In the presence of light, darkness has to flee, in the presence of truth lies start to lose their grip and eventually flee.

I heard this beautiful quote from the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie yesterday which I must confess to not really having watched properly.  Lucy, Susan and the older boy had come to the land which had been frozen and controlled by the white witch for many years, and maybe it was the beaver who said to them, ‘the hope that you have brought has started to weaken the witches power.’   All the ice was starting to melt, spring was starting to come.

Hope is so powerful. It is a potent force. As we allow our hearts to embrace hope, it weakens the power of the enemy. 

God is so very careful when He sees signs of life, a smoldering wick he will not snuff & a bruised reed he will not break. He speaks of the reeds that grew by the banks of the river that the young boys would play as flutes. If you bruised one you would throw it away & just replace but not God.

Jesus brought hope. He restored back to the people what the Pharisees had stolen. He restored God’s original image. The second thing he is recorded as doing in the Gospel of John after the wedding of Cana is going into the temple where he overturned the money tables. My husband shed some light on this today. The men at the tables were selling sheep and doves for sacrifices at ridiculous prices. They wouldn’t allow the people to use their own, they had to buy the sacrificial animal from them, plus there was a temple coin that incurred an exchange rate fee and it was keeping people from sacrificing animals. He called them a den of robbers. He will fight for you too.

Jesus was a great light that dawned on the land of Zebulun.  Sometimes our hearts can hurt from a past season and when He tries to shine light on them to give us hope we shrink further back into the darkness.

Part of submitting to God, and resisting the devil to see him flee is embracing the truths God says about us in His word.

One such truth is that we are accepted in the beloved. This word accepted is the same word used when the angel spoke to Mary and said you are highly favoured among women.  These two instances are the only time that word is used in Scripture. Wow. What a truth.   Not that we are Mary, not that we have the same role as Mary, but just how much value God places on us.

When God gives us a promise may we have the courage like Mary to say, “may it be to me as you have said.”

May we not be remiss and dismiss His holy words. May we embrace and nurture and wonder and treasure these things in our heart.

The way God moves in a situation is often so unexpected.  He will meet us wherever we are. I don’t think the Israelites expected God to rip open the red sea.  They didn’t expect Him to squash flat the walls of Jericho.  But through all these stories, even though they didn’t expect exactly WHAT he would do, He did ask them to be expectant.

He did ask them to expect that He what would be good to them. 

I heard this question:  How many of you are tired of being impacted by the size of your problem and want to impact your problem with the size of your hope? – Bill Johnson

There are some seasons when this feels easier to do than others. There are some areas of my life where it feels easier to expect God to show up than others. . . even though I’ve seen it many times.

I said to someone this week that way you keep yourself expectant is to surround yourself, to feed yourself testimonies of God doing wild things, because then you start to expect them for yourself.

Like the scene from Madagascar where the penguins dig into Marty’s yard and say they are going to the wild. His response, ‘the wild, you can actually go there?’

As we keep digging into stories in the Bible it reminds us how big and wild God is, how much more He has for us, when we keep asking.   His Word, enlarges our minds to have the courage to keep asking. 

We start finding out what He says Yes to in His Word, we start to find out how many times He’s told us to ask.

I heard a cool testimony last night from an electrician friend who works in outback Australia.  He had been trying for hours to fix a fault in a refrigeration plant and simply couldn’t figure out what the problem was.  It was 3 am in the morning and they had tried everything so he said to God, ‘Hey big fella, I really need some help down here.’  All of a sudden his eyes were opened to see behind the paneling and to zoom in to see exactly where the fault was.    He was so surprised he turned to his offsider and said can you see that, but the helper could not.    However they changed out the wire and the plant became operational again.

It was unexpected.

Brooke Fraser Ligertwood was sharing how in 2 Kings 3 there were a bunch of men out to battle and they were running out of water, so they called for a prophet.  He said make this valley full of ditches so the men dug all night. In the morning they were full of water, but to the enemy over the hill they looked full of blood so they fled.

She likened the disciplines of prayer, fasting and devotions to the digging of ditches.

The Word of God renews our minds, and then we can think to ask for more, because we know it’s in His Word, and His power can flow.