Purpose: Calling, Purpose & Plan

HL_DecPurposeArtboard 1 — What’s the difference?

You were made for this!

Here is some brainstorming that I will make sure is in my book called, Hardwired for Purpose: Blazing Trails to Follow God’s Lead from a Creative’s Perspective.

Short Definitions

Calling
1. noun
  1. vocation, profession, or trade: What is your calling?
  2. a call or summons: He had a calling to join the church.
2. Purpose
  1. noun
    1. the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.
    2. an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.
3. Plan
  1. Noun
    1. a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance

Why find your Purpose?

Discovering your Calling leads to finding your Purpose.
Purpose is what you are to do with your Calling and helps define your Plan.
Plan is how you will accomplish your Purpose thus fulfilling your Calling.

Discovering your Calling leads to finding your Purpose.

Your Calling is shown to you in many ways
1. There are things that you are just good at
  1. They may even bore you because they come so easily to you
2. There are things that you love and are extremely passionate about
  1. These things speak to your Calling and Purpose
3. There are things that people praise you for
  1. People say that you are great at them
  2. These are your natural talents and giftings
  3. These are things that you need to accept and own

Be a good steward and obedient with God’s commands and He will show you your calling and purpose
1. It starts with relationship
  1. Ask Jesus what your Calling is and accept the answer
  2. You were made for this! You are Hardwired for this!
2. Trust Him
  1. The more you seek Him and ASK (Ask, Seek and Knock) the more He will help you to understand your Calling
  2. He loves you and wants the best for you
3. Be brave
  1. Step out of the boat with Peter
  2. Make mistakes and know that He will use them for your good
  3. Jesus is your defense
  4. Believe in yourself

Purpose is what you are to do with your Calling and helps define your Plan.

Your Calling leads to your Purpose
1. There are things that God has planned for you to accomplish here while bringing heaven to earth
2. Seek to serve your fellow brethren on Christ Jesus
  1. Your Purpose always lifts the Body of Christ
3. Your Purpose can have many different components
  1. There are often many hats you will wear in service
    1. It’s okay to stretch your tent pegs and serve in many ways
  2. Your Purpose may be one thing—a thing that you are created to do
    1. Own it
    2. Live it
    3. Be it

In the end… Your purpose is God’s purpose
1. His character, His names….
  1. Until you find your calling/purpose/plan follow God’s plan seek to be like Him
2. Don’t get lukewarm, drinking milk from fear to decide and fail
  1. Spend time with Him; praise His Holy Name
  2. Worship and dance for all the life He has given you

Plan is how you will accomplish your Purpose thus fulfilling your Calling.

My plan is not God’s plan usually; I can get myself into trouble.
1. Lay down your life and you will find it
2. Pick-up your cross daily
It’s not divining the future, it’s working effectively and efficiently in the Kingdom
1. Knowing goals, where the mark is
2. what to plan for
3. which direction to take as you go
Sometimes He shows me a fork in the road
1. He wants us to make decisions and fail if we must—we learn that way
  1. Just like having teenagers
    1. We allow them to make decisions and fail if they must
  2. When you have a good relationship with Him you know the plan; you may not like it, but you know it.

My book will be finished sometime in 2019! That’s the goal… ♥

Resources: Dictionary.com Unabridged. Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018

December 30, 2018

The most powerful gift…….Love

Greetings,

If there is anything people can agree on at any time in history and especially now, is that LOVE reigns as King in our lives. We are made for it, crave it, seek it, go to the ends of the earth for it and we don’t want to get caught without it.

Love never loses its mystery and never loses its power. We can’t get enough of it and we push the envelope of life to retain it. We often have actions that are misguided not knowing we are striving for Love.

Our hunger for love, moves us into strange situations and even dangerous ones because we are hardwired for Love. It is so strong in us that without human touch we would die. Studies done, prove the withholding of human touch will affect a person adversely.

Love makes the world go around. Giving and receiving is the dance of Love. Look at the heroic acts of people who help others. Heroes do things like save people from burning cars, rushing rivers, car accidents, Holocaust victims, wars, and a myriad of things that would take a few books to cover.

