desire Archives : Life with the King

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026

Tell of His Faithfulness

Seemingly out of nowhere this week, I got help with a practical household errand that I hadn’t known how to take care of, after 11 years. That soon turned into more help to repair some damage elsewhere. These acts of service, while maybe not so big of a deal to the helper, meant a great deal to me. They spoke to me loudly, as if an angel of God had come to me to let me know, “I’m taking care of you. You don’t have to do things on your own.” There are many such things that I tried and failed to figure out on my own. After many experiences like this, I can say with certainly that we are each very much seen and known by God; He knows just what we need. Let my story be an example that He hasn’t forgotten what you need, even if you’ve had many years of waiting. Things get done in His timing not our own. I so often am tempted to rush, but being patient and knowing that God will provide what is needed is the Way He invites us to go as we follow Him in trust.

So what does life look like when we’re trusting God fully, desperately, knowing that He is our Source of help? Psalm 30 says, “To you, O Lord, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?Hear, O Lord, and be merciful to me! O Lord, be my helper!'” (Psalm 30:8-10). Here we see that God’s desire for us in life is to praise Him and tell of His faithfulness. So today, I’d like to simply tell of His faithfulness!

God has never given up on me. For me, God’s love and faithfulness can be summed up pretty well in that statement. People may give up on us, or we may give up on ourselves sometimes, but God never, ever does. He isn’t ashamed of us, and He always sees the best in us and has confidence in a hope and a potential for fullness of life in us. We may not feel worthy or capable, but He always believes the best for us. Luke 1:37 says, “…nothing will be impossible with God.” He made us, He is the only One who knows what we are capable of. You can’t change His mind about you; that you are worthy of His love, and you are His.

God has shown His faithfulness to me in countless ways, but perhaps most of all through my sister Abby. God used her voice to encourage me and see good when I saw none at all. God has spoken to me through Abby countless times, but the fact that she never seems to get tired of pointing me back to Jesus has been God’s faithfulness in action in my life. She has done this since she took me to a church service with her in 2015, at a time when I had stopped going to church for years, had lost hope, and was lost.

In my wrestle with faith and then with following Jesus, she never made me feel like things had gotten too messy or too hard for God to redeem. She never stopped believing that I could surrender what I told her outright I couldn’t. She wasn’t afraid, not once, to challenge the lies I believed about God and about myself. God used Abby’s voice to faithfully and consistently speak Truth in my life. God’s faithfulness to me has flesh and bones in my sister. I am forever grateful for the gift that she is to me.

Abby is excellent at what we all need from a trusted brother or sister in our walk with Jesus—pointing us to Him with courage, conviction, and most of all love. Where there was a great deal of mourning in my life to the point of losing hope, God in His faithfulness didn’t give up on me. He used Abby, the church, and others to help open my heart and then He did transformative work and restored my faith and hope. He truly made it possible for me to dance and have gladness (Psalm 30:11) when I didn’t feel like I could again.

God is faithful! If you don’t already have one, may God bring a trusted believer into your life to challenge you and help you transform into the likeness of Jesus (Ephesians 4:15). We need each other to help sharpen and spur us on to follow Christ to the end. Amen.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5b).

“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?” (Romans 3:3).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Life with the King, and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me continue writing this blog. Grace and peace.

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026

Obedience to God’s Voice

I’ve been trying to hone in on hearing from God. I’m asking Him questions like, “What do You want me to do in the moment? Should I take a walk or should I read? Should I work or rest? Should I keep quiet or speak up?” After a lifetime of doing what I wanted on my own strength, and regretting most of those decisions, asking God before acting is both a necessity and big challenge. Doing things differently than I’ve always done them is never easy, but it’s worth the struggle, even though I mess up all the time. Just today, I realized I’d done the opposite of what I was supposed to, after making the wrong choice. It ended up causing consequences that set my day back. I realized in hindsight that my decision was disobedient to God’s will for me in that moment. He had told me what to do, I knew in my spirit what it was, but I didn’t act on it. Instead, I thought about it more, and waited, and slipped right into disobedience.

Obedience has a bad reputation in Western culture. We hear constant messages implying that we must listen, not to God or anyone else, but to ourselves; messages like: be a leader not a follower, be yourself, march to the beat of your own drum, do your own thing, live by your own truth. Not all of the sentiment is wrong or bad. But what the culture in this world fails to realize is that listening to our own hearts without the authority of Jesus (who also holds our True identity) is dangerous, because our hearts are prone to be sinful. Our hearts often simply want what they want, and rarely actually align with Jesus without being submitted to His authority. Our hearts, when unchecked, will eventually lead us into sin, every time. Sin leads to death and destruction (Romans 6:16). The obedience of our hearts to God’s will for us through Jesus is the only way to life and fruitfulness (John 3:16, John 10:9, Acts 4:11-12). Living in obedience to God is by far the best life possible for us.

