Do Not Be Afraid

Hey y'all.

Happy New Year everyone! We pray your Christmas and New Year were full of joy and laughter with loved ones.

So sorry we were MIA last month. We had a lot going on with getting sick and other things happened that were out of our control. Thankfully, we are back, and this time, we are more focused than before.

We wanted to start our year off with a challenge. We decided to do a weekly reminder to not be afraid and to trust God. We’re calling it our “Do Not Fear Challenge” and a free download is available in the shop (I’ll link it below) so that you can follow along. Each week, we will post a video completing the challenge and talking a little bit with you guys about the week’s challenge. Together, we will grow in trusting God through the hard times and praising God in the good times.

Okay, now to get into today’s message... This week, our scripture for the Do Not Fear Challenge is found in Genesis 15:1 and it reads like this in the NLT version “ Some time later, the LORD spoke to Abram in a vision and said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, for I will protect you, and your reward will be great.’”. In the previous chapter, Abram had to go rescue his nephew Lot from the hands of King Amraphel of Babylonia. This king, with the help of 3 other kings, had gone to war against the Kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zoar and defeated them. As a result, they went into their lands and took prisoners of war, among them Lot. One of lot’s men escapes and notifies Abram of this and so Abram takes the 318 trained men born into his household to rescue Lot. Upon Abram’s victory, Melchizedek blesses Abram. This brings up back to Genesis 15.

Now time had passed and the LORD tells Abram not to fear, that HE was getting ready to do a new thing in Abram’s life. God proceeds to give Abram the promise of making his offspring as numerous as the stars. The LORD then proceeds to reveal to Abram the enslavement of the Hebrews in Egypt for 400 years and of their liberation. He also reveals to Abram that his descendants will possess Canaan. After all this God ends this conversation by saying that He will indeed give this land to Abram’s descendants.

All this time, God was revealing the bigger picture to Abram although the LORD revealed they’d be oppressed and enslaved, He promised to free them and give them the land Abram was in as an inheritance.

You may be asking yourself how this applies to your life today, why are you bringing up this story that we’ve heard many times before. To that, I say this:

The Lord is telling us to not be afraid, He is doing a new thing in our lives.

Now I know it may not be as drastic as what His plans were with Abram, It may be very small. Just know that the small thing now, may grow to something big later on. Know that your story is NOT over yet. God wants you to seek Him out. Seek him with absolutely ZERO distractions and ZERO excuses. Make time to be in deep intimacy with God and watch how he changes your circumstances.

It may not look like what you wanted, but it will be exactly what you need. Stop allowing outside voices to silence what God is trying to tell you. Stop being afraid of walking alone, of looking like a fool, or of failing. You CANNOT succeed unless you start. From this year on, be intentional with your time with God, seek HIS will for your life. It’s time to stop trying to fit God into the mold we have created for Him in our own minds. Stop setting limiting expectations to what God can do in the midst of your dark times. God wants to meet you where you are at, and bring you to where HE has wanted to take you for a while now. Fear is the absence of faith, and without faith, it is impossible to please God.

Remember the times you have made a promise to God and have failed to deliver on your end of the promise? God wants that cycle to end. He wants your yes to be YES and your no to be NO. Please, don’t misinterpret what we’re saying here, we decided to start this challenge because we, too, have failed God many times. We have just grown tired of being complacent in our failures. We are tired of being afraid to even try to make a difference in our lives. We are tired of accepting defeat. We want to be warriors, not worriers.

This year, we challenge you to seek God’s face in the midst of your suffering, in the midst of your successes too. We need to remember that without God, we can do nothing. Stop making up excuses because, as a wonderful sister in Christ reminded me this morning, at the end, no excuse will be a good enough reason to why we rejected the Lord. The time is drawing near when we will be taken up in the cloud to be with Christ, are you ready for that day?

If you are ready to take the challenge with us, join us at https://critsandcrafts.com/products/widfit-boho-weekly-planner

As always, remember, leave us a comment to let us know your thoughts or if you’re committed to joining the challenge with us.

Love Always,

Your sister in Christ,

Michelle Torres