Filled With Joy

There's nothing like spending a week with your best friends at a camp where God is the main focus. Those weeks where everyone is expecting God to do a work in their hearts. He never fails to show up and go above and beyond what we ask. So here's what he did in me this past week while was at camp. I have been struggling with doubt for a little over a year now. Satan tries to distract me with lies and unbelief that God does not really exist and everything that I have believed all my life is a joke. These doubts come in waves and a week before camp I started getting those same lies into my head again. I was nervous. Nervous that it would continue on through camp and I was going to have to be fighting Satan the whole week.  I was fighting the first two nights of camp. Fighting to focus during worship and fighting to believe what the pastors were preaching. One night during small group, my leader asked us to take some time and journal what God was saying to us. I sat there f...

While riding in the car, I was reading through the Crucifixion and reflecting on Pilot and his actions throughout this story. Pilot believed that Jesus was innocent from the beginning, but he gave in to the pressure from the people around him and freed Barabbas instead. I, then, thought of Judas and his betrayal. How could someone so close to Jesus choose money? Instead of me cursing these guys because of what they did to Jesus, I need to remind myself that I did that to Jesus as well. I am just as bad as Pilot, I am just as bad as Judas, I am even just as bad as Peter when he betrayed him. I also took part in putting him on the cross. Jesus did not just die on the cross because Judas turned him in and Pilot chose him over Barabbas; he went to the cross because he loved me and to fulfill the purpose that God sent him to earth to do. I also need to realize that without these two people and their actions we wouldn't have anything to tell 2,000 years later.  Without Pilot t...