Vision - Past, Present, Future Archives - Page 2 of 6

April 20, 2016 by Laura Diehl 2 Comments

Why Does a Good God Allow Pain in Our Lives?

Basically we all want a pain free life if we are honest. Why doesn’t that seem to be God’s way? Especially if He is such a “good” God?

I’ve been hanging out in Isaiah a lot lately. The passage in Isaiah 48:10, “I have purified you by giving you troubles,” is a loaded statement.

What? God gives us troubles?

Later in Is. 66:9 we read, “ ‘In the same way I will not cause pain without allowing something new to be born,’ says the Lord. ‘If I cause you the pain, I will not stop you from giving birth to your new nation.’ says your God.”

There are a couple of key parts to that verse.

1) Pain comes in birthing. (For sure!)

2) He will not stop us from giving birth. (That’s a huge relief, if you have ever been in labor before!)

We often think life is supposed to be pain free if we are really walking with God, but clearly God doesn’t see it that way.

He always offers a plan in our pain. Not only that, He suffers with us in our pain.

And there’s more! He always offers to birth something that brings new life, if we don’t give up! Wow! That is amazing! Only God can bring life from death! And may I remind you, He has lots of experience and does it quite well!

God says He will not stop us from giving birth, but I wonder if we stop ourselves sometimes. We go out of our way to stop the pain, to stop whatever is happening from continuing, not realizing we are actually sabotaging ourselves by trying to stop a birthing process.

If we choose to see things our way, we risk the forward movement He has planned for us.

Is. 50:10-11 says, “Who among you fears the Lord and obeys His servant? That person may walk in the dark and have no light. Let him trust in the Lord and depend on his God. But instead, some of you want to light your own fires and make your own light. So, go, walk in the light of your fires, and trust your own light to guide you.”

Once we pray and put something in God’s hands, He is at work, whether we can see it or not. We can trust Him, and depend on Him. God has never lost a battle He has entered, and He isn’t going to start with your battle.

Remember, God created Satan and his minions. They were flicked out of heaven because of rebellion and pride. Good and evil is not an even match. Sometimes we forget that, because of the result of evil affecting our lives. We think God and Satan have the same amount of power, and it is a wrestling match to see who wins.

God ALWAYS triumphs! We just have to let Him use His own battle plan, and surrender to it, instead of making up our own (because it doesn’t make sense to us in our painful situation). Starting our own fires and trusting in our own light to guide us will really take us off course, and make things even worse in the long run.

Let me just say, if I could make sense of God and figure Him out, I would actually be really disappointed and lost, because then He wouldn’t be big enough to be God!

Have you EVER asked God to cleanse and purify you? (That question makes a couple of worship songs come to my mind immediately, that I know I have raised my hands to and sung from my heart as a prayer to Him.)

Then guess what? As Isaiah 66:9 says, He doesn’t allow the troubles we go through to be wasted in our lives. He uses them to purify our hearts. Fire is a purifier. He is actually answering your prayer of purifying you.

I talk about this in my book Triple Crown Transformation.

For all my adult life, I have told God to do whatever He wants to do to get me where He wants me to be. Many years ago, I was praying about a situation I wanted God to fix.

He asked me, “Which prayer do you want me to answer?” I had to ask Him what He meant.

He replied, “You have always told me to do whatever I wanted to do, to get you where I want you to be. I want to use your situation to answer this prayer. So, do you want me to answer the prayer you have been praying for years, or do you want me to answer the prayer to fix this situation?”

I surrendered, and told Him to do whatever He wanted to do, to get me where He wanted me to be.

Surrender to His process. Surrender to His plan to birth new life through you. Don’t stop your birthing process because of the pain. Don’t make your own fires to guide yourself.

Allow God to use the pain you are experiencing to purify you, and to birth something new in your life.

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

March 23, 2016 by Laura Diehl Leave a Comment

From Death to Life When Tragedy Strikes

Have you ever faced a tragedy, finding yourself in a very dark place as a result? You are confused, broken, in despair, and lost?

I have, more than once. (And many of you know about some of those experiences from my book Triple Crown Transformation.) But the one that left me in the deepest, darkest pit by far came from the death of our oldest daughter.

