VICI    DERRICK    MINISTRIES

       

JOYOUS GREETINGS!            FROM OUR FOUNDER

I woke up Thursday morning before dawn with the verse in my head “If you know (in your ignorance) how to give good gifts to your children, how much more so is it with God?”

It occurred to me that many of us don’t realize that all of us have been given a gift from God.  We may think of the people like Mozart, or Renoir.  We may think of Stevie Wonder or Alice Walker.  We may think of Billy Shakespeare or Maya Angelou. I remember watching Judith Jamison dance and thinking that I wish I could move like that. Or listening to Ella Fitzgerald and thinking Good Lord, that woman sure can sing.  Probably, if I asked, each one of us could identify someone whose gift we admire and whose gift we would love to have. But what about the gift that we have been given?

In II Timothy verse seven we read “God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power and of love and of sound mind.”

I suspect that the clue to the gift that we have been given from God can be found in the phrase, God has not given us the spirit of fear.  It is the spirit of fear that prevents many of us from recognizing and nurturing our gift.

Fear is a spiritual paralytic. It paralyzes us and prevents us from the exploration of our gifts.

Often we neglect to deal with this most important aspect of who and what we are.  We don’t usually want to admit to our fears. Many of us are not even operating with the conscious knowledge that it is our fear acting as baseline energy that makes our decisions and determines our actions and reactions to life, to people to circumstances and events.

It is our fear that prevents us from becoming all that God intends for us.

There are many ideas that the spirit of fear uses to prevent our forward motion.  One of these ideas is that we don’t deserve anything more than what we have or that we already have more than we deserve.  Fear tells us that we are not good enough or smart enough or talented enough to do anything more than what we are doing.  Fear tells us that others won’t understand or accept us.  Fear blinds us to possibilities.

But God has not given us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and of self -control.

For this reason I remind you to fan the flame of the gift of God.  Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you.  Guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us is how Timothy put it.

Take a moment, close your eyes and imagine that you are being touched by the Holy Spirit. Say to yourself, I do not inherit fear.  I have inherited power.  God power is my gift from God.

God power is creative.  Each of us has access to the creative power of God. Use this gift wisely.

Blessing you,     Vici