vikkiwaters

Searching for love in all the wrong places? It’s time to experience the Father’s love.

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 15:41:00 GMT

Not long ago, I learned that when I was a baby, one of my primary caregivers regularly told me that my mother didn’t love me and that’s why she left me to go to work every day. Of course, when this was discovered, my parents found a new babysitter, but the invisible damage had already been done. Although I was too young to understand the words spoken over me, my little heart somehow experienced the power of the lies.

As I grew older, the fruit of this was a painful longing to be loved, which began to show up in my thoughts about myself, my expectations of those close to me, and my self-protective behavior. Deep down in my heart, I believed there was something fatally wrong with me. This lie facilitated an explosive and destructive self-hatred, as I aimlessly searched for relief and love in all the wrong places.

Even when I accepted Jesus into my life, my inner pain kept me from engaging with God’s heart from me. Though I intellectually knew He loved me, my own wounds kept me from experiencing His love in a way that would heal and transform my heart.

My story is not unique. Though the reasons behind our pain are varied, this reality is common to many Christians. Like me, they have not experienced the first love of God for them, and as a result, they do not know who they really are. Jesus told a story about a son like this—two sons in fact. Neither knew their father’s heart toward them. Though one turned to wild living and the other to performance, their need was the same: a revelation of the unconditional love of their father.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my new book Loved Like Jesus.

I wrote it because I want you to experience the deep love that your heavenly Father has for you. Living from this reality as a much loved son or daughter, you can rest in a confident connection with Him and experience abundant living and lasting freedom.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Child of God, Are You Driven By Performance Or Love?

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

When I’d accepted Jesus into my heart, I’d allowed my driven personality and my wounds from the past to inform my faith, and I became a works-oriented Christian.

Somehow, though I’d been wooed by God’s unconditional love, once I was in His Kingdom, I was driven by performance, not by love. This, I was discovering, was contrary to what the gospel was all about. Jesus had come as an exact representation of the Father’s heart toward me. He had come because of love. He had come because He is love. The Holy Spirit showed me this reality in First John, where it says:

The Living Bible translates these verses a little differently:

In other words, the first love is the love of God the Father for us. This revelation changed me. For years, I had known in my head that God loves me. But now, for the first time, I realized I could personally experience the love of my heavenly Father in my heart!

I did not have to perform to obtain His love; I already had access to His heart simply because He had given it to me. God had loved me first—before I knew His name, before I had done any good works for Him—and nothing I could do would change that.

This realization put the previous years of my life in Christ into a new light. Suddenly I realized I’d been striving and working hard for something I already had. No wonder I was exhausted and discontented. I had gotten it all backward, thinking I had to earn Father God’s love.

Instead, the truth was, He already loved me—eternally and unconditionally. Not only that, but His love in my heart was the catalyst that would help me love Him back. In this way, I would be able to truly and freely love and serve God—not out of duty or performance but because of love.

This is exactly what Jesus modeled in His life on earth. As a human, He experienced the Father’s love for Him, and that love enabled everything Jesus did. We, too, are made to experience God’s love in the same way that Jesus did, and as a result, to live as empowered sons and daughters of God.

This is an excerpt from my book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Are you weary? God’s Presence brings rest.

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

God works because of love, not obligation, and it is this reality that He invites us into when He calls us co-heirs and rulers with Christ. Paul describes exactly this quality in the believers in Thessalonica:

Their hard work and labor for the Kingdom were rooted in faith, love, and hope. They were not performing to earn God’s love but performing because of God’s love springing up in their hearts. The distinction may seem small, but it makes all the difference in our ability to live at rest, no matter how full our lives might be.

In God’s presence we find the peace we need to stop striving. We find the ability to let go, to trust God, and to simply be with Him.

With Him, we discover the rest, refreshment, and renewal we need to be active partners in the expansion of His Kingdom on earth.

The presence of God gives us rest.

In Exodus 33, Moses went to the tent of meeting to experience the presence and glory of God. There God met with him “face to face, as a man speaks to a friend” (Exod. 33:11), and He promised him, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest” (Exod. 33:14).

In this we see a pattern that has continued to our present day.

