This year Jerusalem!

Hi WordPress world, long time no post. Why? It has been a season of very, very busy work and school, and I opted for sleep instead of blogging.

Yet, if you know me and my family, we are missionaries, and people of faith.

This Tuesday, we fly from Tulsa, OK, to Tel Aviv, Israel, for the first time.

For over 20 years, we have prayed for Israel, and loved the nation, for it is the birthplace of the Word of God, Jesus, and God’s country, truly the Holy land.

This year, God has made a way for us to actually set foot in the land, fulfilling a life long dream for our family.

We do have our passports and airfare fully paid, but not nearly enough to pay for accommodations and food for the five weeks we are there.

Therein is faith, radically trusting God to provide for our family as we go..

I guess if we claim to trust fully in God, and our hearts scream: “Go to Israel’ we are going…

Please pray for us, and if you are able to help us financially with this trip, the need is urgent, for I will be travelling with my two children.

Donate on-line: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=95XHSDDXDS7MC

Thanks family!

Keep Smiling!

 

Jesus is Lord!

 

Chris, Karen, Keila and Jedidiah Walsh

We are here! Radically trusting Jesus daily!

 

Donate on-line: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=95XHSDDXDS7MC

T

Seven Rules for a Healthy Marriage

Here’s a marriage and family counseling session:

1. Seek Jesus first, every day. Do a yearly Bible reading plan. Put Him only above your spouse. Except the Lord build our house and family, all our work is meaningless.
   
2. 

   Love your spouse, and deliberately stay in love. Let no child, work situation, or church situation get between you two. Marriage, your one flesh covenant before God, takes precedence over everything else.
   

3. Love your children. Teach them right from wrong. Discover their gifts, and ‘the way they should go’, and get them help and teaching in their gifting s. Teach them to honor the other the parent, and to obey Jesus, and parents. If your spouse is doing wrong, or asking the children to sin against the Lord, stand with Jesus, in love, prayerfully seeking Him to instruct and correct the offending person, while you walk in honor. Children must be taught to obey their parents, first time, always, and if discipline is needed, then both parents should support each other in it. Never allow a child to play one parent against the other. Never use children as a pawn in conflict with each other, nor poison them against your spouse, even if you are divorced.
   
4. Go to church. If you have to check out 50 of them until you find the one that is right for your family, attending a different one every weekend, find a church home, and get planted there. Pay your tithes, support missions, and love the poor. https://chrisaomministries.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/why-go-to-church/
   
5. Work, and grow in your education. The best gift you can give this life, is a better you. Work, contribute, increase, and continue to study, apply, and grow in your gift and vocation. Do not settle nor compromise, but press towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
   
6. Eat healthy, and get or stay in shape.
   1 Corinthians 6:20
   For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God‘s.

   Most health problems can be eliminated by enough sleep, clean water, healthy food, and decent vitamins and supplements.
   

7. Have fun! Laugh a lot! I laugh most at myself and the stupid mistakes I make, and have learned to forgive quickly, and ask God’s forgiveness just as quickly. One third of of the kingdom of God is JOY. It is difficult victoriously serving the Lord, but joyful. Learn to laugh at adversity, and to pray and receive grace as you go, but GO you must…It is His command, not His suggestion.
   
   If you need prayer: https://chrisaomministries.com/2016/08/06/the-purpose-of-this-blog/

Are You a Builder or a Wrecker – BUILD!

How’s this for a career move?

Job 36:11 If they obey and serve him, they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures.

Many people think that if we work hard, go to school, continue our education, and exercise good financial stewardship, we will prosper.

Yet, Biblical prosperity involves much more than money. How well we have seen friends that graduated college, went to work, started a family, and ‘grew apart’, then ended up in an affair, or some other mess, then ended up in divorce court. Suddenly, their dreams are shattered, and their life is ruined, and the nightmare begins: joint custody of children, trying to balance complicated relationships and schedules, and now, challenging budgets.

This is not prosperity!

A Builder Or a Wrecker

As I watched them tear a building down

A gang of men in a busy town

With a ho-heave-ho, and a lusty yell

They swung a beam and the side wall fell

I asked the foreman, “Are these men skilled,

And the men you’d hire if you wanted to build?”

He gave a laugh and said, “No, indeed,

Just common labor is all I need.”

“I can easily wreck in a day or two,

What builders have taken years to do.”

And I thought to myself, as I went my way

Which of these roles have I tried to play?

Am I a builder who works with care,

Measuring life by rule and square?

