Daily Bread: God’s Got a Blessing With Your Name On It

Daily Bread: God’s Got a Blessing With Your Name On It!

At the end of my savings a few months ago, I faced the red pill…

God’s Got a Blessing With Your Name On It!

The Holy Spirit is the best PR person to have. My son and I recently experienced a “Christmas in January.” Jehovah Jireh put our names in the ears of administrators who asked us to be in a commercial. Long story short, they were conduits of God’s blessing toward us where we had not marketed ourselves. We went from literally driving with the fuel light on, to an almost full fuel tank, and from less than forty dollars and ten cents for a month of groceries to feed four people, to over $410 in food value.

Christmas in January was a chilly day with no threat of warming. The next day, the bird shown at left was outside our door when my son and I were leaving home. It was a perfect teaching moment. Thank you Holy Spirit! These events inspired today’s Daily Bread… Why was there a bird on my doorstep?

Some of you have already identified the species of bird in the above photo. Yes, this appears to be a Common starling. When I first saw the bird outside my door, I immediately thought, If GOD cares for the sparrow, how much more will He take care of you. It’s a statement, not a question.

²⁹Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. ³⁰But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. ³¹Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. Matthew 10:29-31

²⁶26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Matthew 6:26

Any good farmer will know that a Common starling not only eats the bugs from many common crops, it will also devour the crops when the bugs are gone (Thank you Google).

The scripture was my first response because “No, I’m not a farmer,” (although I do have faith like potatoes) and because even though you are a human being, your natural reflexes (what comes naturally) including your automatic thought processes, do not have to be worldly.

Away with the notion that you are only human and you are always subject to the second human nature (the first human nature was without sin, Adam, innocent before the fall). You were made in the image of God. You are human and divine. You are a soul that existed before you were conceived – given the breath of life as a spirit that now lives in a human body. You are now having a human experience that will someday end and be followed by the return of your soul to God (Ezekiel 18:4). That’s why you cannot only feed your natural body. You must feed your spirit with the WORD of God. When you fill your spirit with the WORD, the Holy Spirit will bring the WORD to your remembrance whenever you need it and when He wants to open revelation to you.

Your divinity: your spirit self has dominion over your natural self. You have to now give the reigns of your spirit to the Holy Spirit, so He has dominion over both your spirit and your natural self.

You can tell your mind how to think and your body and spirit how to behave. Many people fail at this behavior management because they approach it with self-will or self-control or mere discipline. Actually, it takes the Holy Spirit to keep you consistently from behaving badly. You may think you have everything under control, especially if you consider yourself to be a “good person.” But you will not know what you are capable of until you step out of the ordinary – from a lukewarm existence to being either cold or hot spiritually. If you choose anything other than spiritual heat, you may live the rest of your life under the influence of blindness that some people call bliss, in which you will learn deafness to the Holy Spirit.

If you start getting warm – actually fulfilling your purpose on the earth, that is when the enemy will see you as a threat. At that time, he will stop handling you with kid gloves and start shooting fiery darts of wickedness aimed to make you lose faith, backslide, curse God and die. Literally. He wants to kill you because your influence will do more than save you – it will impact the world for Christ.

The enemy will always tempt you with what he has tried before that worked on someone else. What you need to do is surrender to God and let Him take over the battling while you tune up your praise and worship. You don’t need to use another drop of power to build castles in this world. You just need to lay up treasures in heaven. God is calling us to seek His face and His kingdom and His righteousness; to bow our knees and cast our cares on Him, and to say, LORD, thy will be done.

So, when I first saw the bird, I considered it a sign that God is confirming His plan to watch over us, which reveals my thought process. This is not by accident friends. You can be lined up in thinking with the Holy Spirit, but He will not force you into right thinking, and right believing, which is counted as righteousness before God. You must purposefully cast down evil imaginations and take possession of your thought real-estate, and guard the inputs and outlets of the heart by passing no evil communication (gossip, etc.), thinking on whatsoever things are of a good report, and by guarding every sense and sensibility.