The place of connection with God is the place of rest. And as stated before, true rest means having a heart of rest at all times and in all circumstances. This is what Jesus meant when He said:

Here, He was not promising an absence of difficulties or activity in life. He was promising that regardless of what is going on, we can have a heart of rest when our hearts are connected to Him. The more we turn our hearts and attention to Him, the more we will learn from Him, grow in His ways, linger in His presence, and find rest for our souls. This is our inheritance in Christ.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

“Rest and acceptance once felt out of reach…” – Larry’s Testimony

Sat, 04 Nov 2017 00:07:00 GMT

I grew up in a fairly normal American Christian family being the youngest of five children. A couple of times a week as a family we went to a mainstream evangelical church. At the age of nine I was baptized because some of my friends were but I didn’t really understand what it meant. I believed that I was a Christian for many years to come but knew something was not right. During my college years I went in the opposite direction of God and religion for several years to the point of not believing in God any longer. At one point I realized my need for Jesus and began a personal relationship with Him who turned my life right side up and brought life, peace and joy.

For about the next 30 years I saw Jesus as good and Father God as good if I did good and not so good if I didn’t do good. Holy Spirit was the power and mystic side of God but I did not really understanding Him. I was involved in lots of types of ministry for God through those years but somehow felt that I always had to toe the line and work hard at being good to receive His favor and blessing.

Needless to say, my life turned into a life of rules and boundaries leaving the aspect of rest and complete acceptance out of reach and I certainly did not have an abundant life as Jesus talked about. My relationship with Him which started out so life changing and intimate had turned to a performance base relationship, unknowingly reaching for His favor which I never felt I attained or kept.

I am so grateful for my Christian heritage and all those who invested in my spiritual journey through the years. Yet I always seemed to know deep down that there was something more, that there had to be more than I was experiencing about God. While serving in India as missionaries with my wife and four children, we connected with and were ministered to by someone from Growing in Grace Ministry (GGM) in Chattanooga, TN.

Upon returning and staying stateside in 2009, my personal journey began with GGM which was a path of enrichment and much needed inner healing. Since that time I have enjoyed a deeper, more intimate walk with the Lord while learning about the more of God as it relates to my identity in Him, spiritual gifts, receiving His love, blessing, healing, grace and the list goes on.

I see Father God as good all the time, Jesus as Lord and friend, and the Holy Spirit as He who empowers, comforts and guides. My life has truly shifted from a performance based relationship to a love relationship growing free of guilt, shame and condemnation. I am now growing in love, joy, gifting, intimacy and the more and more of God.

I attribute the spiritual enrichment of my life and my family’s to the life giving message and presence of God through GGM.

Introduced to peace and lasting joy through GGM — Meet Deb!

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 21:36:00 GMT

When Deb Mileur said, “I do” to Jesus in 1988, she fell so in love with the Bible that she began sleeping with it under her pillow; she read it, highlighted it, memorized and taught it.

In 2009, during a friend’s visit to India (where Deb and her family lived as missionaries), she learned about the ministry and healing that was taking place at Growing in Grace Ministries, and decided to visit when her family returned stateside.

The Lord’s prompting, and that visit, changed her life.

Deb’s desire is to see all men, women, and children living in freedom, and walking out their Christian lives with fruit and in joy. She’ll gladly talk with anyone who will pause to listen about hearing God, the Goodness of God, and His Father’s heart toward them.

After completing the Restoration Prayer Ministry in 2010, Deb began serving on the Ministry Team.

Deb credits Growing in Grace Ministries with introducing peace and lasting joy to her walk. She continues to enjoy studying the Word, loves listening to, being ministered to, and experiencing Holy Spirit, and enjoy relationship with El Elyon, the Most High God. She loves to share the perfect triune God in healing sessions, and considers it the highest honor to be with others as they receive both profound acceptance and lasting healing from Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit.

When Deb is not at GGM, she enjoys the sweet gift of spending time with her husband Larry (of 26 years), and loving her 6 adult children (Hannah, Sarah who is married to Michael, Nathan who is married to Jessica, and Rebekah). Deb loves people deeply, values friendship, loves being outside, creating resting places for others, kayaking, gardening, hiking, playing…

Deb loves all New Life.

She is a doula, as well as the owner of Outa the Dog House Dog Obedience, where oodles and oodles of really, really cute puppies and their extraordinary owners delight her by passing through her doors each week.

“I’ve experienced the breakthroughs firsthand…” – Meet Stephanie

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 13:18:00 GMT

Stephanie Johns joined the prayer team at GGM in late 2015. Her introduction to GGM was at the suggestion of her daughters after the death of her husband in July 2013. She experienced firsthand the breakthroughs the ministry could help facilitate as that very day she took a huge leap forward in her grief journey.

She then became involved in the Bible studies and workshops where she was challenged and instructed. Joining the prayer team was a natural next step as she knew she wanted to share with others what had so radically impacted her life. One of her life’s goals is to facilitate others to hear God’s voice for themselves.