Am I shaping my work to a well-made plan

Patiently doing the best I can?

Or am I a wrecker who walks to town

Content with the labor of tearing down?

“O Lord let my life and my labors be

That which will build for eternity!”

Author Unknown, The Increase, 35th Anniversary Issue, 1993, p. 9.

Ps 127:1 «A Song of degrees for Solomon.» Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

Mt 6:33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

This is how we are to live.

In love with Jesus, and each other, obeying His word, no matter what appears to be happening in the political arena or workplace.

This, according to this verse, will produce true prosperity, and a pleasurable life.

Want to rearrange your schedule?

Schedule in church three times/week, daily morning prayer and Bible reading, and let the Lord begin to show you His career plan, filled with goodness, blessing, peace, and true prosperity. Live the life you were born to live!

https://chrisaomministries.com/2016/08/06/the-purpose-of-this-blog/

Let’s pray:

‘Father, rearrange my life, and help me to schedule you and your Word First place in all I do. Where I’ve missed it, forgive me, and deliver me I pray. I commit to your Lordship Jesus, lead me into your perfect plan for my life, and bring peace out of my storm, Amen’

That We Might Live A Quiet and Peaceable Life!

That we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty

1 Tim 2 2 Kings 1, 2 1 ¶ I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men;
2 For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;

Ever notice that this portion of the promise, that is a life of godliness and honesty, lived quietly and peaceably, comes after the exhortation to pray for government and leaders.

Sure, we have First Amendment rights here in the US to speak up against evil, and to bring correction where the government has sinned against God, but it seems that many Christians spend more time railing against the government, than actually praying for them.

As for me and my house, we serve the Lord, and I don’t know about you, but I want my house, to be a place of godliness, honesty, peace, with quietness from the storms of life.

Guess I’m kinda old school in this, but I actually take God at His Word here. Each morning, I pray for His kingdom to come, in love in this nation, and the many others He has given me to pray for each morning, and I trust His kingdom to show up, in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, in America.

I honestly believe, that God Almighty in heaven pays more attention each day, to the quiet prayers of His church, His children, exercising His authority against wickedness, than in all the raging, passionate filth that pollutes the airwaves.

As I do, I am living my life quietly on the home front.

Gently teaching and loving my children, keeping the peace, honesty, holiness, in all godliness in my home: a refuge of peace from the storms of life.

How about you?

What are you going to do today?

Let’s Pray:

‘Father, I bring before you today, President Obama, the executive,judicial and legislative branches of the government today. I pray for each government employee, whether military or civil, at every level of authority you have granted them.I pray for Homeland security, and every intelligence agency, that they would do right, in protecting our borders and families from evil. I pray for every state government, every police officer, fire fighter, EMSA, and every medical personnel across the land. I pray for every school, teacher, and educational institution across this land, including every homeschool group, that every person might learn and grow in truth and knowledge today. Father, touch them today, protect them from evil, and work in them to will and to do of Your good pleasure. Give them wisdom, direction, correction, and lead them in peace today, in Your name I pray Lord Jesus.

As I pray for this, the government you have set in place, I exercise Your authority in the earth, enforcing Your kingdom in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, trusting you to convict, correct, and counsel those that have missed it, and to rebuke and remove those intent on doing evil.

As I pray this morning Father, I believe you make my home, a place of peace, prosperity, quietness, joy, godliness, and honesty, where I can raise my family in the love of Jesus, Amen.

 

 

Still Waters Run Deep – Missing my family

When my father was in the last stages of cancer, my aunt Emily, a Catholic nun, and a RN, my dad’s sister, came and stayed to help look after him as he wasted away. My other aunt Donna, my mom’s sister, also a RN also came to stay with us to help. During this time, when my father was delirious with morphine, our parish priest had come by, and I looked at aunt Emily and he in frustration, exclaiming, ‘How can you just sit there, why are you not praying for his healing?’ Aunt Emily looked at me with great love and said, ‘In the ocean, there may be great storms that ruffle the surface, but the depths remain untouched. Still waters run deep’

Not what I wanted to hear at that point, my dad was dying and I wanted him healed! Yet, life has gone on, and I have learned the wisdom of these words, and as hard times have come and gone throughout my life, I have learned the wisdom of not only these words, but depths of God’s love, and consecrated life of faith in Jesus will produce.

Philippians 4:11

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content

My dad died in 1996. He knew and loved Jesus. We will meet again.

Still waters run deep!

