Created to FlourishSample

As we’ve seen so far in our devotional, God’s heart for your life is to flourish. He desires for you to have a purpose. He desires for you to have life and life more abundantly. He desires for you to have peace that surpasses all understanding and unspeakable joy!

But as we saw in Day One of the devotional, often, we settle for so much less than what God has for us. Not only this but often we don’t actually believe or trust God that His plans for our lives are actually good. We find ourselves not really convinced that these wonderful promises of purpose, joy, perfect peace, and security could be for us.

If we look back to the age-old tactic of the enemy in the garden, we realise that Satan still tries the same thing with us today. Back at the very beginning, Satan twisted what God said by questioning, “Did God really say?” In doing this, he made Eve doubt God’s Word and His character. He’s been using this same trick on women ever since, and it has been robbing women of their ability to flourish.

Satan knows how much God loves us, and he knows that if he can hurt us and keep us from trusting God, how much it will break the Father’s heart. The enemy knows that once you’ve received Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, your salvation is secured, and he can’t keep us out of heaven. So he tries to rob, steal, and destroy us – making us doubt God’s promises and His goodness to stop us from flourishing.

If we struggle to believe that God loves us, then we’ll struggle to believe that He really wants us to flourish. If we struggle to believe that we can trust Him to keep His Word, then we’ll never experience the fullness of all He has for us.

We need to recognise that any doubt, any fear, any lack of trust in God’s character or His Word for what it is – a tactic of the devil to keep us from flourishing. Our first step in guarding ourselves against this tactic of the enemy is to make sure we have a Biblical perspective of God’s character.

The Bible says in 1 John 4:7, “God is love.”

God is love. What a thought! Love isn’t just an action God does – it’s who He is! Love isn’t just a feeling God has about us. It’s who He is. It’s His character.

As we read 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter that’s commonly known as the love chapter, it beautifully describes what love is, and because the Bible says that God is love, it gives us a powerful insight into God’s character.

As you read through 1 Corinthians 13, why don’t you read through it with God’s perspective on how He views you?

Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you if you have any inaccurate perspectives of who God is. Then, why don’t you begin to meditate on all God says He is? Every time those fiery darts of doubt and fear from the enemy try to make you doubt God’s character or His promises, take those thoughts captive and replace them with these scriptures from 1 Corinthians 13.

God really loves you, He rejoices over you, He has good plans for you, He loves you with an everlasting love, and you can trust in the never changing faithfulness of His character.