Power Play

Today's challenge just might be the hardest yet...
It might be the most humbling, the most humiliating, the most harrying, but also the most helpful and most freeing... if you have the courage to face it.
Are you willing?
Are you ready?

Day Nine

We are fixing to dig deep ladies... so very deep. We are going to take a walk through our past and quite possibly our present.

Today your challenge is to some point and time between now and March 17th... I am not asking you to do this today because I know personally how hard this will be for some... so just some time between now and March 17th I want you to get physically alone with God. No one else around. No time limit. Just you and God and a sheet of paper... or a couple of sheets of paper. Get alone and undistracted and pray that God would lead you in this challenge.

The challenge I am issuing you is the same challenge that Shannon was given as she sought healing. I will share the challenge in a bit, first let us go back to the garden.

See post at Proven Path Ministries

Woman to Woman

Compare and compromise and competition... we are going to continue today to look at comparisons and our emotional ties... but today we are focusing on us... woman to woman.

Day Eight

See post at Proven Path Ministries

I Wish My Husband...

I received a comment on one of the Thirty-three day Challenge posts sharing that they were doing the challenge, but they felt like a failure... Ladies, God is honoring your efforts. Just as I shared with this woman I will share with you, don't feel like a failure, just persevere! Keep going. Our God is not a performance based judge. He judges according to the heart. 

Day Seven:

Today as we focus on becoming a woman of sexual and emotional integrity we will focus on our thoughts toward our husbands or future husbands....

See post at Proven Path Ministries

Legalism vs Love

We live in a day when we have a list of rules or steps that are supposedly guaranteed to solve all our problems. Just do this, this way, in this order, and sit back and watch the results. Life just doesn't always fit into a list. How many times have you sat down in the morning or the night before and wrote out your "to do" list for the next? How many times have you been able to accomplish it as written?

Today in our challenge we are going to talk about how to live lives of sexual and emotional integrity based on love not legalism.

See post her at Proven Path Ministries

Men Give Love To Get Sex, Women Give Sex To Get Love

See post here at Proven Path Ministries:
http://www.nicolelhvaughn.com/?p=783 

Moving to New Place

I am just letting everyone know that I am moving my blog. You will now be able to find me at Proven Path Ministries. I have loved my Blogger... the move is to a personally owned site as I step forward in this ministry and to whatever God has called me to do in each day.

Also, being an approval addict, this new site does not have "followers" or "stats" so it will save me from the heart dropping condemnation I experience when I see no new followers or worse... when I see that I have been "unfollowed". It also will keep me from constantly stopping by the computer just to see if anyone is reading my posts and what countries they are from.

I don't write for the glory of me, but for the glory of God and the building up of His church. I have to be reminded of that constantly... as I catch myself too easily seeking approval and validation from those who are not my Lord and Savior.

Confessions of a Christian Housewife will continue.
Devotional Studies Through The Bible will continue.
Proven Path Ministries will encompass these as well as eventually will make available several Bible studies I have written as I have taught and studied.

I still am working on the layout and ins and outs of Proven Path... it is a work in progress and I am having to be coached through it... thank God for youth ministers that are computer geeks :-)
I hope you will continue to join me and share in this ministry with me.
I pray that I will be able to continue to encourage you...

Many blessings in Christ to you all!

Every Woman's Battle Review

I received Every Woman's Battle through the Blogging for Books program. I poured over this book. I have had a passion for purity since the day I was wholly surrendered to Christ. I was a complete failure in this area and I reaped the consequences. My heart's desire has been since to do all that I can to give others the info and encouragement they need to not go through what I went through and to help them realize that there is hope if they are where I was.

What I love about this book is that she brings sexual integrity back to where it begins... the mind. Most women think that if they have not crossed whatever line they have written in the sand then they are living a pure life... but then they wonder why they struggle if they haven't "done anything". Sexual purity and integrity is so much more than physical sex... physical sex (outside of marriage) is not where the battle begins... that is where it is lost.

I have often wondered how I ended up traveling the path I did when I had such a wonderful father... and then I read this:

"I recognized that I was looking for love, approval, and acceptance from every authority figure in my life except my real father and my heavenly Father." ~ Shannon Ethridge

When I read this quote it took my mind to the book of Isaiah.

Stop regarding man, whose breath of life is in his nostrils;
For why should he be esteemed?

Isaiah 2:22

I realized that I had stopped looking for approval in my father's eyes... and my Heavenly Father's eyes and began looking for approval from mere man. This is when my life went of course in a major way. I know now that this is when it began. How thankful I am for the grace and unconditional love I have in both my earthly father and my Heavenly Father... and yes today, my husband. 

Every Woman's Battle is a must read for every woman, it really is.

If you feel you are alone in a struggle... after reading this you will realize that you are not alone.

Buy now :-)

The last thing you want to do is keep your struggle in the dark. We are to expose what is hidden in the dark and the love of the Light of Christ will heal us... always. When David cried out to God in the psalms he cried out for God to go deep and dig out whatever was hiding in the darkness of his heart.

 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way. 
Psalm 139:23-24

This book, along with another that I read right before it, has inspired me to do a thirty-three day challenge with any one who would like to join me. I will be using the study that comes with this book combined with the other that I read, What Are You Waiting For by Dannah Gresh.

In this challenge I hope that we will allow God to go deep and dig into our hearts and expose all our anxious thoughts and hurtful ways so that we might turn to Him and be healed. 

Feel free to join me :-)

*I received this book for free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review.