Month: November 2013

Blessed Thanksgiving!

Blessed Thanksgiving!

Iris Godfrey


I am attempting to put a photo of my front yard earlier today on this post so you can see I am in a very beautiful place. It is sunny, and several inches of snow fell overnight. Really nice for Thanksgiving Day.

I think the earliest I remember it snowing was one year when it snowed on October 2. That was unusually early. This year we have already have several inches that came and melted as is normal for November. However, it is not very often that we have several inches on the ground for Thanksgiving. It is nice. I said on my FB post this morning that I love Central New York, and I truly do. I know many would prefer the constant warm climate of a southern state, but I have always loved it when it gets cold, snowy and even enjoy the shorter day-light of the days.

Now having said that, I really do get tired of the wet snow and the boots and the gloves and the lack of sun as the year progresses. I am done with it around mid-February, but it usually isn't done with us until late March or by mid-April. However, for the most part I love the weather where I am appointed to live.

Yes, I am here on assignment and by appointment. It is not where I was raised and not where I thought in my youth that I would live my life. However, The Lord moved my husband, my son and myself (our small family – which would eventually increase to 4 children) into the Northeastern US in 1966 on assignment as tent-maker missionaries. We remain so. Our situation has been modified a whole lot but we continue to be servants of our Lord Jesus Christ in teaching Bible and building His Kingdom. So we love the Northeast and we love the people. It is a marvelous place to raise a family.

The Kingdom is diverse and rich in many ways. I have never found people hard, cold nor resistent to the goodness of God. There are such people everywhere, regardless of where one might live, so we do what is needful – we set the atmosphere – where-ever in the Spirit and it is amazing the sweet reception and openness folk have in their hearts to the true King and Lord.

It is only when we confuse our own doctrines, or worship preferences, that it gets difficult. But when we want to simply love and allow our Lord to love through us, it is amazing how open folk can be. The Lord came in love as a response of the Father's love. Can we have any other agenda? If He then draws them to walk with us, teaching and more information can be easily shared and is often very warmly received.

The Lord is faithful to fulfill His call on our lives and we are so thankful to still be healthy and able to do as He commissioned us so long ago. So our Thanksgiving Day is a very blessed one in Him! It is always so!

I pray you wrap in Him and allow Him to be the reason for your joy. He will not fail you – now or later. Blessed Thanksgiving All!

 

Before The Foundation…

Iris Godfrey

cornerstone“For He was foreknown before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you who through Him are believers in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.” 1 Peter 20-21

After writing and assuring his readers that they are of precious value in respect to the price paid for them, Peter continues to instruct us about just who the Precious Price is. He was known before the “laying down” of the cosmos. That is the literal rendering. The term used here for “foundation” has the sense of laying down a foundation prior to building anything. It is a term trying to convey an understanding to us that is hard to grasp.

We are creatures of thinking in “beginnings” and “ends.” But when it comes to “thinking with Him,” we must lay all such aside and become willing to embrace His mind. That means that our Lord existed always and what He was to become and to do was known all about prior to anything becoming visible – whenever that was. The same understanding (and Greek word “katabole”) is found in Ephesians 1:3-4, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world,….” So in Ephesians this word and concept of existing prior to the plans for the creation were laid down is applied to you and to me. (I am reminded of the phrase in 1 John 4:17, “…because as He is, so also are we in this world.”) Our identity in Him precedes creation. 

Such thinking about Him and about us, produces “knots in my brain,” as one of my teaching associates says. It lifts us up beyond the normal into the realm of the Spirit where we begin to see and treasure all that has been done for us and with us. Our linear thinking just does not work here. Instead we see the cyclical thinking of our Father. (See Isaiah 55:8-11) This is where we are drawn as we think with Him and open our spirits in His Spirit to see as He sees.

His appearing here was for us. So we who believe (action motivated by trust based in confidence) that God raised Him from the dead and now He sits in glory – so our faith and our expectation are in God and not in ourselves, our plans, our loved ones, our friends, our circumstances – none of what is here. But we have been empowered to release into what is eternal and to take all our expectation from that realm.

Lord, thank you! I have to think quietly for a while now. Bless all who read and ponder. Such is our heritage and our empowerment.