Having been raised in a preacher’s home and married to a preacher for 44 1/2 years, Stephanie is excited to minister at GGM knowing firsthand the difference it can make.

Stephanie has three married children–Michelle, Angela and Michael. She also has six grandchildren–Matthew, Joshua, Luke, Sophia, Annabelle and Lili. (But she doesn’t have time to tell you how great they are!)

Since her husband’s death and her retirement from Erlanger Medical Center, Stephanie has kept busy volunteering at various ministries including the local crisis pregnancy center; attending Iris Global Mission School in Rio de Janeiro; going on mission trips to Honduras, Las Vegas, Romania and Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; and leading a GriefShare group at her church.

She has many friends made through her association with several Christian singles’ groups. These groups enjoy varied activities together including white water rafting, kayaking, camping, biking, hiking and just hanging out.

Without a doubt her favorite food is potatoes anyway you fix them.

She loves life and would wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend the ministry of GGM.

“I’m so proud of the people who say “yes” to God and freedom!” — Meet GGM’s Anne Armstrong!

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 13:22:00 GMT

Anne Armstrong unofficially joined the Growing in Grace Ministry (GGM) family in December of 2010 after receiving her first SOZO there. Anne was referred to GGM by a former ministry team member after sharing her heart and struggles about feeling “stuck” in certain areas of her life.

Even before finding healing for herself at GGM, Anne had said that she knew, deep-down, that God would have her serving in a healing ministry of some capacity, at some point. After only one SOZO, Anne realized the impact this life-changing encounter with the Lord had on her. Knowing this ministry had “the missing link” for many of her questions in life, Anne has spent the last several years then telling everyone she knows about GGM and the potential for others to find freedom in Jesus through receiving ministry there. One of her greatest desires is for others to experience God in a way that maybe they haven’t before and gain inner freedom to walk in His abundance and joy every day.

In the Fall of 2016, Vinn Dean, Executive Director of Growing in Grace Prayer Ministry, reached out to Anne and asked if she was ready to join the team. Anne answered with a resounding “yes!” and has been serving in this way ever since. Anne is amazed at the ways God continues to prove Himself, and His love, as he continues to minister to even her each time she sits in another person’s SOZO session. “I’m so proud of the people that say ‘yes’ to God and choose this stream of healing for themselves on their quest for inner freedom,” Anne says.

Outside of GGM, Anne has been a Realtime Closed Captioner since 2005. She works from home doing live captioning for the hearing impaired (including, but not limited to) on TV and in classrooms, meetings, teleconferences, webcasts, webinars, hospitals, financial calls, graduation ceremonies, churches and more!

Anne and her husband, Justin, have been married since 2011. They have three dogs, two cats, two donkeys, and two mini horses with a baby mini horse on the way.

Napping is Anne’s first-favorite hobby, when she finds time to do it. She spends a lot of her free time in the field with the animals, running with the dogs, eating out with Justin and their friends, and as of recently, kayaking on Sundays has become a regular thing for them.

From strict religion to a true relationship! – Sunda’s Story

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 18:48:00 GMT

Before coming to Growing in Grace, my life was a mess.

I was in pain, I was angry, I was confused and I only knew God through religion’s eyes.

I was raised in a very conservative and strict religion and that is how I saw God. I always felt His eyes of displeasure on me as I struggled so hard to please Him. In August of 2007 my dad passed away of colon cancer. From that time on I struggled with addictions and confusion and just walked around aimlessly trying to figure out who I was and where I belonged. I honestly felt like a homeless orphan. I finally told the Lord I was done with Him and I was going to live life however I wanted.

In November of 2012 I got a puppy, hoping that would ease my loneliness. I immediately called a dog trainer that my friend had suggested because I was determined to have a good dog. Little did I know the change that was going to take place because of that phone call.

On January 10, 2013 I walked into dog class for the orientation session and there I met the trainer, Deb Mileur. The moment I met her I knew she was different. There was a glow about her and a joy that I could not explain. As she spoke to the class that evening I knew in my heart that she had a relationship with the Lord. She had something that I wanted to have.

God was already beginning to work in my life that night. During my time in dog class Deb and I began to talk a lot after classes. I would walk with her as she swept the gym floor and we would talk about dogs and life.

On March 28, 2013 I began telling her my story. It was a story full of anger, sadness, depression and confusion. I remember she sat down on the gym stage and she began to talk to me about God. At first I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. But the more she spoke words of life to me the more my heart softened and I desperately wanted to believe that everything she was saying was true.

