we end up believing in those words.    Then, when we don’t remember why or when we became like that, we blame God. We start believing that God doesn’t love us, we believe that God made a mistake with us, and we believe that God won’t accept us because of what we believe that we are. We carry those disappointments and let them define us, and we don’t even remember the source of that sadness and anger. A lot of feelings start boiling inside our hearts, and thoughts come flooding into our minds, and we feel lost, insecure, forsaken, unloved, and forgotten, and then, instead of searching for our...

  You know, we want to believe that we are wise in our own eyes. Then, God sends a test. And then what happened? We fail. Why do we fail? Because we believed that we were wise. We trusted in ourselves. We thought that we had been through enough to know what was right, what was the best alternative, the best response, the best… and then what happened? Our humanity happened. Our pride comes in and messes with everything. We think we are too good to be true, right?   Some people believe that saying that God tests us is wrong. But He does, and He does all the time. Why? to break our pride, to fix us, to show us His power—what else?   I have at least eight verses here saying that God tests us.   I have asked myself this question so many times: Why did God put those two trees in the Garden of Eden? Didn’t He plant a trap? Maybe. Didn’t He know that the devil would come in serpent form to test those humans? He did. Then, why?   Well, the test was this: where are you le...