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Hey, friends. Welcome to a new creation podcast where we're pointing women towards victory in Christ, one Jesus story at a time. My name is Jemese LaChel. I'm your host. Go ahead and get yourself comfortable and let's dive right in to today's episode.
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Hey, welcome back. I am going to be brief on this episode. This is really just a quick check in. Actually, I wasn't even sure exactly what we were going to be talking about today. And I never want to just publish an episode just for clout or just to say I did it.
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I never want to just be producing content because for me, it really is about Jesus. I was cool with just not having an episode and not getting into that whole perfectionism thing of thinking I have to publish every other Tuesday or else I'd rather show up with a message with a word. But I prayed over it for like two weeks and I just wasn't hearing God point me in any one direction until today when I sat down and turned on the microphone. So you're getting it fresh. We're not going to get too too in depth.
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I say that right now as we're just getting started, who knows where the Holy Spirit is going to take us? Speaking of which, why don't you join me in praying over this episode as we dive in?
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We just come before you. We just want to say thank you. It just seems like every time that I open up prayer, especially for this podcast, I'm just entering with praise and Thanksgiving. And that's the first thing on our mouth that's the first thing out of our mouth is praise and Thanksgiving for you. Thank you for this time together.
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Thank you for everything that You've done in our lives up until this point. Even the very breath in our lungs is there because you put it there. We just want to thank you for the smallest things. We want to thank you for those great big things that you do, of course, but we want to thank you for even those things that we can overlook because you just keep us that comfortable. You give us water, food, clothing, and you give us love and comfort, whatever that looks like, however, it shows that maybe it's through somebody that we know or even the kindness of a stranger.
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We just know. And we're just so grateful and thankful that we don't have to ever feel like we're alone walking through this life that you are always with us. Give us a deeper hunger and knowledge for Your Word. If there's anyone listening right now who doesn't know you that way, Lord, I pray for that one right now. Who doesn't know you as their presidency, who doesn't know you as their comforter, who doesn't know you as their healer, who doesn't realize that Jesus is everything.
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When we have You, Lord God, we have everything that we need, and it doesn't matter what our circumstances look like around us, it doesn't matter what our eyes we see that could contradict Your Word. Oh, Lord, teach us to walk by faith and not by sight, remembering that when we have you, when we have God on our side, who is for us, who is with us, oh, we have all that we could ever need. We thank You, Lord jesus, I ask you to be over this episode. Be with the listener, lead us, guide us, help us. Just bless us.
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Lord, I'm bold enough to ask for Your blessing. Bless each and every one of us with exactly what it is that we need, Lord. In Jesus name, amen.
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All right, so, yeah, like I said, this is actually sort of an unscripted episode. Not that I ever actually sat down to script my episodes, especially my interviews, which I love to interview. I've had some amazing interviews that God has lined up with women telling their stories about how they met Jesus. Those are obviously not scripted, but the solo podcast, I kind of like to go with an idea. And that's literally all that the Lord gave me this time was an idea and we're just going to go with it.
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So I entered into prayer asking what to speak about this episode. Here I was wanting to log on and just say, you know, I'm going to potentially be taking a little break for the month of July. We've got a lot of family stuff going on. It's just a busy time of year. I'm starting this new incredible curriculum program that I'm entering into, which I'm super excited about and I'll share a little bit more about that, but just an atmosphere of studying the word of God with other people.
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I'm going to be starting out in July. Got some family stuff. I said, I'm just going to hop on here and tell the listeners that I may not be producing much content, but, you know, we have our plans, but God's plans are so much greater. There's that proverb that says that man may make the plan, but it's God who orders her steps. I'm paraphrasing.
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That's a terrible paraphrase. Go look it up in the proverbs. But essentially, you get my point. I had my idea and the Lord showed up like, no, this is what we're going to talk about today. And so as I prayed and pressed in about what to record today, or if I should even record, I did get a word, literally.
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And the word was around a relationship. When I say the word relationship, what do you think? There are some of us when I say relationship, they kind of get this cringy feeling because maybe you've got some negative emotion around relationship. Maybe somebody will hurt you. Just that's some information for you to sort of notice.
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Just take note of that's. The therapy for send me saying, hey, listen, take a look at that. What even do you think? Where is the relationship? Because the Lord showed me that today we're going to be talking about relationship, but maybe not in a way that you would expect.
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Actually, we're talking about relationship with God. So relationship with God through Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit. So we're not going to get too deep into the theology. We got God our Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. As I pressed in praying about this episode, we are here today to talk about relationship.