She told me about Growing in Grace and the Sozo and Restoration ministry there. I told her I would think about it. The very next day I looked up Growing in Grace Ministries and before I knew it I had filled out an application for both the Sozo ministry and Restoration Prayer ministry. I also made a note that Bible Study was on Tuesdays.

The very next Tuesday I showed up to Bible Study and met Vikki Waters for the first time. She was teaching a session about being created for great things. I sat in that study and my mind was blown away by what I was hearing. I didn’t know that God had created me for big things and that His plan for me was beyond what I could begin to imagine. I left Bible study that night excited about life and dreaming about what God had planned for me.

On April 10, 2013 I received my first Sozo. I met Jesus and I met Father God and my life changed completely that day. I can remember walking into the Sozo room so broken inside, but when I walked out there was joy and hope and life springing out of me.

I was a new person.

From that day I have continued walking in healing. I did a full Restoration and I have done Sozos from time to time when I get a little stuck. Papa God, Jesus and Holy Spirit are forever faithful in healing all the wounded broken places in my heart. And now I am part of the GGM team and I get to witness the Lord’s work in the lives of others as He heals their hearts. I am so incredibly grateful to Papa God for this amazing ministry and the amazing people involved there.

It is an honor to be a part of this wonderful ministry.

You Don’t Have To Do This Alone

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 22:56:00 GMT

About three and a half months into my husband Richard’s out-of-state job, I realized I had been internalizing my resentment about being alone. On the weekends, we focused on being together, but during the week I focused on keeping busy with ministry and activity. Inside, I felt depressed and tired. These feelings were an old default that I had become used to in former seasons of my life. I didn’t like that I was returning to that place, but it was familiar and easy.

Then, one morning while I was spending time with Jesus, I heard Him whisper to my heart, inviting me to pour out what I had been holding back. As I described to Him my feelings of weariness and loneliness, I sensed Him saying:

This was exactly what I needed to hear. According to John,

When we are born again, we receive the ability to overcome in all circumstances in life. We are no longer under the power of the enemy or the oppression that fills the world apart from Christ. This is our reality as new creations. However, to live in this reality as overcomers, we need to practice turning to Christ in the midst of difficulty. We need to rewire our hearts and minds to the truth of God’s Word instead of believing the lies of our circumstances. In effect, we are creating a new default pattern. This is the process the apostle Paul calls “renewing our minds” (see Rom. 12:2).

In the situation with Richard’s job, I had a choice. I could steward discouragement, or I could steward life through expectancy and hope. I chose the latter and decided from that day onward to be an overcomer. In the years since then, I have learned more and more to steward hope in my life and to ignore hopelessness and discouragement. And I have seen the fruit of this choice over and over.

The year when Richard was unemployed was very difficult for us financially. Yet we chose to trust God’s promises and to run to Him with our struggles. And God transformed our difficulty into an upgrade. Not only did He provide for us in a variety of ways, but He enabled Richard to follow his dream and start his own company. Also, He helped us to see that season as an opportunity to strengthen our marriage and reconnect with each other in a way that would not have been possible if Richard had been working full time.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Let Down Your Walls

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 17:56:00 GMT

Though Jesus had become my Savior, the walls barricading my heart remained . Some of them softened, but many of them were my closest allies. It’s hard, even for Jesus, to have a relationship with someone who has walls like I did. I only had so much capacity for His love. Because I didn’t believe He really loved me unless I worked hard and somehow measured up to His standards, I held Him at arm’s length.

But Jesus was patient. Eventually Jesus broke through those walls, and for the first time, I was able to experience the love God had always had for me. When I came to the end of my own strength, I discovered that my Father’s arms had been surrounding me all along. I just did not know He was there. I did not know what His love was like or how to allow myself to receive it.

I had no idea that God is, as Paul puts it, “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3) and could heal my broken places. When I discovered His healing love, I realized that in every circumstance of my life, the compassionate and comforting Father desires to come alongside me and listen, encourage, console, reassure, calm, strengthen, and counsel me. He wants to share Himself with me, no matter what’s going on in my life. In fact, this is one of the main things the Father does for us. It’s His specialty. The Old Testament prophet Zephaniah described this aspect of the Father like this:

This is exactly what He did for me. He gathered me up like a broken little child and held me closely, breaking through to the core of my being with His love, compassion, and mercy. He gladly filled me with the power of His love and the Spirit. Over the course of several intense years, He mended the broken places in my heart, quieted me with His love, enabled me to hear His songs of deliverance, and celebrated with me every step of the way. He also brought people into my life who had also received His compassion, comfort, and healing, and they walked alongside me. They were a safe place, and they patiently pointed me to God for help in working through the baggage.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Does God Really Enjoy Me?