There are everyday unsung heroes like you and me. Walking out life in the face of great trials and tribulations sometimes. We can face great odds and obstacles to get through this journey called life. Love is always the answer,

steve-halama-558233-unsplash — Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

Jesus of Nazareth died a sacrificial death on a cross, to make all of these things come to pass. He faced the death that tries to subvert Love. Death will never overcome Love. Jesus made us co-laborer’s with him to apply Love to a dying world. Love, can never be trumped by anything.

When we spend more time with Jesus, we learn how to Love others and ourselves more. He imparts to us the language of Love. We yearn for his presence and in spending time with him he can add more Love to his greatest works, which is us.

If we are made in his image, we have a lot to look forward to. We start to understand that he is perfect and holy and so are we. We need to receive the Love he has not only died for but is positioned at all times to give us. Grace is the part of Love that enables us to draw closer to him even though we are still working out our salvation in fear (reverential) and trembling. Grace is the by product of Love that allows for our weakness to eventually become an asset to the Kingdom and ourselves.

A great example of that would be someone who is cheap or stingy is actually called to give great resources to the body of believers for the furthering of the Kingdom. God gives grace to work out the details of that person’s gift of finaces for the Kingdom. God has to apply Love.

So at this time of year we celebrate the birth of our Savior who came to leave Love. In the Love resides peace. The Hebrew word Shalom, means complete healing and restoration of everything in our life. Jesus came so we can be at peace. Jesus came to save, deliver and heal. He also came to teach us how to Love.

John chapter 20 verse 21

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you.As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

John chapter 14 verse 27

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

1 Peter chapter 1 verse 16

Since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

Genesis chapter 1 verse 27

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Matthew chapter 5 verse 48

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

The Power of Touch

shifaaz-shamoon-1113383-unsplash — EPhoto by Shifaaz shamoon on Unsplash

December 19, 2018

Tapping into Creativity

We are all creative and I am so passionate about people discovering their creative purpose in life.

December 12, 2018

Creativity: Seven Letters; Seven Days

debby-hudson-705707-unsplash — *Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash*

Psalm 31:5: “Into your hands I now entrust my spirit. O Lord, the God of faithfulness, you have rescued and redeemed me.”

Ministering to the Human Spirit

The practice of ministering to the human spirit has grown in popularity in the past couple of decades. Arthur Burk, founder of Sapphire Leadership Group (www.theslg.com) is one of the pioneers of this healing method which has proven effective; producing fruit beyond his spiritual great-grandchildren.

Ministering to the human spirit has been controversial so let me give you our perspective: We are strongly for it because we have received personal healing from it for over 10 years. There are more than 150 verses on “spirit” to study in the Bible, so we encourage you to develop your own theology on the subject.

That said, let’s look at some Scripture:

1 Thessalonians 5:23 The Passion Translation (TPT) “Now, may the God of peace and harmony set you apart, making you completely holy. And may your entire being—spirit, soul, and body—be kept completely flawless in the appearing of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One.”
2 Corinthians 7:1 The Passion Translation (TPT) “Beloved ones, with promises like these, and because of our deepest respect and worship of God, we must remove everything from our lives that contaminates body and spirit, and continue to complete the development of holiness within us.”

Body, soul and spirit are distinctly separate from each other in these verses confirming that we are made 3-in-one, a trinity after the image of God, Jesus and Holy Spirit. Our body, soul and spirit are enmeshed with Holy Spirit when we become Spirit-filled. We can’t separate our spirit from the Spirit of God.

Our spirit has seven portions, and again this is something we know of from experience. Scripture alludes to this, but we have no hard-and-fast Word yet (See Isaiah 11:2 and Revelations). The seven portions are modeled after the seven grace-gifts or redemptive gifts found in Romans 12:6 which are Prophet, Servant, Teacher, Exhorter, Giver, Ruler and Mercy (We are not referring to the gifts in other portions of Scripture.).