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What does your relationship with the Lord looks like? Do you have one?
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Because I've seen the Lord say that some me being one. I've been in that experience, I've been in that season. Some people enter into the relationship with Jesus, like checking off a checklist, and then you wonder why it seems like you can't reach Him or why does it feel like he's very far off. So it takes time to get some maturity. Like there's maturity as we spend time on our Word, as we study the Bible, as we just spend time with Him.
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You know that whether it feels like Jesus is there or not, whether it feels like God is speaking to you or working with you, you know that he's there because by faith we know it because we know that we have His Word and His Word is true. We know that he promises to never leave us or forsake us, right? So there's that piece that comes with maturity, but there's also this invitation just to get honest before God and like just check yourself for a minute, you know. What does your relationship look like, the difference between being in a relationship with someone and they're just hanging out in the room with you, almost like your roommate. You don't really spend much time together other than noticing each other's presence.
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Like, say you have a cat or dog or pet. You notice that your pet or whatever is there in the room and you just like pass by. You go to the kitchen, you get a glass of milk and you go back to your room to do whatever right. Obviously, we don't want our relationship with Him to look like that. God is asking us to stop compartmentalizing Him in that way.
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He doesn't want us to only take Him off from the shelf whenever it's time to do Bible time so we can check something off from a list or to only feel like we are engaging in our relationship with Him. Whenever we go to church on Sunday or Saturday or whatever, Wednesday night, he wants us to have that ongoing relationship similar to our heartbeat. And speaking of the heart, it is an issue of the heart. What is the status of your heart? Check your heart right now.
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Do you only want God? Do you only want to come to Him because of the awesome things that he can do for you? I had a conversation with someone once who was really confused. They were coming out of sort of new AG thoughts or New Age thought or New Age spirituality, trying to understand the difference between knowing Jesus, the person, someone that we have a relationship with as a Savior, as Messiah. They're trying to understand knowing Him that way versus knowing Him just because of the incredible blessings that he brings when he's in our presence.
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Because that's the thing about Jesus. When he's in the room, everything's going to change. He does bring blessing with Him, but we're not going to the Lord as some kind of magic genie. Absolutely not. Now that's your mindset you might want to consider, is it time to check that at the door?
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We obviously wouldn't go to Him and give Him all of our concerns. He says, Cast all of your anxieties on me. He says, I care for you. Cast every care of your heart onto Him, every worry that you have, everything on your mind, whatever keeps you up at night, cash those things on Him because he cares for you. You'll find that often.
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Yes, you will receive a blessing back. You will receive whatever you need for that specific situation. But that's not where that's, like, self service level. That's like baby stuff. Because you get to a point where what you really need beyond the blessing is the presence of Him.
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Are you there? Can you be satisfied with the presence if Jesus never gave you another blessing? Would you be satisfied if you never got another quote unquote thing or, you know, if you never got another thing from the Lord, would that be enough? Would you be satisfied? This is just an invitation to check your heart.
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As I was pressing in, I just kept thinking and meditating on how much the Lord actually craves relationship with us. Now, that may be a strong way. There may be some who, like, are like, oh, I can't believe she said that. God wants you so bad that he sent His Son to die for you because he wants you that bad. Okay, contrary to popular belief of some in some circles, guess what?
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God doesn't actually need humanity. This is Holy God we're talking about. We're here because he wants us. He wants to hang out with us, and he wants a relationship with us. So it's really important for us once we get to that point where we put all we have repented of our sins, we have repented of trying to do life without Him, or we repented of going after idols.
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Once you do that process, it's important to keep going. Keep going and pressing in until you receive relationship. I'm going to read something out of the Scripture, because I did receive a Scripture, because, you know, me and my ignorance to back it up. I'm like, I don't want it. The scripture that I'm going to be reading out of is coming out of actually the Gospel of Luke.
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I'm working through this, like, Bible in 40 days. Actually, it's the New Testament in 40 days on the Bible Plan app. And this is coming out of Luke, chapter ten, starting at verse 38. Now, it happened as they went that he entered a certain village and a certain woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. So we're talking about Jesus here.
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So this girl named Martha welcome Jesus into her house. So Jesus is going to go hang out with Martha and Mary, verse 39. And she had a sister called Mary who also sat at Jesus feet and heard his word. But Martha was distracted with mex serving, and she approached him and said, lord, do you not care that my sister has left Venice alone, therefore tell her to help me? And I laugh right there, because how relatable is that?