Using Our Words to Heal Our Marriage

Using our Words to Fix our marriages

I read this quote, and it made me think about my marriage, and how, over 18 years, we have allowed little compromises in our faith, to work on eroding the love between us. Yes, there are very real issues that need to be addressed, but for those of us who know and understand how our faith and authority are supposed to work in every arena of life, we need to be using our faith by our words, on purpose, in our marriage.

Here’s the quote:

In order to uncover the processes that destroy unions, marital researchers study couples over the course of years, and even decades, and retrace the star-crossed steps of those who have split up back to their wedding day. What they are discovering is unsettling. None of the factors one would guess might predict a couple’s durability actually does: not how in love a newlywed couple say they are; how much affection they exchange; how much they fight or what they fight about. In fact, couples who will endure and those who won’t look remarkably similar in the early days. 

Yet when psychologists Cliff Notarius of Catholic University and Howard Markman of the University of Denver studied newlyweds over the first decade of marriage, they found a very subtle but telling difference at the beginning of the relationships. Among couples who would ultimately stay together, 5 out of every 100 comments made about each other were putdowns. Among couples who would later split, 10 of every 100 comments were insults. That gap magnified over the following decade, until couples heading downhill were flinging five times as many cruel and invalidating comments at each other as happy couples. “Hostile putdowns act as cancerous cells that, if unchecked, erode the relationship over time,” says Notarius, who with Markman co-authored the new book We Can Work It Out. “In the end, relentless unremitting negativity takes control and the couple can’t get through a week without major blowups.”

U.S. News & World Report, February 21, 1994, p. 67

Since ‘love covers a multitude of sins’, there comes a place where we need to deliberately activate the love of God in our homes, so that our faith, the muscle of God can work. Gal 5:6 ‘faith which worketh by love.’

What if we deliberately decided to love our spouses, as an act of worship towards God, no matter how much they fail us, disappoint us, and let us down, then, on purpose, choose to believe the opposite of what we are currently experiencing in our marriage, but claiming the promises of God for our marriage.

Faith calls those things that be not, as though they are.

This, I believe, is where we truly overcome evil with good.

So, let’s pray:

‘Father, I need Your love flowing through me to truly love my spouse today, yet you have promised that it shall be shed abroad in my heart, by the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit love my spouse through me today, to bless, empower, encourage, and equip them to become more like Jesus, in strength, honor, holiness, passion, and fire today.’

By faith I declare: I have a terrific marriage, for I serve Jesus, and my marriage is supposed to look like His love for His Bride, the church.

I declare: I believe that Jesus is working to will and to do of His good pleasure in my spouse, transforming them into the person of excellence and honor He has created them to be.

I declare that He who began a good work in my spouse, is faithful to complete it, in Christ Jesus.

I declare that I forgive all past failures of my spouse, and I refuse to stonewall, despise, or manipulate them in any way, but will love, honor and respect them for Jesus sake.

I declare that God is free to work on me, to make me more like Jesus, removing my negativity, bitterness, hopelessness, despair, and all sickness of heart, where I have given up on my marriage in any way. I receive Jesus as my healer.

While there is more that I could write today, this should be a good start….

Staying in Love – Marriage

I Read this this morning, and felt to share it:

Looking for a gift or just a unique way to say “I love you?” What do you give when his dresser is full of cologne and you’re both on diets? When she thinks flowers die too soon, and you’ve already spent next month’s paycheck? Here are 21 great inexpensive ways to tell the love of your life just how much you care.

1. Make a homemade card with a picture of the two of you on the cover. Get ideas for a verse by spending a few minutes browsing through a card shop.

2. Write a poem. It doesn’t have to rhyme.

3. Send a love letter listing the reasons “Why I love you so much.”

4. Pledge your love for a lifetime. Write it on calligraphy or design it on a desktop computer and print it out on parchment paper and have it framed.

5. Plan a surprise lunch, complete with picnic basket, sparkling grape juice and goblets.

6. Bake a giant cookie and write “I love you” with heart shaped redhots or frosting. (Don’t worry about the calories, it’s not for eating!)

7. Make a coupon book and include coupons for a back rub, a compromise when about to lose an argument, a listening ear when needed, and doing the dishes when the other cooks.

8. Kidnap the car for a thorough washing and detailing.

9. Design your personal crest combining symbols that are meaningful to both of you.

10. Compose a love song.

11. Arrange for someone to sing a favorite love song to you and your love when you’re together.

12. Call a radio station and have them announce a love message from you and make sure your love is listening at the right time.