Many professionals say that experiencing the death of one’s child is the greatest trauma a person can face. Those who have faced the death of their spouse, a sibling, or other losses and have also faced the death of their child, say losing their child takes them to a much deeper darkness than other losses, and it lasts so much longer.

When Becca died (you can read about her story by clicking here), I didn’t know anyone who had lost a child, and had no one to guide me through the darkness that made me think I was going crazy. I started reading books from other parents who had experienced the loss of a child, and most of them seemed to carry the message that our lives are forever a black mess we can’t get out of.

I would read how angry and bitter these parents were; just waiting to die so they could rejoin their child.

I would read how their living children would say they also lost their mom when their sibling died.

This just wasn’t acceptable to me.

I knew I had the seed of Hope living inside of me. I knew I wanted to be part of the lives of my other children and my precious grandchildren. I knew God still had a calling on my life, with a purpose.

So I fought!

I grabbed ahold of God with everything I had, and I fought. It took months, even years, because of how deep and dark that pit is when you have to bury your child. Sometimes I would feel the Lord reach down and help pull me up a bit, and other times I felt like I was fighting and clawing to the next foothold on my way up while He was under me, giving me the boost I needed.

It was messy, it was difficult, and it was painful beyond words. But I was victorious, because God’s specialty is bringing life from death!

Let me say that again. God’s SPECIALTY is bringing life out of death!

ANY death, when put in His hands, will birth life!

And not only did I receive life, but during the battle, the Holy Spirit taught me so many things about myself, and about Him. Things about how I was living out of a false identity. How I didn’t really know how to live from a place of resting in Him. How I had a deeply rooted sin of judging the heart and motives of others, and would try to manipulate them into doing what I thought they should be doing.

So not only did He bring me through the fire, He lovingly refined me in the process.

I must share that I still have the pain of grief. I will always feel my daughter’s loss deeply, and my life will never be the same with her gone from this earth. But I have life again, beyond her death. And it is a life richer in God’s love than I could have ever imagined.

If God can do this for me, He can do it for anyone. He can do it for you. He can do it for other parents who have lost a child from this earth through death.

And that is now a passion I have; to reach out to those parents behind me who have been thrown into that deep black pit, and offer them a hand of hope. I didn’t have anyone to do that for me, and I don’t want that to happen to anyone else on this dark horrible path of the death of a child.

About a year and a half ago, I woke up in the night with the title of a book (When Tragedy Strikes) and many of the chapter subjects. I got up and wrote everything down. It seemed the Holy Spirit was directing me to write a book, so I started. My plan was to learn how to publish the book myself, having no intent of pitching it to any publishers.

Apparently, God had His own plan which I wasn’t aware of. In February of last year, Dave and I were at a conference in San Diego, where I met David Hancock, who is the founder of Morgan James Publishing. We had a conversation, and by the time we were done, I had his business card with a request to send him what I had written so far with the book I had started.

Five weeks later, I was offered a book contract, and signed it on what would have been Becca’s 33^rd birthday. I am still in total amazement of this!

I never knew how much work is involved in writing a book and getting it published. And unless you are already a big name person with a huge public following, the greatest part of the leg-work of promoting and marketing a book falls on the shoulders of the author. And when you think about it, no one else is going to have the heart and passion for what was written on the pages more than the person who wrote it, so it makes sense that the author should be the strongest promoter.

SO…. In my passion for getting this message of hope and healing to as many hurting and grieving parents as possible, I am putting together a team of people who want to help.

I am seeking those who firmly believe in the power of unity! Those who know how God can move mightily through a group of people who are moving as one in Him, sharing His message of hope and healing.
I am looking for those who hate seeing the darkness Satan keeps people wrapped up in, and want to shatter that darkness with the light and life of the Risen King.
I want people who carry that seed of Hope within them and want to help me plant it in these precious ones who have lost their hope when they lost their child from this earth.
I need to be connected with those who have a passion to give others a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a mantle of praise instead of a spirit of despair and heaviness (Isaiah 61:3).