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Have you ever been so busy doing work, doing your work? It's not like Marfa was doing something sinful or doing something terrible. She was actually surveying because there was a custom at that time, and we may think of this as sort of like hospitality or that quote unquote Southern hospitality. You have a guest who comes over. The question was that you would get to work serving and just making that guest comfortable and doing all these various things.
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So Martha was more caught up with the fact that there was these things to take off of her list. But her sister Mary is rather sitting at the freedom Jesus, listening to every word that Jesus is saying. So you could almost imagine Martha in the kitchen, like, scrubbing dishes, getting so angry and irritated, and she goes right up to Jesus and she says, jesus, she says, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone, therefore tell her to help me, she told Jesus. And I laughed because, you know, it seems silly when you read it in black and white, but come on now. We do that same thing.
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Check your heart. We do that same thing. Maybe you have it. I'm not going to sit here and keys anybody, but be honest, have you done that before where you've been sitting in traffic and you're like, oh, my goodness, come on. I can't believe that this is going on.
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And to be honest, any time we're complaining about anything, you may not be outright saying, lord, I don't like this, so change it. You may not outright have that kind of nasty attitude, but if you are complaining and grumbling, which scripture tells us that God doesn't like that mess, the Israelites did that in the wilderness for over 40 years. 40 years wandering in the wilderness. God doesn't like that, because when we complain and we grumble, we are not seeing and allowing ourselves to see the miracle, the blessing that God is actually with us already working it out. So Mary here in this instance, is sitting at the feet of jesus is eating up every word.
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So Jesus in verse 41, and Jesus answered and said to her, martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her. There's so much meat here. Again, that's coming out of Luke chapter ten, verses 38 to 42. There's so much good stuff in that. I encourage you to study that portion of Scripture out for yourself.
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But just real briefly, for this episode, I just want to ask you to check your heart. Is there stuff going on in your heart? Are you coming to the Lord with a checklist? Are there things that you're unhappy about in your life and you're like, Lord, if you would just change this, then I could be satisfied and happy. Because God does say that what's on our heart, he cares about it, but we need to come correct.
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I've been saying, like, these 90s phrases. We need to come correct, come correct, bring those things to God, but do it in the right way. We can't let our agenda, what we want to accomplish, take over or become more important than the words that God has spoken. We can't let what we have to do on a day be more important than spending time with Jesus. We can't let our responsibilities, our jobs, we can't even let our boss say, you have a job.
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I was working from home for a time, and now my work is just taking care of my family right now. For this season. We can't even let our boss though. I can't let my kids. I can't let my husband.
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I can't let anybody whatever your situation is. You can't let your teacher. You can't let your professor. You can't let your mom. Your dad.
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Who whatever's going on. You can't let any other relationship or task take precedence over your time spent with Jesus. Eating up his words. Spending time in His Word. So that may literally look like carving out some time to read your Bible or whatever.
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I don't know what it is that you need to be doing. But I'm just here to remind somebody that if you are acting like Martha. Which we all have been a Martha before. And that's you right now on the season. This is just the Lord reminding us all gently as he does.
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To come back to Him to put off our agenda. Put off our todo list. Put that off long enough to just spend time with Him. And don't let her spending time with Him looks like a checklist either. Right now we're getting very law based or legalistic.
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Like, if I can't sit down with my hot coffee first thing in the morning, then it's ruined. No, we can't go into it like that. You may have your idea of what quiet time looks like for you. Like for me. I love to get up in the morning, go get a glass of water, I get a cup of coffee.
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I go into my prayer closet, literally, which is this office that I'm recording in, which is my closet. I go into my closet and I will either worship with a worship song, I'll pray, I'll read my Bible, and I loved. If I could get a straight hour of that in the morning with nobody harassing me, that would be great. But guess what? That doesn't often happen that way.
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Because I have two small children, I got to help see my husband out the door. Sometimes his schedule change. I just don't get that morning time first thing, you know? So I'm not carving out time and some other part of my day, maybe when the girls are asleep or even late at night, like, I can feel that. I don't know how else to say that it has an impact.
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I miss it because that's my intimate time with the Lord. So I don't know what it is that you have to do, but what you want to make sure that you're not doing. You just want to make sure that you're not going into it like a checklist. And if it doesn't happen that specific way you laid out, your whole day is ruined. Because anything that even if it's a good thing, right?
