Are you ready to trust God with chicken?

The whole thing about trusting God with chicken came the other night when I threw a dinner party which consisted of chicken pieces marinated in tequila and lime. So, I invited a few people over to come and wine and dine, however when you have a public facebook event, numbers begin to increase and you suddenly have RSVPS from a bigger crowd than you expected. .
You see, recently I've been asking God to teach me to really trust him. To trust him with Every.Tiny.Detail.  Anyway, I didn't want to spend more money and purchase more chicken for the guests but I felt like I had no other choice so I began to fret. The scripture in James suddenly popped into my mind : James 1: 5 If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.
Really?! Ask God about chicken?! That's absurd God doesn't care about chicken I thought to myself. However, what does the above scripture tell us? That if we ask God for wisdom, he will give it to us freely without finding fault in regards to what we ask him for. So, I got down on my knees and whispered a quick prayer asking for wisdom for tonight's dinner party.
"Don't buy anymore chicken" I heard a still, small voice whisper back to me. I knew it was the Holy Spirit, so I chose to listen to His voice and not purchase anymore chicken. Despite the fact that 15 people had RSVP'd, and I only had enough poultry for 8 people .
To cut a long story short, it pays off to trust and listen to God. That night not everyone showed up to the party ; and the amount that did attend was exactly 8. Not one less, not one more.

To some of you this may seem so trivial and petty, nonetheless God taught me the essence of waiting patiently and trusting Him with Every.Little.Detail of my life. It's weird but I've been  in this dry spot with God recently but that's because I haven't been resting in Him and savouring his His love. That's all God wanted me to do, just be with Him.
Another incident: My friend had been suffering with a swollen ankle for weeks, she found it hard to get to class on time but when she told me her plight I just heard this scripture:
"They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Mark 16: 15 . God wanted me to trust Him and see that particular scripture come to life.  Mark 16:15 did manifest itself and to this day my friend has not had issues with her ankle. Jesus! Why do I doubt your goodness?

Are you ready to trust God with chicken? As in, are you ready to trust God with every area of your life? I guarantee you, when you begin to surrender all areas of your life it's painful. However, the rewards of surrendering to God outweights all the pain. Things may not look like they are looking up for you but are you stillready to trust God?  Maybe you've been praying for the fruit of the womb and 6 years on, still no child? It's a painful ordeal for you, you've done tests after tests, the doctor keeps on telling you "next time" - and the only child you did carry did not make it through. Are you still going to trust God with that area of your life? No matter the costs because I tell you there is peace in trusting Him.
Or, maybe you've been unemployed for sometime and with all your qualifications still no work. You are ready to throw the towel in and sign on to welfare. Wait! Hold on if God's Word is true that He is the Jehova Jireh - can you trust God to provide the next meal?
This is a call out of our shallow christianity and it is a call to go deep into deep with God. With a lot of young people, we often have the misconception that we need to do something completely and utterly radical for God, such as drop out of school at age 14 and become a missionary in Afghanistan. Slow down, God does not care about our radical acts but He is in love with a heart that is radical for Him. Afghanistan will come in due time but in the meantime your science teacher has never heard the gospel. Now that's a radical lifestyle.


I'm taking a vacation, not just to Germany next week but a vacation from worrying and not trusting God. However this particular vacation will last a lifetime.

Amen!

Relationships between Christian Men and Women at Uni.

So here is my long anticpated article that I said I will write with regards to Christian Male and Female relationships at University.
Can I speak to the ladies first? Long gone are the days when femininity and authentic beauty was a prized possession to be attained. Now, a lot of us share the motto "I can do everything a man can do, just BETTER! " and these are the cries of several Christian women on campus. The post-modern woman feels if she embraces her femininity, she is weak and men will take advantage of her. Whether we like it or not God created us to be feminine and not to be masculine. Feminity does not mean shopping for dresses and loving all things pink, but it does mean understanding our God ordained positions as women. Our strong but delicate nature is not to be hated but praised.

Some of you arrived at University with a misconception. A misconception that many girls are suffering with the consquences of it today. There is a common lie among Christian female students that they will meet their husband at University. Whoever voiced such nonsense needs a reality check. As a result of this lie, many girls come to University all bushy tailed and bright eyed, waiting for Mr Right in their lecture hall. Christmas term approaches, followed by Easter term ....still no sign of this potential Mr. Right. Not too bad you think, afterall it's only your first year. However, by your second year you begin to get impatient and you begin to wonder that you might have missed him, or worse God is being cruel by not bringing him around. You start wincing at the fact that you only have one more year left of University, so God needs to step His game up.