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 14:22:00 GMT

We are new creations, filled with a new belonging and a new power —all because of Christ’s work in us. In Ephesians, Paul painted a beautiful picture of this:

Paul desired this fullness of the Christian experience for the early believers. God desires the same for us today. Only when we are rooted in our identity and empowered by His Spirit will we live as we were meant to live .

Unfortunately, many Christians go through life without experiencing one or both of these realities. Like I did for so many years, they try to measure up to an imagined standard so they can earn God’s love through good works. This is a sad and frustrating place to live. Instead, God wants us to know what He thinks about us and to wrap us in His invisible arms of love.

The Passion Translation of Psalm 84 gives us a beautiful picture of God’s wrap-around arms:

God, Your wrap around presence is our defense. In Your kindness, look upon the faces of Your anointed ones….For the Lord God is brighter than the brilliance of a sunrise! Wrapping Himself around me like a shield, He is so generous with His gifts of grace and glory! (Psalm 84:9, 11 PT).

This is God’s promise to us. Yet, many of us have a very hard time believing it. For a variety of reasons, we find ourselves unlovable, and though we know in our heads that God loves us, we do not really believe it in our hearts. We have a hard time believing He is really as optimistic and positive about us as the Bible says.

We think, Sure, God loves me, because He is God and that’s the holy thing to do, but I doubt He really likes or enjoys me. In this way, we interpret His love as an obligation and miss the reality—that it is the overflow of His heart toward us. Yes, we did nothing to earn it, and it is not based on our performance, but it is based on who we are as His kids.

God loves who we are in the truest and most intimate sense.

He loves us at our core, and because of that, He is patient with our weaknesses. Truly, He is the best of fathers.

Do your daily thoughts impact your relationship with Jesus?

Sun, 21 May 2017 23:26:00 GMT

Focusing on Jesus is the key to a lifestyle of conversation with God.

It goes hand-in-hand with learning to be . As we sit in silence with the Father, the goal is not to empty our minds completely but to fill our minds with nothing but Him.

This is where focus comes in.

Many people exercise little control over their thought lives. They may even think they cannot control what comes into their minds. However, the Bible is full of admonitions to steer our thoughts toward God and the good things of His Kingdom. As Paul says, we must “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus taught on the importance of what we choose to set our hearts, minds, and desires on. He said that the object of our attention has a huge impact on our day-to-day living, either for good or bad. In everything He did and said, Jesus showed what it looks like to have a mind continually set toward the Father’s heart.

Jesus, the Spirit-filled man, was continually under the influence of the Father’s tangible presence. One day, when asked why He healed a man on the Sabbath, Jesus answered:

Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing and heard Him saying while in His presence (see John 8:38) . This is the proper place for doing in the believer’s life. It should always flow from our heart connection with the Father. Continually connecting with the Father was the foundation of Jesus’ life and ministry. For this reason, when He approached the end of His life, He emphasized to His followers the importance of staying connected to the Father through the Spirit of God who would live in them (see John 14–16).

The apostle Paul also emphasized the need to focus our thoughts on Jesus:

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Does resting in God make you feel uncomfortable?

Mon, 15 May 2017 14:35:00 GMT

The result of a lifestyle of communion and conversation with God is rest.

Before I realized who I am as a beloved daughter, I had no idea about rest. My mind was constantly filled with thoughts about what I needed to do. I lived in overdrive, and the idea of rest seemed unattainable. In fact, I believed that if I was not continually getting things done I was goofing off and wasting my time.

When Richard and I first married, my inability to rest caused me to feel irritated and uncomfortable when he rested. On Sunday afternoons, Richard loved to nap on the couch while watching sports. To me, this was a sign of laziness, and I did not like it.

So, week after week, when he fell asleep, I’d get out the vacuum cleaner and begin my cleaning in the room he was sleeping in. I figured if I needed to work continually, he did too. This, of course, did not go over well.

Thankfully, I now realize that I do not need to prove myself or earn anything through hard work. Instead, I have been given the rest of God.

The rest God gives us mirrors His own rest. As the author of Hebrews wrote:

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Are You Using The Benefits God Offers You?

Sun, 07 May 2017 17:46:00 GMT

At His baptism, Jesus was anointed and empowered to do the good works of His Father’s Kingdom. In this passage, the Greek word euergeteo , which is translated as “doing good,” can also mean “to bestow benefits.”

