Inside Out Devotionals

 "If any man will come after me,  let him deny himself..."  Luke 9:23 I don´t know about you, but I have never been much fond of the scripture above. Denying myself never sounded so appealing to me - until I found out what Jesus REALLY meant by saying this! I used to think that DENYING MYSELF meant: to ignore, to reject my will, my desires, the bad thoughts... but how many of us know that IGNORING things doesn´t cause us to OVERCOME them? The act of simply denying A FACT doesn´t make it disappear before our eyes - unfortunately! :D  I used to be the type of a Christian that would do EVERYTHING possible to get closer to God and to show Him -my- love for him. I was really confident in - my actions and attitude- towards Him. And that was the point when I learned what denying myself really meant!...  The whole time my focus was on ME, MY ATTITUDES, MY DEVOTION, MY CAPACITY to DO things right ... whereas what Jesus meant by saying that...

"Do you not say, ‘It is still four months until the harvest comes?’ Look, I say to you, raise your eyes and look at the fields and see, they are white for harvest."   John 4:35 A harvest is the consequence of much labor: plowing, sowing, watering... each step of this process points to the final goal - the reaping! In life, we are always looking forward to the day of our reaping, and -back in our minds- there is always still quite some time left till it comes.  However, Jesus is teaching us something different here! He is inviting us to LIFT UP OUR EYES and SEE, harvest is HERE already! The solution of some difficult situation we may face won´t come after a time, it IS there before our eyes already! Graham Cooke puts it this way: every problem comes with provision attached to it!   So true! We, Christians, tend to be future-focused people. We receive God´s promises and think they are somewhere in the future and we end up missing the beaut...

 "O taste and see that the Lord is good..." Psalm 34:8 Human beings are normally moved by what they see. Many of us will say we like or we don´t like a certain kind of food by simply looking at it. If it looks good, even though we might have never tasted it before, we will not hesitate to try it. On the other hand, we will say we don´t like it simply by how it looks.  Many situations in our lives don´t look the best, and we might find it difficult to see any profit in it. That is our great challenge: to walk by faith and not by sight - it’s what we trust in but don’t yet see that keeps us going (2Cor 5:7).  To taste means to eat something in small quantity, allowing one  to have a real experience with it.  When the bible invites us to TASTE, it is calling us to realize that we don´t need to wait till the next great happening in our lives to experience the goodness of God. And even when the situation doesn´t look good, we are able to prove of Go...

God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody (...)  “I have set you up as a father of many peoples”?  Romans 4:17 (MSG) Abraham´s story is one of the most encouraging passages in the bible. We only get to learn more about it from Genesis 12 on and Abraham is 75 years old already! The cool thing is that when we think we will finally start reading about Abraham´s story what we really get to read is GOD´S STORY FOR ABRAHAM.  God has a story for each of us and He is not just "watching" us from heaven as we live our days here on earth. He has actually planned something beautiful for us to live and get to enjoy life  - on earth as in heaven- instead of simply  living it!  We spend our days trying, struggling to become something, to achieve things... but Abraham´s story shows us that it is not about how hard we try to make things happen in our lives. It is God who causes us to BECOME whatever we ever wanted to BE, for before h...