Before I continue, I know many who have met their spouses at Uni, and have had amazing marriages but if your story does not end up like this don't rush into anything.

Anyway, so we start getting impatient and we start doing things our own way. Take for example my friend Audrey. She fed into the lie that God had to bring her husband during her University career. Well, God wasn't on her agenda and didn't bring him around. Anyway, frustrated and annoyed she began a relationship with Segun. Segun studied engineering with Audrey but he wasn't really walking with the Lord. For example, sex before marriage was a big win for him just as long as he went to church and repented. Audrey a strong believer herself, felt Segun was "the one". He wasn't exactly a Christian but he believed in God, that was good enough for her. Before long, Segun and Audrey began a relationship, which was not Christ centered at all, Audrey's faith began to take a downward spiral as Segun could not encourage her in the Lord. Before we knew it Audrey had comprised her purity and fell pregnant. Segun ended the relationship soon after, and has since acquired a new asset. I mean girlfriend...

If Audrey had waited on God, what would have happened?



Women, do we not know that every guy we flirt with, or every guy we have long intimate conversations with is a dishonour to our future husbands. Or every guy we grind on in the clubs is disrespectful. This is not a rebuke, I'm guilty of the same kind of mess. Some of you are diasgreeing with me right now as you feel like you do not have an obligation to your spouse-to-be. Hmm...maybe but we certainly have an obligation to our first love, Jesus Christ.

Proverbs 4: 23 Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.

Before anything else, we need to guard our hearts. If my dear friend Audrey had guarded her heart, I don't think her course of life will be as a single mother back in Manchester. Guarding your heart means to be careful in your conversation, pouring the Word into your Spirit and seeking God's wisdom for the course of your life.



Now to the University men. Men, I urge you to guard your own heart but also be a guard of hearts. I think a lot of reasons why some of our Christian sisters fail in areas of relationships is due to the lack of guys caring for their hearts. It's in your nature and God given capacity to be strong enough to protect the heart of a woman. If you see a girl who you find attractive, wait on the Lord. Pray about it. Attraction isn't everything you know? Ask God to show you more about this girl. Most importantly RESPECT her. As long as you have not put a ring on it ,you could be dishonouring her future husband. So, if she does not adhere to your advances it may be because she too is waiting on God for direction. Not because she is "stush" or "frigid" as some of you may kindly put it but she has made God her all in all, for this season of her life.

As you can see, I do not have too much to write on the Men but I hope it has given you insight in some way.


This is what the Lord has been speaking to my on, and has asked me tor reevalute some areas of my life. I pray if need be, you do the same too.



In Christ



Chizor

The true face of hope

God gave a word the other day and it was HOPE. I'm not fond of Obama as some of you already know but whether we like to admit or not, he is currently the  face of "hope" for Americans. Yes, I can hear my friends groaning all ready at this. Don't worry guys I'm not going to go on a rant about why I hate liberalism. Rather, I want to talk about the true face of hope. Jesus Christ.

You see, I thought this week was going to be extremely rough on me.  I was so worried that I was going to have a melt down this week and 5 days out of the 7 would be spent curled up in bed crying my eyes out. Have you ever been scared of your emotions before? I have. I experienced this phenomenon a few days ago; I was scared what my emotions could do to me if I was not careful. You see, there is something I've been dreading and God showed me specifically in a dream that, that thing I was so scared of was going to come to pass and I need to prepare my body, mind and soul for it.
Anyway, that "thing" - which I won't go into right now, came to pass and it was time to face the music.
Sorry this blog is so abstract today. Please excuse me...
 Do you ever get to that point, where you have finally come to terms with a bad (or good) situation? You start rebuilding your life again, God begins to put back the pieces of your once broken heart back together and all is well with your soul. However, there is just that one thing that could trigger your emotions and set you off in tears. These pain "triggers's" often come in the form of a picture, a long lost gift or worse a long lost memory of what once was. Recently, these "triggers" have not had much affect on me and I've been more than able to get on with things if I come across a ghost of my past. These past few months, I've been so happy and full of unexplainable joy and I was NOT about to let anything steal that away from me.
Well, when it was time for me to face the music the other day , and come face to face with that thing that my heart was dreading, it was strange but I was still full of unexplainable joy.  I wasn't having a breakdown afterall. What once caused my heart to break, was no longer there. Was this a sign of God healing my heart? It sure was. I spent the past 12 months putting my hope in God and not in man and I saw the benefits of it the other day. God was the physician and healed me from the inside out because I had put my trust in him.