I like the way Henry Gruber says it, “I plead the blood of Jesus over all communication to me, from me, around me and concerning me; and over all communication to my family, from my family, around my family, and concerning my family…”

It was not until after a conversation with a friend, that I Google matched the photo and learned that this particular bird is known to have parasites and is widely considered a pest. If we filter everything through the Holy Spirit, we can stop the enemy from re-phrasing our blessings and translating them from a WORD of faith into a seed of doubt when we have already heard the promise from God in its pure form. God is not playing with our lives. The Holy Spirit is not jumping in and out of you when you need or think you don’t need Him.

If you are in Christ, you are a child of the Most High God and if you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will He give the Holy Spirit to you. The Spirit of God is not just making you speak in tongues and dance down the aisle. He is in the trenches with you. He knows your struggle and your frustration and everything you did not even speak in prayer. He was there when you got a raise and when you got laid off the day before your pension was due.

God is looking for faith. If you will be courageous enough to believe in a God you do not see, that you do not place on a mantle or hold in your hands though He holds you in His, who knows even the number of hairs on your head, friend, you can have a breakthrough in 2022. And, the more you believe, the more He is visible and tangible.

You’ve heard the psalm, ‘His Eye Is On The Sparrow” [and I know He watches me]. But what if you are not a sparrow? JESUS is the Good Shepherd, but what if you don’t feel like a sheep?

Not every bird of the air is a sparrow or an eagle. Some birds are common and nothing to be greatly desired. But none can fly without the dynamic of God’s own wind. The Holy Spirit is the wind that gives us the supernatural ability to rise above every negative situation. It is God who makes everything work together for our good because we love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). We do not have to be depressed. We do not have to let worry consume us.

When you reach the end of your perception of control – when you realize that nothing in this world is just by chance, that no matter how many of your life’s circumstances are the products of your decisions, what you choose next will be a defining moment for the rest of your life, you can take the blue denial and return to a mediocre existence (because you would not be here if you were not looking for something, because God is looking for you), you can pretend you are no different. You can act like you don’t know that God set you apart from the foundation of the world – not to fit in, but to stand out. You can tell yourself that every car accident, abuse, slander, and even truth that you survived is just dumb luck. You can just, pretend. Or, you can take the red blood of Christ and see what faith really is.

One day with the Holy Spirit is more effective than a year of plans and programs and preparations – to get ready to be fixing to gonna make a change. The Holy Spirit will do a work right now that will change your life forever. Choose JESUS. Choose faith.

For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness. Psalm 84:10

Maybe everybody loves Chris, but what if you have enemies? Our adversary wants us to see the world and pick out everything that is wrong because he wants us to do something God hates: complain.

The thing about complaining is that we cannot praise God and complain at the same time. These are polar opposites. Complaining is a road to the wilderness – the absence of the favor of God. On the other hand, praise is the road to your victory. Praise is the door to the atmosphere of worship – and this is what God designed people to do. You were not designed to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. Notice how the width from shoulder to shoulder is small compared to your height. Now consider the breadth of your wingspan. With your arms stretched wide, you are like the form of a cross. From the tips of your fingers on your left to the tips of the fingers on your right you have a length like your full height (barring accident or other trauma).

God did not make your wingspan just for push-ups. He wants to make you free from bondage and cares of this life to be a link in the cross-connection that went around the world (Luke 22:32). Only the enemy wants you to be the weakest link.

God is calling for uncommon faith in 2022. The days of His miracles on the earth are not sealed in a book of his testimony. He wants to partner with you to show His glory in the land of the living, right now! But He must find faith. We love to sing that God is our Jehovah Jireh (yes, I love some Maverick City Music & Elevation Worship!). But, are you still singing when all of your bills are due and people are threatening you with all manner of destruction (AKA distraction from your purpose). No matter how you came to be in a situation of pending loss, GOD can get the glory out of it. He is looking for you to turn your focus away from the worry and seek Him with all your heart (Matthew 6:33). If you are in a season that feels like your enemies are coming out of the woodwork, don’t give up. God reveals them when you are ready for the next level. There is about to be a shift. Look for an open door to your next opportunity. Be of good courage.

God has a blessing with your name on it.