13. Make a big sign such as: “I Love You, Kristi. Love, Joe” and put it in front of your house or her apartment complex for the world to see.

14. Buy favorite fruits that aren’t in season, like a basket of strawberries or blueberries.

15. Hide little love notes in the car, a coat pocket, or desk.

16. Place a love message in the “personal” section of the classified ads in your local paper.

17. Florist flowers aren’t the only way to say “I love you.” Pluck a single flower and write a message about how its beauty reminds you of your love. For greater impact, have it delivered at work.

18. Prepare a surprise candle light gourmet low-calorie dinner for two.

19. Write the story of the growth of your relationship from your perspective, sharing your emotions and your joys. What a treasure!

20. Make a paperweight from a smooth stone, paint it, and write a special love message on it.

21. Promise to change a habit that your love has been wanting you to change.

Family Matters.

The Due Benevolence Clause…

The Due benevolence clause…

1 Cor 7: 3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband.
As I have counselled folks in marriages over the years, there have been times when I hear: ‘If he wants sex, he better treat me right, or he’s sleeping on the sofa!’, occassionally, a few brave and honest women have said: ‘When I don’t fulfill his expectations, he stonewalls me, and sleeps on the other side of the bed. Makes me feel dirty and ashamed when I want sex’. This verse ends both sides of this game. God made sex to be joyful, honorable, and holy in a marriage relationship, and we are not to withold from one another, for any reason, other than times of prayer and fasting. In this rough and tumble, high tech, often brutal world, seems God gave sex to married couples as an anesthetic, a comfort and stress release from some of the rough edges on life. Enjoy the ride!
Let’s pray:
‘Father, I pray for married couples that are struggling sexually, that you would bless their sex life, with intimacy and passion, that brings grace and comfort to their marriage relationship, and homes, in your name I pray Lord Jesus, Amen’

Who is teaching our children?

Who is teaching Your Children, and What are they being taught?

Even when families remain intact, moral instruction is not automatic. A public school survey in Maryland showed that parents spent an average of 15 minutes a week in “meaningful dialogue” with their children–children who are left to glean whatever values they can from peers and TV.
Senator Dan Coates, Imprimis, Vol. 20, #9, September, 1991

Deut 11: 18 ¶ Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.
19 And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
20 And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:
21 That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.

Thank God for teachers, who can help us to teach our children, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Thank God for great churches, Sunday school teachers and children’s pastors, to help us raise our children in the Word of God, and give them a place to serve God. In today’s broken world, sometimes real teachers get to step into this parental role, in love: http://www.bestthings.co/teddy-stoddard/

Yet, the primary responsibility for teaching, training, equipping, our children, is with us, their parents.

Which means, it is not the church’s responsibility, not the schools, not their friends, peers, or coaches, it is ours, the parents.

I read this and it resonates within me:

No Time to Play
My precious boy with the golden hair
Came up one day beside my chair
And fell upon his bended knee
And said, “Oh, Mommy, please play with me!”

I said, “Not now, go on and play;
I’ve got so much to do today.”
He smiled through tears in eyes so blue
When I said, “We’ll play when I get through.”
But the chores lasted all through the day
And I never did find time to play.
When supper was over and dishes done,
I was much too tired for my little son.
I tucked him in and kissed his cheek
And watched my angel fall asleep.
As I tossed and turned upon my bed,
Those words kept ringing in my head,
“Not now, son, go on and play,
I’ve got so much to do today.”
I fell asleep and in a minute’s span,
My little boy is a full-grown man.
No toys are there to clutter the floor;
No dirty fingerprints on the door;
No snacks to fix; no tears to dry;
The rooms just echo my lonely sigh.
And now I’ve got the time to play;
But my precious boy is gone away.
I awoke myself with a pitiful scream
And realized it was just a dream
For across the room in his little bed,
Lay my curly-haired boy, the sleepy-head.
My work will wait ’till another day
For now I must find some time to play.
Dianna (Mrs. Joe) Neal.

Nuff said. Gotta stay faithful. They are our future, and the future leaders of our countries, if we raise them right. The Word of God will grow, strengthen, and instruct them in discerning right from wrong.

Each day, I treat the privilege of the time I have with my children as a wonderful gift from God. Each day is like Christmas, where I wake up to open a beautiful gift. The gift, the wonderful blossoming of my children day by day, in the grace of God, in understanding, in love….