By the power of the Spirit, Jesus bestowed the benefits of the Kingdom on all He met. In His humanity, like us, Jesus needed the anointing power of the Holy Spirit to carry on the work God had assigned to Him.

Though Jesus did have a relationship with God and the Holy Spirit from childhood (see Luke 2:52), as far as we know, it does not seem that He had any special power or abilities until the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on Him like a dove. This was the crucial moment in Jesus’ life, the moment when He stepped into His role as Messiah and Savior of the world.

Only through the anointing of the Holy Spirit could He fulfill His destiny on earth.

The same is true for us. Not only does the Father have the same love and approval for us as He did for Jesus, but He also empowers us with His Spirit to do the work of the Kingdom. In our humanity, we need the same anointing Jesus received. And, as Jesus taught, the empowerment of His followers to do all He did (and more) has been God’s plan from the beginning (see John 14:12). Just as Jesus’ work of redemption on the cross was only possible through the Holy Spirit, so too, our work in expanding the Kingdom of God on earth is only possible by God’s Spirit.

When Jesus returned to Heaven, His job description became ours.

He commissioned His followers to take His Kingdom into all the earth, and He sent His Spirit to make it possible (see Acts 1–2).

Our individual parts in fulfilling Christ’s commission are only possible when, like Jesus, we experience the two aspects of His baptism—the love and approval of the Father and the empowerment of the Spirit for good works. When we are embraced by our Father’s arms, secured in our identity as His beloved children, and when we are overshadowed by His dove, then we will be ready to minister His good news to the world.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

What Enabled Jesus To Fulfill His Life’s Purpose?

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 09:12:00 GMT

In Matthew 3 we find perhaps the clearest picture of Jesus’ personal experience of the Father’s love. At the start of His public ministry, Jesus went to the Jordan River and asked John the Baptist to baptize Him.

Matthew records the story this way:

In this simple event, Jesus was embraced by the unseen arms of the Father in two significant ways. This embrace confirmed His identity and filled Him with power, enabling Him to accomplish His life purpose.

This was necessary because, although He was fully God, Jesus was also fully human. When Jesus came to earth, He voluntarily left behind the attributes of His divinity in order to put on human flesh (see Phil. 2:5–8). Jesus had a human body just like ours, and He experienced the same kinds of practical needs and challenges we do—including hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and pain. He also had the full array of human emotions.

Joy and sorrow, compassion and anger, peace and distress—Jesus had to deal with it all just like we do. And just like the rest of us, Jesus was wired with a core need for love that could only be fulfilled by His Father.

This is exactly why Jesus needed to be baptized.

Though He was perfect, He was also human, and He needed to begin His ministry with a reaffirmation of His Father’s love.

For this reason, when Jesus came up out of the water, God gave Him two signs of His love. The dove of the Spirit landed on Him, and God audibly declared Christ’s identity as His loved and approved Son.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Symptoms Of A Performance Mindset: Offended, Accusing, Pride

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:48:00 GMT

Like me, many believers have spent years in performance, trying to earn the love God has freely given them. They have become like the older brother. Because this mindset is often learned in childhood, it can be difficult for us to identify what is really going on in our hearts.

Our actions look great, but beneath the surface, our wounds are festering.

I had to come to the end of myself before I was willing to really look deeply at why I was acting the way I was. Through my healing process, I discovered some of the predominate symptoms of the performance mindset. Recognizing them can help us avoid wandering from our Father’s heart.

Offended

When we are performance-oriented, we can also become easily offended by others. The older brother became angry when he discovered that his younger brother, who had not performed as well as he had, was the center of everyone’s attention. This triggered the deep longing for love in the older brother’s heart, and he became offended.

He was resentful and bitter because he had not been recognized and appreciated. He felt the father had been holding out on him. As the older brother demonstrates, people with the performance mindset depend heavily on affirmation for their self-worth and value. When they come across people who are enjoying favor apart from behaving well, they become offended and angry.

Accusing

The older brother also accused his brother of behaving badly, and he even accused his father of inappropriately forgiving and rewarding the younger son. His thinking had become so self-
centered and strict that he seemed incapable of feeling compassion for his younger brother or relief that he was safely home.

Instead, he angrily accused him in an attempt to tear his brother down in the eyes of the father (and probably to make himself feel better). When the performance mindset dominates our thinking and relationship with God, our thoughts toward others often become poisoned.