God really does exist. Seriously, nothing in this world could ever do what God did in my life these past few months. The only encourgament I have today, is: hand it ALL over to God. I mean everything the whole shabang.  You can't go wrong. There is no point holding on to it, it just won't do you any good. So hand it over to Jesus.
God gave me a simple but MIND BLOWING revelation the other day: HOPE.
Be sure of this scripute: Romans 5: 5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
There is hope in my story. There is also hope in your story too.

In Christ

Chizor

Do you remember the time, when we fell in love ?

Sincere apolgies readers but this particular post will not be dedicated to the legendary Michael Jackson. Nonetheless his song "Do you remember the time?"  is one of my favourites. I encourgage you to listen to it actually...it may make you think about your relationship with God.
In this particular song, MJ is basically remininising about the time he first fell in love with his girlfriend. How they would always talk on the phone and he is constantly trying to encourage the young lady to remember the time that they had together. But now they have broken up.

It really made me think? Do I rememeber when I first fell in love with God? Things were rosy, I wanted to be around my new found love constantly and just sit and converse with Him. From that time, till now - where has that romance gone? Why is it so easy for us to feel disappointed with God and forget all those sweet gestures we once received from him?
My relationship with God is going through a storm. Well, actually quite a few storms to be frank.
I need to remember the time when I first fell in love with my Jesus. I need to remember the time when we first fell in love. Just like Michael Jackson said...

I do remember! God has always been there for me. Yes, I admit I have been immature in my walk with God but through this storm I know I will mature and become the woman of God He has created me to be.
I remember EVERY single WRONG He made RIGHT! God has such a great plan but sometimes through the fog it's so hard to see what His true purpose is but never forget that He will always be your 1st love.

Revelation 2: 1-7

…But I have this [one charge to make] against you: that you have left (abandoned) the love that you had at first [you have deserted Me, your first love]…(v.4)

This starts to happen when you stop finding time to read your bible or kneel down to pray. Going to church seems to be a chore for you and life with Jesus just isn't exciting anymore. So you begin to indulge in other lovers such as television, work,alcohol, drugs, sex,etc just to distract yourself from the pain you are facing. Instead of you to go home to your husband- Jesus and tell him the truth, you continue to engage in your adulterous affairs.
Can I share a little of godly wisdom with you? Those "other" lovers will fail you. They will fulfill you for a short while but when the going gets tough...they just won't stand with you. It's time to run back into the arms of your first true love. 
If you do this, then this is what Jesus will do in return for you:

Isaiah 54: For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back.

Love you, guys.

Testing of my heart

Now that things have died down a bit on campus, I am able to say that I  have more time for blogging.
To be truthful, I love to blog. It's actually my hobby but I just wish I more time and MONEY to invest in my blog. Hence, why my website looks disastrous at the moment.
It's almost a one full year that God took me on a long, painful but rewarding journey. If you want to know the details of the story, ask and I will tell you. However, I will never actually go into details on my website.
Up until today, I do not understand why God picked me out of all my friends to go through this. I guess I will never completely understand until I get to heaven.
Nonetheless, there is a famous quote which goes without saying : When God takes something from your grasp, He's not punishing you,  but merely opening your hands to receive something better!
Have I received that "better" thing yet? With a resounding "Yes!", my Saviour certainly has restored 10 fold.
I've learnt to know God for myself. My prayer, my whole life has been "God allow me to know you". I spent a whole gap year  in the States, praying for the same thing over and over again. My favourite song during that year was "Where you go I go" by Brian and Jenn Johnson.  I would sing it several times a day.  Did I understand the depth of that song?  The lyricist sings about following God NO MATTER what. Following the Spirit of God in an out of season. God was and is testing my heart. Would I say true to the same song I would sing every day? Even if everything I held so close to me slipped away?
God tested my heart and He did just that. He stripped away every "idol" and "shrine" I had constructed in my life. Basically, He took away that thing that I was holding onto with a death grip.

But to be honest readers...sometimes I feel I have failed in certain areas. I feel I have failed the test. My heart hasn't always been true to God. However, when I feel like I'm slipping away, I have to bring to  rememberance the goodness of the Lord. I've failed the test several times but often I beat myself up over the things I'm doing wrong but I never look at how much progress I have made.

In closing, I just want to inform you all that I'm not giving up on God. Why? Because, despite all my junk God has never ever given up on me. I vow not to take the Lord's goodness for granted but I want to be made more in His likeness.
Job 23:10 But He knows the way that I take; when he has tested me [my heart] , I will come out as pure gold

No matter, the situation if our faith and trust remain in God, our heart's though refined in the fire, we shall surely come forth as pure gold.

In Christ
Chizor