Human beings were designed to obey God, but in the sinfulness of the heart, that obedience can be replaced by idolatry so that we obey, or are subject to the authority of, a myriad of other things. However, it is God’s authority that we are made to live and thrive under. When God told Moses to appoint Joshua as his successor to lead the people into the Promised Land, He spoke of the role of authority in the people’s obedience: “You shall invest him with some of your authority, that all the congregation of the people of Israel may obey” (Numbers 27:20). Moses had authority to command the people only because it was specifically given to him by God to lead them. The very first thing recorded in Scripture that God said to man was in the form of a command, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16-17). God’s authority over man is clear from Scripture, as the proper order. Messaging from the world has tried to twist this order, and nudge us all into playing God in our own hearts and lives, to do what we want to do, to live solely under our own authority.

Obeying God simply out of love and respect for Him and His loving, gracious character is where I want to be, and I have faith that we all can reach that place in our relationship with God at any time. But in my fallenness, I recognize that things can and do go wrong. When they do, it points us to Jesus, who is the solution to every single wrong thing in our lives.

In some seasons of following Jesus, it can be hard to hear God’s Voice. In my experience, I can hear His Voice clearest when I am living in obedience to what He is telling me to do. When we hear His Voice directly in our spirits, it can seem easy to obey. As I learned again just today, it’s not always as easy as it sounds. But He always gives grace. Jesus spoke about his followers listening to His Voice, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:14-16). Sheep know and listen to their shepherd. To live in obedience to Jesus, our Shepherd’s, Voice, we must lay down our lives daily (Luke 9:23), including our hearts’ self-centered desires. He graciously laid His life down for us first; His Voice is trustworthy!

It is in obedience to God that we may enjoy peace; “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1-3). When we allow God to determine our actions, we are able to represent Him well, and be available to minister to others. He has given us His name, as we talked about last week in Called By Your Name, and He longs to guide us in the Way, living in obedience to Him.

May we all seek God and know His Voice, to guide us in all obedience, every day, every moment, all for His glory.

Amen.

“For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart,” (1 Peter 1:22).

“Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine;” (Exodus 19:5).

January 29, 2026January 29, 2026

Led by the Spirit

Here in the middle of winter, there has been a shift in spiritual seasons, at least for me. I had been in a season of waiting, of resting, and of stillness. That season was humbling, and at times frustrating. In Isaiah, it says, “but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31). I’d been so conditioned to work and make things happen, that being out of action felt wrong. But it was exactly what God was calling me to. I learned obedience, and to submit to His will instead of mine. It became clear that I needed that season of rest and to wait for the strength of God to be behind what I did in and with my life. I learned in this last season to wait for leading from God before jumping into anything new.

To wait on God requires seeking God and His will, all the time. For me this was also a frustrating process to learn, as it seemed so incredibly mysterious and too “woo-woo” to be practical in everyday life. But I just needed to surrender to get out of my own way and believe the truth, that God really does communicate, all the time! God’s Word says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). That’s a promise!

We see an amazing example of this in Acts 13, when the church where Paul (Hebrew name Saul) was worshipping in Antioch was all fasting together. While they were seeking the Lord in worship, the Holy Spirit spoke to them and told them what they were to do next. “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them‘” (Acts 13:2). After obeying this command, the next time the Holy Spirit is mentioned, He empowers Paul to speak boldly, leading to a miracle (Acts 13:11) that stopped evil influence (Acts 13:8) on a man of intelligence (Acts 13:7) in the region, and his subsequent belief in the gospel (Acts 13:12). Paul’s words and actions were led. They weren’t done on his own strength, or just because he in himself felt ready to go. He was sent by the Holy Spirit, given God’s strength to take the actions he was sent to take.

While God may not speak audibly all that often, He speaks, leads, and sends people today in many ways. He’ll also speak to us if and when we’ve taken a wrong turn. Wrong turns are okay, as long as we are listening to Him! God won’t stop letting you know what’s right and in His will for you. He always makes a way for us to come back to Him.

I’m entering a new season where God is sending me in a new direction, and I’m excited to be able to share the details with you very soon! For now, I want to share that God has graciously given me new work to do, and in this new season I’ll be doing my best to steward it well and according to His leading. Friends, I would appreciate your prayers as God is leading my life in a new direction, that I would lean on God’s strength, continue to wait on Him even in the middle of the work, and allow myself to be led by the Spirit through it all.

I encourage us all to surrender it all to God, today and every day. The Spirit is eager and longing to lead us in God’s unique and beautiful purpose for our lives. May we let Him lead us as the King of our hearts. Seek Him and you will see miracles! Let your faith in God’s leading shine, and may He will do His will through you. Amen.

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26).

“And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit“. . .’ (Acts 2:38).