Rules and accomplishments are the standards we use to measure others, leaving little room for forgiveness and grace. This is a depressing and lonely way to live. It causes broken relationships, ineffective ministry, and a deep sense of dissatisfaction. It also damages our relationship with our Heavenly Father—the very thing we thought we were strengthening through our obsession with performing for Him.

Pride

In the end, the older son’s pride kept him from experiencing his father’s love. He was so convinced that he was right in his offense that he could not see or receive the genuine love his father had for him. Jesus’ parable ends with a picture of the son choosing to be stubborn and unforgiving.

Nothing in the story suggests that the father got through to him; nothing indicates that his heart may have softened toward his brother. Instead, because of his offense, he refused to fellowship with the father, the younger brother, and the entire household. While everyone else celebrated, the older brother stayed outside. Even though he had a loving father, he chose to make himself an orphan in heart.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Symptoms Of A Performance Mindset: Striving and Isolation

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:50:00 GMT

Our actions look great, but beneath the surface, our wounds are festering.

Striving

In His story, Jesus tells us that the older brother was in the field, away from home. Although the Scripture does not explicitly say it, the picture we get is of a workaholic. This is confirmed by the son’s boasting about how hard he has worked for the father.

We know we have fallen into the trap of performing when we find ourselves striving or laboring in ministry activities and at work without proper boundaries or rest. When we get to the point where we are consumed by these activities, we have probably wandered into the fields of performance.

Isolation

The older brother had also isolated himself from the family by working so hard in the fields. When he came to the house, he had to ask a servant what was going on. But by that time, he was already in a huff. There he was, working hard out in the field while other people were in the house feasting, dancing, and having a good time.

Didn’t they know there was work to be done? Didn’t they know how unfair it was for him to be doing the father’s work all by himself while they were in the house celebrating? Rather than go inside and investigate, he called for a servant to explain the situation.

In so doing, he chose to further withdraw himself. A sad byproduct of performance orientation is that we often end up isolating ourselves from the body of Christ. We frequently become perfectionists and convince ourselves that we are the only ones who can really perform a particular task well.

We set out to do things by ourselves, looking at the faults and shortcomings of others we deem unable to perform as well as we can. This leads to an arrogant and short-tempered attitude that causes us to cut ourselves off from others.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

You Are No Longer A Orphan

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 01:26:00 GMT

In the story of the two sons, we see God’s value for relationship over performance. That, of course, does not mean service to God isn’t important. Serving is part of loving. But the bottom line is this:

Our Heavenly Father does not base His love for us on what we do for Him.

He does not love us more when we perform well, and He does not love us less when we fail.

Instead, He loves us unconditionally, simply because we are His children.

As a mother, though I am imperfect, I have a deep love for my daughter that transcends logic or explanation. She is always in my heart and on my mind. She always belongs with me and is valuable to me.

This is an imperfect image of how much Father God thinks about us. We are always on His mind, not because He wants to control us but because He wants intimate relationship with us.

God is truly a prodigal Father, extravagant and reckless in His love for us.

Knowing this and allowing ourselves to receive His love is the foundation of relationship with Him. Instead of searching for significance and approval in the fields of independence and performance, may we enter our Father’s house and heart.

There we will find the healing we need, the love our hearts have longed for.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

How Do We Learn To Hear God’s Voice?

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 03:05:00 GMT

The first key a lifestyle of conversation with God is learning to be instead of do. Doing and being are two very different things. Simply put, doing encompasses all we do for God, things like attending a small group, volunteering, reaching out in the community, serving on committees, and the like. It can even include Bible-reading,church attendance, and prayer—if we are doing these things without a heart connection to the Father.

In other words, doing is anything we do that does not develop intimacy with God. By contrast, being is learning to be still before God and spend time with Him. This is how we cultivate real relationship. We communicate, spending time with Him, listening to Him, and resting in His presence.

This is how intimacy is built—in human relationships and in our relationship with God. Through learning to be in our relationship with Him, we discover peace, rest, and confidence in Him.

This is a central part of our faith, yet the sad fact is that many Christians do not know how to connect to the Father’s heart or recognize His presence. Often, this is simply because they have not been taught about the presence of God. They see Him as their Lord and Savior, but they don’t realize He’s also their Father and friend.

For others, the issue is feeling uncomfortable, like Peter did when God’s presence tangibly showed up on the mount of transfiguration (see Matt. 17). Instead of listening and discerning what was happening, he became really nervous and started talking. He didn’t know how to abide in the Father’s presence, so he wanted to get busy doing something.

While this might be a natural response when we are not used to supernatural experiences, God invites us to set aside our insecurities and to simply be with Him.