We will have a dominant grace-gift and the others will vary in size and shape, for lack of a better description. This imbalance can cause challenges and sin in one’s life. Some portions may need a lot of healing and ministry while others don’t. Our goal in ministering to the human spirit is healing to become more like Jesus.

Guidelines for Ministry

Ministering to the human spirit is powerful and asking for permission before engaging in the seven portions is a great practice. We can always bless someone else’s spirit but the deeper work, in our opinion should be approached like we would a deliverance or counseling session with the person present. The work can be done face-to-face or not once permission is granted to minister to the seven portions.

These are some guidelines for ministering to the human spirit:

Engage: Invite or call the person’s human spirit forward. It’s great to have a seer or intuitive person present if more discernment is needed. This is where we can call forward each of the seven portions or ask which portion would like to come forward and speak. Take care with this as some of the portions may be hurting or even aggressive.
Affirm: Let the spirit know they are loved and safe. This is where we can exhort the spirit and affirm its work and care for the human body and soul. We can also engage in blessings here that will work to restoration and healing.
Instruct: This is the teaching and faith-building moment. Speak the word over the spirit, share testimony, and counselling wisdom. Take care not to direct the spirit because this can become witchcraft easily. Let’s take a step back to directive prayer which is also witchcraft. When we pray for someone, we must stay away from telling God what we want the person to do. We can’t pray they fall in love with someone or have their boss fired. We can pray they find godly love and a better relationship with their boss.
Direct (Occasionally with God’s command): This is only done when God is very specific about a word for direction. Best practice is to stay away from directing unless we know that we know that we know it’s of God.

Seven Letters

We challenge you to write seven letters in seven days to each portion of your spirit. Write, “Dear Prophet, etc.” Below are a few topics related to each portion with verses to get you started, or you can find one of your own or wait and listen to Jesus.

Day One

Letter to the Prophet: Design

Romans 8:28: “So we are convinced that every detail of our lives is continually woven together to fit into God’s perfect plan of bringing good into our lives, for we are his lovers who have been called to fulfill his designed purpose.”

JR_Day1 — Letter Day 1 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Two

Letter to the Servant: Authority

Matthew 10:1: “[Jesus Sends Out His Twelve Apostles] Jesus gathered his twelve disciples and imparted to them authority to cast out demons and to heal every sickness and every disease.”

JR_Day2 — Letter Day 2 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Three

Letter to the Teacher: Responsibility

Matthew 24:45: “[The Wise and Faithful Servant] ‘Who is the one qualified to oversee the master’s house? He will be a reliable servant who is wise and faithful, one he can depend on. The master will want to give him the responsibility of overseeing others in his house, for his servant will lead them well and give them food at the right time.”

JR_Day3 — Letter Day 3 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Four

Letter to the Exhorter: Reality

Proverbs 1:23: “Come back to your senses and be restored to reality. Don’t even think about refusing my rebuke! Don’t you know that I’m ready to pour out my spirit of wisdom upon you and bring to you the revelation of my words that will make your heart wise?”

JR_Day4 — Letter Day 4 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Five

Letter to the Giver: Stewardship

1 Corinthians 9:17: “If it were my own idea to preach as a way to make a living, I would expect to be paid. Since it’s not my idea but God’s, who commissioned me, I am entrusted with the stewardship of the gospel whether or not I’m paid.”

JR_Day5 — Letter Day 5 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Six

Letter to the Ruler: Freedom

1 Corinthians 6:12: “It’s true that our freedom allows us to do anything, but that doesn’t mean that everything we do is good for us. I’m free to do as I choose, but I choose to never be enslaved to anything.”

JR_Day6 — Letter Day 6 > Jana’s Sketchbook

Day Seven

Letter to the Mercy: Fulfillment

Luke 24:44: “Then he said to them, ‘Don’t you remember the words that I spoke to you when I was still with you? I told you that everything written about me would be fulfilled, including all the prophecies from the law of Moses through the Psalms and the writings of the prophets—that they would all find their fulfillment.’”

JR_Day7 — Letter Day 7 > Jana’s Sketchbook

♥

December 4, 2018

Month: December 2018