Inside Out Devotionals

Surely, Lord, you bless the righteous;   you surround them with your favor as with a shield.  Psalm 5:12 Whenever something bad happens to us, we may think: I must have done something wrong; or...maybe this is the consequence for that one thing I did in the past.. or we may even question: why didn´t God prevent this to happen to me? No matter what the situation is... we must be careful not to either look at ourselves in search of faults nor look at God as someone who is punishing us or someone who could have done something to stop that and yet didn´t do anything about it.  Last year I broke one tooth and because it was very expensive to get it fixed I waited till last month in order to see a dentist. For this past month I could only chew using the left side of my mouth because of this tooth treatment. Now, guess what? On the very day I finally got my tooth fully recovered, a few hours later I was eating A PEANUT and the OTHER TOOTH (which had al...

"O Lord, revive Your work in the midst of the years, In the midst of the years make it known..."  Habakkuk 3:2 It is past half of the year of 2017, and I ask you... are you as excited and encouraged as you probably were by January 1st? Whenever a new year begins, we feel refreshed and renewed, we feel God´s promises renewed in our hearts and minds but it looks like that feeling and awareness simply fade away as the days go by. But the good news is: it DOESN´T have to be so! As we feel like our energy is being drained and our hope is doing down, we should look up towards those same things that set our hearts on fire at the beginning.  Everything around us will try to show us that this year isn´t going to be as good as we expected at first. The prophet Jeremiah went through a similar experience and he describes it in the book of Lamentations 3:21-24 (MSG):  "I’ll never forget the trouble,(...)  the feeling of hitting the bottom. But there’s...

"... and all these blessings shall come on you, and overtake you,  if you hear unto the voice of the Lord your God." Deuteronomy 28:2 We all are top communicators! The proof of this is that not for a single minute we are silent... there is a constant talk going on in our heads through our thoughts and the point is: there are always TWO VOICES speaking in our heads!  Jesus speaks of these two voices in the parable of the good Shepherd:  "(...) his sheep follow their shepherd because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice." (John 10:4-5) No matter the time, day or night, there are these two voices speaking. One is the voice of the good Shepherd, that is God speaking in our hearts, showing us the way, leading us towards an amazing destiny in partnership with Him. This one voice will say the BEST things about you, it truly believes...

"(...) knowing that he had been in that condition a long time, Jesus said to him, “Do you want to get well?”  John 5:6 In Jerusalem there was a pool called Bethesda and it is told that from time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be healed of whatever disease they had. There was a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. He would lie by the pool longing to be healed, even though his chance was almost null. He had no one to help him into the pool when the water was stirred- while he was trying to get in, someone else would go down ahead of him. Bethesda in Hebrew means " House of mercy; house of kindness" . That man didn´t know that THAT DAY he would meet and experience MERCY and KINDNESS in his life as Jesus came to encounter him by the pool!  Jesus knew that he had been in that condition for a long time. In fact, Jesus knows every single detail of...