My Thanksgiving Challenge – Get Ready!
Praise the Lord! So excited to begin my big Thanksgiving Challenge! In case you didn’t read yesterday’s message about this, I’m about to begin sharing with my precious readers the 100 DAYS OF THANKSGIVING: A DEVOTIONAL-JOURNAL FROM THE HEART OF LARA LOVE that I wrote miraculously in about a 10-day period not long ago!
The book is intended to help people learn & practice a lifestyle of everyday thanksgiving to God! I will be sharing the messages from my book and so hope you will consider getting a copy for yourself or copies for others whereby you can read the messages in print & have the Jesus Journal Time space to write as you are led.
Below you will find A LITTLE LETTER FROM LARA & the INTRODUCTION to the book. Lord willing, in the next few days I plan to send out the message from Day 1 of the book.
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A Little Letter from Lara
Dear friend,
It would be hard to imagine there was ever a more negative, self-pitying, complaining, spoiled, and unthankful person on the planet than I was much if not most of the time FOR DECADES. Even once as an adult in my 20s I placed my faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, and even after some years later I got serious about being a believer in Jesus, and even after some years later I became totally devoted to the Lord and to following Him, and even back when I first started my ministry, I very much lacked Thanksgiving very much of the time. But God has changed me beyond measure!
Now I am not only totally devoted to the Lord and to my ministry work, but I do not want to draw a breath without being, feeling, speaking, and acting with a heart filled with Thanksgiving to God. And when I fall short in this, which I confess I do, I want to repent immediately.
May this book be an encouragement and inspiration to you who read it, and to myself as I write it, to live our lives totally devoted to the Lord with our hearts, our mouths, and our very lives continually filled with Thanksgiving to the Lord – and for the Lord! Hallelujah!
love & blessings,
lara
p.s. I have purposely used an upper case T in Thanksgiving in this book to emphasize the giving of thanks to & for the Lord!
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Introduction
People in America tend to think of Thanksgiving as a once-a-year holiday marked by time off from work, the beginning of the “holiday season”, cooking and baking, turkeys and stuffing and stuffing one’s face with endless food, friends, family, fun, football, more food, more fun, and oh yes, still more food, getting ready for the big sales at the stores the day after Thanksgiving Day, putting up Christmas decorations, family traditions, more food, well, you get the point. Somewhere in the mix of it all, toasts may be made at the dinner table and some prayers may be spoken thanking God for His goodness.
But all in all, typically what is preeminent for many is not God and Thanksgiving to Him but instead ourselves and enjoying His blessings. The Thanksgiving Day holiday quickly passes, and 364 days now remain until the next celebration of the Thanksgiving Day holiday. As though Thanksgiving does not exist at all or much anyway outside of once a year.
But Thanksgiving in God’s eyes isn’t about a once-a-year American holiday but is instead about living a life of total devotion to Him to include faith, love, praise, worship, adoration, obedience, service – and THANKSGIVING to the Lord!
The mission of this book is to encourage and inspire us all not to think of Thanksgiving as a once-a-year holiday but to practice a lifestyle of faith in and total devotion to the Lord to blessedly include Thanksgiving to Him each & every day of our lives and forevermore!
Ready for the challenge?
