This is Practice

Aglow Prayer Director, Nancy McDaniel, shares a word the Lord gave her at the beginning of 2020. Listen as Nancy gives insight into a work God is doing that will prepare our hearts for what is coming. What we are experiencing now, is just a practice.

• How has God been preparing your heart for what may be to come?
• What practices have been developed in you during this time that will equip you for what's next?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

At the beginning of this year, the Lord kind of arrested me with telling me to guard my heart this year. That was before the pandemic, before everything happened, and and my first response was to guard. “Lord, if you're telling me to guard my heart, there must be some things that are going to come against me, or against my heart.” But I also had that sense that it wasn't about what would come against me, but something he was developing within my heart that needed to be guarded. And so as things began to develop this year, I grew in a in a sense of understanding - that to guard my heart hadn't really had nothing to do with all of the stuff that was going on, but it had to do with guarding my heart from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. And, you know we we've all been on a similar journey with different nuances. Dave and I had a number of opportunities to panic,  if we would have wanted to go there. Starting with being outside of the country as the nation was being shut down,  and then experiencing walking through COVID, and for many weeks trying to get cleared of that. And all of that, and yet God has done something so incredible in my heart, in the area of learning to guard my heart from the inside out.

So that it really doesn't matter what's coming from the outside. It's not about putting up a big guard and being guarded, but guarding the presence of God, the peace that passes understanding, the rest that's in our heart, the assurance of who God is. And he hasn't changed, and guarding those things from the inside out, so that things that come from the outside don't shake us. Or we're immovable, as far as the things that are coming from the outside, and that's been a very precious gift. I feel that the Lord has developed in my heart, and is also a preparing somebody. A couple people have referenced what we've gone through this year. This isn't the end all of it. In fact, when the word pandemic first started being used widely, I just kept hearing the Lord say “this is just practice”. This isn’t, you know, this isn't the big one and there's going to be some things developed in you, in this in this time of practice that are going to be so crucial and so important for the next big or bigger thing that comes along. And in that process I’m kind of hitting a couple different things here, but in that process, I’ve continually been reminded of when Jesus in John, around 17:15- 17, He says over and over, “these things I’ve spoken to you” so that and I feel like he's been speaking some things to our hearts -  some things we can write down in journal, some things are more being written on the atmosphere of our hearts, but he's speaking these things. One of the things that he says in John says “these things i've spoken to you, so that your joy will remain full. And your joy and my joy will remain in you”. And so I feel like it - have some things been tough? Yeah, they've been tough, but he's building something on himself, in the area of guarding our hearts from the inside out, that can cause that can cause us to live in that place of fullness of joy. And not joy from the circumstances, but that as he said, that my joy his joy remains in us. And that's something so rich and so solid and something that I believe is going to sustain us all, but his joy, his peace, his presence from the inside out.