If that is you, please click here, to find out how to join our When Tragedy Strikes Book Launch Team. There will be lots of benefits, including a free pre-release copy of my book.

And if you are a bereaved parent, let me first say how very sorry I am! You have my heart, as we have an instant connection. I would be so honored, and absolutely love to have you join us on the launch team.

We are here to be a light of hope, in a time of deep darkness for those who have been shattered by the death of their child. Please help us spread that light of hope!

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

March 9, 2016 by Laura Diehl Leave a Comment

How Can I Get Hope When I Don’t Have Any?

How do you get hope when you don’t have any? That’s a huge dilemma, isn’t it?

When our oldest daughter died, I found myself in a place of depression, blackness, and hopelessness. As I kept crying out to God for help, He not only brought me out of that place of hopelessness, but He used it to birth the ministry of GPS Hope and turned me into an author. (I wrote four books within 13 months, and it hasn’t stopped yet as I have almost completed book number five!) I now have a passion to bring others out of that place of hopeless darkness and into hope, light, and life.

You may be surprised, but there are actually many things we can do to open the door to hope in our lives. In this article, I am only going to talk about four of them. They are things you probably already know in your head, but I am praying after reading through this, you have a new revelation of them in your soul that you will act put into action.

Find things to be thankful for
Don’t be a slave to your grief
Connect with others who have hope
Take care of yourself

1. Find things to be thankful for.

As Christians, we are told so often to be thankful that we tend to tune it out. But it is so true! I have been in some extremely dark situations over the years. (I share some of them in Triple Crown Transformation.) My discovery over the years is that when I force myself to find things to be thankful for, it may not bring an immediate response to my soul; but as I continue and I build on it, a spark of hope begins to stir inside me.

Here are some suggestions on practical ways to make sure you find things for which to be thankful to God.

Keep a small notebook by your bed. Every night before lying down, write at least five things you can be thankful for. It might be a big event you were blessed to be a part of. It might be something as simple as, “I woke up today and got out of bed.” Hearing your children laugh, you have a place to live, you had money to get a haircut, you got to eat your favorite meal; these are all things to thank God for. It doesn’t matter how trivial others may see it. This is not for anyone else but you!
Set a timer for every hour or two hours. When it goes off, pause for a few seconds to thank God for something.
Before getting out of bed, take a minute to give a prayer of thankfulness to God. Be specific, and once again, it doesn’t matter how “trivial” the things you share with Him may seem. Start at whatever level you find yourself.

2. Don’t be a slave to your grief.

If you feel hopeless about a situation, there is probably grief involved. You have lost something important, whether it is a life-long dream, your financial circumstance, a job, an actual person, etc.

Any kind of slavery steals hope. When you’re hopeless, you are lost and in bondage.

May I present to you the thought that there is a difference between grief and self-pity? It is normal to have an initial shock, numbness, anger, intense sadness (or other negative emotions) to a deep loss of some kind. But there comes a point where it can cross over from grief to self-pity. The loss becomes our identity, and we let people around us continually know what happened to us. Some people identify this as a victim mentality. We allow ourselves to become a hopeless victim of the circumstance.

If this has happened to you, you need to make a conscious decision, a determined effort, to let go of how the loss wounded you. This includes obeying the command to forgive anyone involved in this unjust loss. (I address the struggle of forgiveness in a two part article, Giving Yourself the Gift of Forgiveness.) It is not a decision based on how you feel. It is a decision based on how you want to get out of the darkness and into a place of hope, and will do whatever it takes to get to that place.

Then you need to replace those lying negative thoughts in your head.

Find scriptures that speak hope (I have made a list which is available in our free GPS Hope Members Library). Copy them and post them in prominent places.
Find sayings that speak hope and life, and once again, copy them and post around your house, in your car and your work area.
When negative images come into your mind, force yourself to imagine the opposite. See pictures of yourself doing something full of life that you want to be able to do in the future.

3. Connect with others who have hope.

I cannot stress enough how important this is! The saying, “Misery loves company” is so true. If you spend your time with others who are in darkness, you are going to stay in the dark. If you spend time with others who are in the Light, it is going to shine into your darkness, giving you the beacon of hope you need.

