American roots go deep in the soil of believing. Our founding fathers were united. With one accord they trusted in God. Still on our paper money it says, ‘In God We Trust.’

Yesterday I was reading John 12. Verse 46-47 says, “I have come as a light into the world, that whoever believes in Me should not abide in darkness. And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world.”

All over the world there are pockets of revival springing up. Unbelievers are turning to Christ. May these pockets connect until they become a river that runs throughout the world–unstoppable!

Jesus only spoke what the Father spoke. O Lord. Open our ears to hear what You are speaking in this time of history. Help us hear, believe and speak out! Take our roots deeper in You so that nothing can shake them.

John 12:49-50 says, “For I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent Me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak. And I know that His command is everlasting life. Therefore, whatever I speak, just as the Father has told Me, so I speak.”

Notice how Jesus used the word ‘command’ twice. What is the command of the Father? Everlasting life. He has no desire to see anyone perish. This is our hour to speak His command–believe.

Romans 10:17 says that faith comes by hearing the word. Verse 14 says, “…how shall they believe in Him of who they have not heard?…” Let us follow in Jesus’ steps and be about our Father’s business to proclaim salvation. O Lord open ears to hear and believe.

I wrote a few posts earlier about how our roots need to continually feed on nutrient rich soil. In 2016 the Holy Spirit took me on a journey of meditating. He would wake me up in the night with a phrase from a verse or maybe one word. He would give me rich insights as I was meditating. He drew out verses from my heart-reservoir that I had memorized, or that He had highlighted through my daily reading. That is why it is so beneficial to hide God’s word in our heart.

When I got up in the morning I would type what He showed me. It resulted in 35 short ebooks in seven and one half months. He then had me compile five paperbacks, making each ebook one chapter. Each of the five are of the same topic. For instance, “Victorious Garden: true heart forgiveness” covers many aspects of forgiveness.

We can mediate any time day or night. My best time is when everything is quiet, long before my day begins. Meditating is like a sheep ruminating. They ate earlier, but their shepherd then led them to a quiet resting place so they could re-chew their earlier grazing.

Psalm 119:15 says, “I will meditate on Your precepts, and contemplate Your ways.” Meditate, contemplate, consider, and ponder are great words to express how our heart thinks, feels, and chooses. We bring His word into our mind, roll it around in our thoughts, inculcate it, and deposit it into our heart belief-bank.

This is my testimony. I love these verses. Psalm 119:147-148 says, “I rise before the dawning of the morning, and cry for help; I hope in Your word. My eyes are awake through the night watches, that I may meditate on Your word.”

Here is another favorite. Psalm 104:34 says, “May my meditation be sweet to Him; I will be glad in the Lord.”

Meditating is a deliberate action to bring God’s word from the printed page into our heart and make it our own. Meditating weaves His word like threads intertwining in fabric. His cherished words become the golden threads in the tapestry of our lives that give brilliance to the dark threads of hard times.

Psalm 107:9 says, “For He satisfies the longing soul, and fills the hungry soul with goodness.”

In the 1970’s I read a book that radically changed my life. I had no idea that I was thirsty, but I was spiritually parched. Nothing satisfied. My heart was awakened as I read “Pursuit Of God” by A. W. Tozer.

I was drawn into his prayers at the end of each chapter. They were words like this: I long to long for You more. They were words of intense longing to have more than what he already had.

For me, I had nothing. I had stuffed my emotional pain and ignored it. My ‘longer’ had been silenced. I didn’t know it was still in my unconscious, screaming out for release.

I kept myself so busy that I didn’t have ears to hear my weeping heart. If I had, I wouldn’t have known what to do. As I began to make A. W. Tozer’s prayers my own, something inside began changing. It was an awakening that was like a tight rose bud opening to the sun.

Asking the Lord to give me a desire to desire Him began a whole new segment of my salvation. I accepted the Lord Jesus as my personal Savior in 1958. I didn’t know about intimacy with Him until 1977. I had fallen head first into a six foot ravine and was bedridden. Flat on my back, no longer able to stay busy, He began to open my heart.

He wooed me from a slumbering believer to one who clung to Him with refusal to let go. I love Psalm 63:1-8. It became my daily prayer. Verse 8 in the Amplified says, “My whole being follows hard after You and clings closely to You; Your right hand upholds me.”

Emotional fillers are satan’s counterfeit-lies. Drinking deeply is the Lord’s way to fulfill the intense longings of our heart.

Psalm 65:4 says, “Blessed is the man You choose, and cause to approach You, that he may dwell in Your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of Your house, of Your holy temple.”

John 15:16 says, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.”

We are chosen to be set apart for the Lord in a deep personal fulfilling relationship with Him. No other created being has this privilege.

Buried emotional pain sets up barriers in our hearts so that our capacity to enjoy the Lord is diminished. A fulfilling relationship is two-way. It is Heart to heart communion.

Open intimacy is without fear. We desire to share all of our heart—holding nothing back. We can’t do that when we have hidden pain.

I want you to picture it like this. Down in the dark windowless basement is a room where you stuffed your emotional pain. You have starved it. It is crying out for release, but you ignore its cries.

Psalm 42:1-2 says, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” The panting is from a deer that knows it will die unless it can get to water.

