Author Archives: Karla Jo Wasion

“The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack. He lets me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters.” Psalm 23:1

I had a moment a while back. A moment of understanding that came rushing out of my mouth as confession to Jesus.

“Lord, I did not follow You here.”

In order for us to be led by Him, we must follow Him. I found myself in a place that I knew He had not led me. It didn’t mean I had stopped loving Him, trusting Him or that I was no longer His. It meant that I had followed my flesh and found myself where I did not want to be.

Don’t get me wrong — Jesus will lead us into difficult places. We cannot read His word and come away thinking that following Him means long walks on the beach for the rest of our days. But there are certain places we can wander into that we didn’t get to by following Him.

He will not lead us into sin. He will not lead us into the captivity that He freed us from. He does not lead us into despair, hopelessness, or complacency. He won’t lead us away from His Body, the Church. He won’t lead us to hold grudges, to slander or to demand our own way. He won’t lead us into a victim mentality or self-righteous thinking.

We follow our flesh into those places and most often it never occurs to us that we had stopped following Jesus.

But with our very next step, we can follow Him again. We can turn around, obey His Word, die to ourselves and get covered in the dust of His feet once again.

“I know your works, your labor, and your endurance, and that you cannot tolerate evil…You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.  Yet I hold this against you: You have abandoned the love you had at first.” – Revelation 2:2, 3-4

You’ve done good things, endured much for My name. You haven’t given up the fight, and you hate what I hate. On the outside, all is well. But.

Love. ἀγάπη. Agape. Denotes the love which springs from admiration and [reverence], and which chooses its object with decision of will, and devotes a self-denying and compassionate devotion to it. Love in its’ fullest conceivable form. (Bullinger’s Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English & Greek New Testament)

This is not an outside kind of love. It’s the love that accompanied your first ‘yes’ to Me, full of fire and hope. It’s the devoted love, the love that doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, the love that made you want to risk everything for Me. In the beginning, that love was the reason for everything you did.

Come back to your first love.

“Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you.” – Isaiah 54:10

Earthquakes hit our lives and send everything out of control. Things get broken or moved off center at the very least. And when the shaking ends, we look around at the mess it left and wonder what happened, and how we’ll pick up all the pieces.

Let’s face it. There are a tremendous amount of things that can be shaken in our lives. When our worth and/or happiness is determined by what we have, who loves us, who approves of us, what we do, how much we’ve accomplished — we have a lot to lose when a shaking comes.

But God’s promise is this:  Whatever is shaking in your life, it cannot shake you free from His love and His promise of salvation. That’s your safe ground right there. If you are going to cling to something, cling to that.

Everything else can shake. Everything else may need to shake until it falls. God promises that He will not be shaken.

“I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’ … What I have said, that I will bring about; what I have planned, that I will do.” – Isaiah 46:10, 11)

This is one of the passages of scripture I stood on during the restoration of my marriage. When doubt began to rise. When what was in front of me looked nothing like restoration. When the lie crept in that it was on my shoulders to fix this thing, to somehow make everything right again.

But it’s not just me. We all have lives that are being taken from destruction to restoration, if we know Jesus.  And we all have days of doubts and days of lies. Days when it feels like it’s all on us.

Let today be a day of truth. Regardless of what our eyes are seeing, we are in the process of restoration. Our lives are full of His purposes and His plans. He will do what He said He would do.

God always keeps His word.

The same truth that should cause those who refuse Him to tremble, can be for us a firm place to stand.

“In Your unfailing love You will lead the people You have redeemed. In Your strength You will guide them to Your holy dwelling.” – Exodus 15:13

And this is our own song as well. You and I, the redeemed, are being led home from our place of captivity. He didn’t save us to just leave us to find our own way. Through every difficulty, every sorrow, every valley…we are still being led by the God who rescued us. The God who promises that He loves us and will never, ever abandon us.

You have not been forgotten. He is still leading you. Not with anger or disappointment. Not with reluctance, but with unfailing love. He is not waiting for you to figure it out or make all the right moves. He is waiting for you to believe Him again. To trust that He is with you and He is for you.

Lift up your eyes this morning and remember that you are His, and He is leading you home. With love.

^“Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here.” He replied, “You give them something to eat.” They answered, “We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd.” – Luke 9:12-13

These same twelve had just returned from being sent out by Jesus to heal people and cast out demons. But when faced with hungry people and not enough food, they can only consider what is humanly possible.

But what catches my heart this morning is this:  His followers were called to participate in His power. He sent them out, in His power, to heal and deliver. And then He included them in the miraculous feeding of hungry people. Until He sent them out, they had watched Him minister with power, but now He was calling them to do with Him what He had been doing alone.

It will always be His power at work, but as His follower, I have been called to co-labor with Him. Sometimes, that will mean feeding people who are hungry, rather than sending them away.

His power reaches every part of our lives. The sick parts, the tormented parts, and the hungry parts. Today, don’t overlook the places His power wants to touch through you.