Let us learn to play with our children…

Let’s pray:
‘Father, help us to be, and become the parents our children need. I trust you Jesus, to fill any gaps in my family or extended family with your presence, and the power of the Holy Spirit, as you give us grace to love them and train them in the Word of God in this, my generation, Amen’

 

Father’s LEAD!

Saw this Video, and it made me tear up, so I got inspired to write my 7 things for husbands. What are yours?

/ http://skitguys.com/videos/item/fatherhood

Husbands, Lead!

 

Ephesians 5:23
For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

Eph 3:15 Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,

2Ch 34:33 And Josiah took away all the abominations out of all the countries that pertained to the children of Israel, and made all that were present in Israel to serve, even to serve the LORD their God. And all his days they departed not from following the LORD, the God of their fathers.

Ps 127:1 ¶ «A Song of degrees for Solomon.» Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it:

Col 3:24 Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.

You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you.” – Desmond Tutu

As I read through these few verses, and this wonderful quote, I am reminded again, that my family, my wife, my life, are gifts from God, that I am responsible to constantly love, provide for, develop, bless, lead, empower, teach, snuggle, and walk with God with.

Today I heard Rev. Tom Leding make the statement: We were never designed to live in this world without God. In fact, the very problems that infuriate you today, may well be the problems you are called of God to solve as you cry out to God in frustration, your deliverance, and solution may well help many others to find freedom!

Serving Jesus as a husband and father in today’s generation is no small challenge, and will take a close walk with Him, humbly seeking grace, strength, wisdom, and direction as we grow through life.

Yet, husbands, we are heads of our homes, there is nothing more to say in this other than we need to man up, step up, and accept our responsibility, and walk it out in the power of God!
Here are some thoughts on leadership responsibilities:

1. Lead in family devotions. Seek ye first the kingdom is still in the book, and as a father, we need to include our wives and children in daily devotions and Bible reading. We need to be the ones to get up for church in the morning, and remain faithful in the house of the Lord.

2. Protect – Sure we need to protect our homes from home intruders, and our children from the local bullies, and drug dealers, but we also need to keep our homes safe spiritually. Monitoring internet usage, our children’s friends. Our wife should help in this, but we are required by God to set a standard of holiness, purity, and honor in our home.
3. Discipline – I have learned that 90% of my time with my children is spent loving them, playing with them, and answering their questions. Yet, if, at any point, any child directly defies my or my wife’s command, there must be instant consequences, either a time out, or the board of instruction applied to the seat of higher learning. I cannot throw this off on my wife.
   
   
4. Provide – Whether in ministry or the work-place, I need to be bringing home the bacon. In Proverbs 31 we see a godly wife contributing to household support, but we are the one’s who must bust a move and put bread on the table. If this is all we do, it is not enough, but this is the first responsibility.
   Yet, money alone is not provision. As seasons have changed in our lives, we have been wealthy, and very poor. Seems that in the poor times, we have had to stick together really tight and press into Jesus if we wanted to eat that day.
5. Love our Wives – sounds simple right?1 Peter 3:7
   Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayersAnyone who has been married more than a couple of years knows that this will take a prayer life, and the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. 
6. 
   Set the Vision for our home – I believe that each family in the earth is ordained of God, and has a specific mandate from heaven to fulfill. It is usually too great for any man, so that is why he is given a wife to help him with it. Submission, means to come under the mission – easy for a wife to do (she is wired that way) when a hard working man of God is following his God given dream.
7. Set the atmosphere of love in your home – Life is hard. Our homes need to be a place of refuge from the storms of life, places of peace, where we can rest, laugh, love and enjoy each other. Keep the battles outside your four walls, but make your dwelling a place of peace. It is here that children can be raised in the training and nurture and admonition of the Lord, for we serve a God of love!
8. 
   Let’s Pray!
   ‘Father, I see my place as head of my home, to set an atmophere of love, honor, holiness, joy, peace, provision, and respect for authority. I submit to your authority in this nation, determined to do right, in obeying the laws of this land, and in doing my job, supporting your work in my church, and any other ministry you call our family to. I see my responsibility to hear you and your vision for our family, recognizing that you have called us, this family, and named us, and given us a place before your throne, in your kingdom. As for me and my house, we will serve you Jesus, trusting that you are building our house, that our work, done in obedience and in worship of you, produces the reward of our inheritance, both in this life, and eternally. I thank you for this privilege Father, and ask you for courage, strength, and faithfulness, to continue to lead, guide, direct, encourage, instruct, train, equip, and bless my wife and children, in your love and light, in your name I pray Lord Jesus, Amen.’