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It's good to spend time in the world, it's good to spend time reading the Bible, it's good to spend time studying these parables. Man, you could spend your whole life studying the parables and still have more to study, right? That's all good stuff, but you can't let it take precedence of your relationship with Jesus or you can't want to check those things off your list more than you want the presence of God in your life. So this is just my reminder, my short reminder for my listeners today. This is a reminder for myself as well.
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Keep your heart pure before the Lord. You do your part. There's a part that we have to do with our heart, right? There's a part that we go before God and we let God do. We're not fighting against God, trying to do this whole thing on our own.
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It's the Holy Spirit who changes our hearts in the first place. So take it before God. I'll leave you with this. If this is something that you sort of struggle with, there's a psalm that you can read and pray, rather. Reading is one thing, but praying it's another.
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Check out Psalm 51. It's called a prayer of repentance. It's a beautiful model as you study it out for how to approach the Lord, how to come to him sincerely.
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I'm not going to read the whole psalm, but I am going to hone in on verse ten, psalm 51, verse ten and eleven, where it says, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. How blessed it is to know that in the new covenant, the Holy Spirit is with us. God said he will never leave us or forsake us that's speaking to us as the believers. This part of the psalm is a wonderful prayer for your heart.
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Create me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a said fat spirit within me. God gives us every good and perfect gift, and I think it's important for us to ask for those things. So if what I've talked about today has started something up on the inside, just go before God. Read Psalm 51. Say it out loud is what I would do.
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Read Psalm 51, say it out loud. Pray sincerely, creating me a clean heart, O God, and renewing that fast Spirit in me. Just pray these words of your heart and just give it to God and just hang out and just spend time with Him. Spend time with him like you would a friend. You spend time with your husband, you spend time with even your friend friends.
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But here we have a Savior who loves us, and we often will let life get in the way. We know that some of that is spiritual warfare, right? Some of that is intentional spiritual warfare. And if you are not hip to the skip, as the saying goes, you may fall for it and you may not even realize that you're in that loop of putting other things before God. But that's just a quick little word for this episode.
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Check your heart, check your relationship. What's the relationship look like with the Lord? What's your relationship look like with Jesus? Like, I don't care how long you have called yourself a Christian, whether you're a baby Christian or maybe you have been a Christian longer than I've even been alive, and you're like, what is this young woman talking about? None of that matters because every day we wake up, it's a new fresh day.
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It's a new opportunity to check yourself, check your relationship, check your height, you know, and then give it over to God so that he can clean it up. Because it's the Holy Spirit who changes our heart.
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We serve such a merciful God, a holy God, the only true God. And I want to give you an opportunity, like I do at the end of every episode, to come to Him. If you have never done that before, or maybe you just need to renew your commitment, you can pray this with me. Just Lord Jesus. I just recognize you as my savior.
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I thank you, Father God, for sending Jesus in My place to take my sin debt. He died for me. He rose again. He resurrected. Hallelujah.
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I just want to thank you for that and I want to acknowledge right now that I need you. I recognize, like the psalmist, said the psalmist, that my sin is ever before me. But bless you God, but you take that sin as we repent you, cover it in the blood of Jesus. You cast that sin into the sea of forgetfulness. Glory to Your name.
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I pray God, that you would just receive me now. Come on, people talk about receiving Jesus or receiving the Holy Spirit. Won't you just receive me? It's me coming to you too, Lord. I need you to come to me.
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But won't you just receive me if I come to you, Lord God, right now, just as sincerely and humbly as I can. And I give myself to You, Lord, and I just ask you to take over everything. You're the Lord of everything. You are the Lord of everything and I ask you to help teach me. I ask you to lead me and guide me.
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I ask you to give me your Holy Spirit. I ask you to fill me fresh. I ask You Lord, to do these things in the blessed name of Jesus. I just give it all to you Lord, because you gave your life for me in the name of Jesus. Amen.
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If you just said that prayer for the first time welcome to the family.
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I want to invite you before I close. If you know someone who has a testimony for Jesus or Jesus story, if your heart is burning to share that thing, reach out to me. I'm going to be traveling a little bit. I got some things going on, but I am always accepting new applications to come on the show. Or you could also just DM me and kind of skip that formality and we'll work it out that way.
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Just throwing that out there. I will see you on the next episode. Until the next time, stay blessed in the Lord, stay faithful to Him, for he is faithful. And may his grace, may his favor, may He's His blessings, may his goodness follow you every day until we meet again.
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