That is how we are without intimacy with the Lord. Our heart dries up like a barren field. He alone can satisfy the longings in our heart. When we look to someone else or something, WE create emotional hunger.

I bit satan’s bait and was hooked on self-deception. I pretended that everything was alright, but I had a vacuum inside from broken expectations. I sought to fill that vacuum with my own efforts. My life marinated in pride-juices, therefore my motives were pride-driven.

Emotional fillers are heart idols. They are anything or anyone that we put before the Lord to fulfill our needs. Ezekiel 14 is written to Israel. We can make personal applications.

Verse 4 says, “…who sets up his idols in his heart, and puts before him what causes him to stumble into iniquity, and then comes to the prophet, I the Lord will answer him who comes, according to the multitude of his idols. Verse 6 says, “…Repent, turn away from your idols…”

Zechariah 10:2 says that the idols speak delusions and they comfort in vain. It is impossible for our emotional filler-idols to satisfy needs. If you would like to read more about heart idols, I encourage you to read my ebook, “Heart-Idols Are Idle-Worship” on Amazon.

The crux of my emptiness was that I did not have a fulfilling relationship with the Lord. He was not my All In All at that time in my life.

The Holy Spirit dropped these two words into my heart for another chapter in my book: DeFlating Pride.

In 1973 I began having horrendous headaches. Nothing would take them away. I went to a specialist who gave me a glucose tolerance test. Yes, I was having severe low blood sugar symptoms.

He put me on a special diet. No more sugar! I thought I would come unglued. Sugar was a staple in my life—I thought.

This doctor taught me to look for preservatives in the food I was buying. Fillers and additives that would keep the food from spoiling were abundant. He also taught me to look for supplements that had no fillers. Looking at every ingredient before I bought something slowed down my shopping experience.

What he didn’t teach me was to look for emotional fillers. What was going on emotionally at that time? As I think back to those years, I filled my life with as much busyness as I could. I connected my radio to the front door switch. The moment I entered my house I’d flip the switch on to produce instant noise.

I gave gifts of things I desired myself. I became what I wished others would do for me. I filled my void with anything I could find. Yet I remained unfulfilled.

The bottom line—I was emotionally empty. Pride had taught me to bury my emotional pain.

We stand in grace. It is our eternal position. Yet, we walk in His grace daily for the empowerment of our progressive sanctification.

John 17 was Jesus’ prayer just before He went to the cross. Verse 17 says, “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.” Verse 19 says, “And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified by the truth.”

Sanctify means to set apart. Walking in the truth’s of God’s word, daily applying it to our lives, exemplifying His character, and speaking truth in our hearts is our breath.

Experiential truth nourishes our spirit. Truth on the printed page is just that. We must believe the truth, and incorporate it into our thought processes. Until then, it will not bring the dramatic inner transformation needed to derail our strongholds of pride.

Our minds still have to be renewed from our old beliefs, lies, and mindsets. Those strongholds will only be destroyed through His implanted word. Ephesians 4:23 Amplified says, “And be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind (having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude).”

The Lord is Truth. John 14:6 is truth we can live in experientially because it applies to every aspect of our lives. It says, “…I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Think back to your salvation experience. You were going the way of the world, you only knew the lies of satan, and you were separated from God.

Every thought you had was futile. Each thought that came from your heart was deceitful. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” We didn’t know. We were ignorantly bound to satan’s slave block of sin.

Then one day you heard the truth. Your heart responded and you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior and made Him Lord of your life.

Ephesians 1:13 is a great description. It says, “In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in who also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise.”

You experienced a radical transformation called ‘justification.’ Romans 5:1-2 says, “Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”

Psalm 25 is one of my favorites. Verses 4-5 say, “Show Me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths. Lead me in Your truth and teach me, for You are the God of my salvation; on You I wait all the day.”

Pride does not wait but forges ahead. The heart who humbly waits on the Lord reaps countless benefits. God’s timing is impeccable.

Isaiah 64:4 says, “…who acts for the one who waits for Him.”

Isaiah 30:18 says, “Therefore the Lord will wait, that He may be gracious to you; and therefore He will be exalted, that He may have mercy on you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for Him.”

Isaiah 40:31 says, “But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up0 with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

David wrote about waiting. Psalm 27:13-14 says, “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord; be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart; wait, I say, on the Lord!”

It is good to remember that we are an open book. The ‘words’ folks around us read either exemplify the Lord, or taint our testimony. Let us honor Him through our words and actions.

One who walks in pride or humility is evidenced through their body language, their speech, and their actions. As we have seen, pride walks in disobedience with arrogant disregard to God’s word and ways.

Saul was supposed to wait for Samuel for seven days. When Samuel didn’t show up when Saul thought he should, he took matters into his own hands. As soon as he completed something in his own timing, Samuel showed up.

1 Samuel 13:13-14 says, “And Samuel said to Saul, You have done foolishly. You have not kept the commandment of the Lord your God, which He commanded you. For now the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever.

But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought for Himself a man after His own heart…because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you.”

How we error when we step out ahead of the Lord. What have you forfeited through your impatience? We do well to remember Moses’ example.

The path of obedience is strewn with grace. Therefore only the humble walk on it. We prosper when we wait for His timing. David wrote many Psalms that we can use his wording as our own personal prayers.