Here are several suggestions to guide you in this.

Stay away from negative people! Remove them from your social media platforms. Don’t stand around and talk to them at church (yes, I said at church). Don’t sit with them in the breakroom at work. (I highly suggest doing this as discreetly as possible, not with some announcement that you are getting rid of the negative people in your life.)
Find generic Facebook pages (or other social media platforms) of Christians who have a calling and anointing on their lives as encouragers. (People like Joyce Meyers, John Maxell, Lisa Terquest, Max Lucado.)
Connect with people who have overcome in the specific area you are struggling in. There are many people who are throwing out a lifeline to those around them. They are on social media, writing books and blogs, making podcasts, putting videos on YouTube, and all kinds of other places.
Find a group of people who are walking in the Light, and plug in to it. (Organizations like Celebrate Recovery is a great place to start.)
Look for conferences and retreats. There is something about getting away where you can focus on allowing God to bring the hope you need through direct ministry, and time with the Holy Spirit. It catapults you in a way like nothing else seems to do. Ask God to lead you to the right event, and pray for Him to provide the finances, if that is an issue.

Obviously, making a choice to do these things means you have to put in a bit of effort. And once again, you might not see immediate results. But if you keep putting yourself in situations where you are seeing, hearing, and reading about life and light and hope, it is going to begin to draw you out of your hopelessness.

4. Take care of yourself.

The two things I am going to share may seem contradictory, but hear me out.

Exercise. This is something I fought for a long time. When you feel hopeless, discouraged and depressed, it can often be the last thing you want to do. I have been to the place where I didn’t have the emotional or physical energy to exercise, even if I wanted to (which I admit, I did not want to).

It has taken me years to have a recent breakthrough in this area. I believe it is because once hope started trickling in, it gave me the desire to want to take care of myself. It still took months for the desire to turn into a committed decision that I am actually following through on, not allowing how I feel to dictate what I do, or don’t do. I started out doing very little. Just 20 minutes of light exercise while listening to an encouraging podcast. However, the combination of the exercise and positive input has pushed me to a new level of going from just having hope, to anticipating what God has for my life.

You need to rest. Not just a physical rest, but an emotional rest along with it. When our daughter died, I spent countless hours in my prayer room, learning how to just rest in the loving arms of my Father God. The writer of Hebrews tells us to work hard to enter into a place of rest (Hebrews 4:11). I will confirm with my own experience, it is work, but it can be done. Learning to rest in God will bring hope into your life like nothing else can. The only way to receive this precious gift is to just do it. Make time for it. Keep at it. Don’t give up. To learn how to live life from a place of internal rest, peace and contentment, no matter what comes your way, is a valuable treasure worth the fight!

As I said at the beginning, there are actually many things we can do to set ourselves onto the path of hope. Please share in the comments below something God has shown you to do to find hope, when you don’t have any.

I want to end by speaking Romans 15:13 over you. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

February 10, 2016 by Laura Diehl Leave a Comment

Is It Possible to Have a Problem Free Life?

Where did we ever get the idea that we deserve a problem free life? Somehow most of us seem to think that, including Christians. Having God in our lives means He eliminates all of our problems like some magic genie, right? Or if we pull the lever enough on God’s big slot machine, we will eventually hit the jackpot to make all our problems go away.

If our hope is in solving all the trials and difficulties in this life to be able to have a pain-free-problem-free existence, it is a false hope. And we have no business blaming God for our disappointment when it doesn’t happen that way. Jesus Himself told us we will have troubles in this world (John 16:33).

Our hope is not in having a perfect life here on earth, but in our eternal home after this life on earth.

So instead of trying to get God to be our “spiritual handyman” to fix everything, how about if we trust God to do things His own way, and ask Him to help us rise above the problems? That would be through His grace (His divine empowerment) which, by the way, He tells Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is all you need. Only when you are weak can everything be done completely by my power.” (ERV)

Let’s look at that in context, starting with verse seven.

Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me, My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness. Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become. (MSG)

I will admit, I still struggle with “appreciating the gift” and considering it “joy when we encounter various trials” (as we read in James 1:2). My problems can still frustrate me, discourage me, or weigh me down with heartache and tears. For instance, I still cry and feel the pain more than I care to admit over the death of my daughter, even though she left us several years ago and is dancing away in heaven. But during those times of pain and heartache, trials and tribulations, I have learned to look up, because that is where my help comes from (Psalm 121:1,2).

If I belong to Him (which I do) and am in covenant with Him through the blood of Jesus (which I am) then I have to believe as a good Father (which He is) that He is not going to just step aside and let the enemy go at me with a vengeance and no purpose other than to be the devil’s punching bag. A good father is not going to stand by and let his child be beaten on by a bully. However, God sees the big picture. He knows how He can take something bad in our lives and turn it around to use it for our good. And it is absolutely amazing when we watch Him do it! (Which I have, over and over again.)

Some people say that religion is a crutch. Crutch nothing… I tell people that God is my wheelchair! I depend on Him for everything. It is my personal relationship with Him that gets me through this life, and I must say, I don’t know how others live life without Him.

I am going to ask you to do two things for me.

In the comments below, share a promise from scripture that strengthens you during hard times, or one that helps keep your eyes on Jesus during the storms of life.
Let’s do something fun. Share this blog on one (or all) of your social media sites, and let’s all use #Godismywheelchair

As Acts 4:33 says, may great grace be on you all.

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

January 6, 2016 by Laura Diehl 1 Comment

Seeking the Glory of God

I have been meditating on how God has been so faithful in my life through the most tumultuous six years of life I couldn’t have even imagined happening. In doing so, I realized how true the words of a familiar song are, about how the more we seek Him, the more we find Him. And the more we find Him, the more we love Him.

When Moses asked God, “Please show me your glory” in Exodus 33:18, God replied, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”

God sent Moses up Mount Sinai to stand in the crevice of a rock and we read the account of what happened in chapter 34. “Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands…’”

I urge you to go back and read that again, pondering the revelation of what God said.

When we cry out for God’s glory, do we realize we are crying out for His abounding goodness…His great mercy…His incredible compassion… His never ending, never changing love?

He is not a hard or a mean God. He is a God who wants to be good to us, to love on us, and have compassion on us – to the point of paying a huge price through the blood of His Son Jesus to be able to offer complete and total forgiveness of our sins to be in fellowship with Him! Wow!

The exact thing we all are searching for – love and acceptance, mercy and compassion, forgiveness and healing in our very souls is exactly who God is and how He wants to manifest Himself in our lives! That is incredible!

So the more we seek Him, the more we experience all of His goodness, mercy, compassion, forgiveness and healing of our painful past. And the more we experience those things, the more we love Him (which in turn causes us to want to seek Him even more). And, the more we experience those things, the more of His glory is revealed in us and through us because that is how He displays His glory!

So what about our children? Are they experiencing the glory of God in this way? Do they know God as “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth?”

They cannot just be told about it, they need to experience it for themselves. How can you help them do that? There are many ways:

teach them how to hear God’s voice
make sure they know who the Holy Spirit is and how He gives us power in our lives
create an atmosphere of worship in your home
mentor them in how to get ahold of God in prayer
take them to places you know they will have an opportunity to come into God’s presence (such as conferences specifically for children)

These are just a few suggestions. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you how to bring your children into His glory and allow Him to guide you in this.

And of course, you need to be seeking and modeling these things yourself. If you dedicate yourself to teaching your children how to seek for God, they will find Him, and they will love Him, which will lead to their desire to seek Him even more.

Your home will experience God’s goodness, mercy, favor, compassion, healing, and love. In other words, your home will be filled with the glory of God!

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

Why Does a Good God Allow Pain in Our Lives?

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

From Death to Life When Tragedy Strikes

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

How Can I Get Hope When I Don’t Have Any?

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

Is It Possible to Have a Problem Free Life?

Seeking the Glory of God

Gems from the Crown is a weekly blog from Crown of Glory Ministries to strengthen and encourage believers in Christ in their walk with God, especially in the areas of vision, authority, and identity. If you would like to have Gems from the Crown delivered directly to you, please click here.

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