Several years ago, I attended a conference on how to hear the voice of the Lord. There I learned two life-changing skills—how to have a conversation with God and how to soak in His presence.

Both of these are part of learning to be. At the conference, I learned four simple steps to dialoging with God, based on Habakkuk 2:1–2.

1. Become still and quiet in my thoughts and emotions.

2. Fix my eyes on Jesus. Use vision like King David did by picturing Jesus (see Ps. 16:8; Acts 2:25).

3. Recognize His voice as spontaneous flowing thoughts.

4. Write down the flow of spontaneous thoughts which come to me while my eyes are fixed on Jesus.

Using this simple pattern, we can connect to God’s heart and learn to hear His voice in response to our thoughts and questions.

At first, it may feel difficult to know whether we are hearing God’s voice or not. That is normal, because we are just beginning to train our spiritual senses to hear from God. The most common way for God to speak is through a still small voice, which is the voice we hear in our hearts. It wells up from within us.

Of course, it is important to always test what we hear against the Word of God. God will never contradict the Bible. And He also always speaks for the purpose of encouraging, strengthening, and comforting. His voice is never accusing, destructive, or condemning.

Even if He is convicting us of sin, He does it in a loving and hopeful manner. He tells us who He made us to be in Him, and that never involves condemnation or fear. God has many wonderful things to say to us. He is always speaking to us. We just need to develop our spiritual senses in order to discern His voice.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Intimacy With God Is Not Reserved For The “Super-Holy”

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 02:32:00 GMT

Our relationships can be organized into five stages, based on their intimacy. Every relationship begins as a casual one, and some progress to deeper levels of intimacy.

The same is true in our relationship with God. As children of God, we are all equally loved, yet we do not all experience the same depth of intimacy with God. This is because God offers the depths of relationship with Him to all of us, but our level of intimacy with Him is up to us. We get to choose. This is why it’s important to spend time with God.

In Luke 2, when Jesus was just 12 years old, He traveled to Jerusalem with his parents and their relatives and friends for the annual Passover Feast. After the festivities were over, they set out for home. However, on the second day, they discovered that Jesus was not actually with them.

So they returned to Jerusalem and found Him in the temple courts, sitting among the religious teachers, listening and asking questions. When His parents found him, they asked why He had stayed behind, giving them all a fright. Jesus’ answer shows us, even from a young age, the priority of His focus.

“Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49).

In other words, Jesus was saying, “My focus and objective, the core of who I am, is My Father and His business.” We too can develop this kind of focus and intentionality in our relationship with our Father. We simply need to practice His presence. Like Jesus, we need to make conversation with the Father our way of life, not just a discipline.

Many people are hungry for God, hungry to experience a deep, intimate, and ongoing awareness of the love of the Father. This is the purpose and result of conversation with Him. When practiced consistently, speaking directly with Him and actively listening to His voice leads to a connected relational lifestyle . In other words, practicing two-way conversation with God will eventually enable us to live with an awareness of God’s presence and love with us, even in the midst of the busyness of everyday life.

Of course, God is with us all the time, whether we are aware of Him or not. He lives within every believer. However, practicing awareness of His presence at all times enables us to live out the abundant new covenant life He has given us.

This may seem weird or impossible to those who have not experienced it, but it is both simple and possible. When we received new life in Christ, He restored our relationship with the Father, and we now have access to Him at all times. His Spirit lives within us, and we have the mind of Christ (see Rom. 8:9–11; 1 Cor. 2:16).

Further, as a good Father, He is always thinking about us and speaking to us. All we need to do to encounter God’s love is to be still and look at Him. It really is that simple. When we do this regularly, we begin to live a lifestyle of connection with our Father. We begin to continually experience His presence—living under the influence and in the overflow of His love for us. This is not something reserved for the super-holy; it should be the reality for every believer.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Would You Like To Sense God’s Presence Every Day?

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 02:06:00 GMT

Nicholas Herman, better known as Brother Lawrence, was a Carmelite monk in France in the mid to late 1600s. Before coming to the monastery near Paris, he was a soldier, a footman, a cabinet officer, and then finally, a monk. As a large and clumsy man, he was prone to making messes.

At first, his superiors put him to work in the stables, but eventually they moved him to the only job in the monastery he couldn’t mess up—washing pots and pans in the kitchen.

Here, with God as his only companion, Brother Lawrence discovered the tangible and abiding presence of God.

Brother Lawrence loved God with all his heart, and he decided to attempt to practice dialoguing with the Lord in his daily activities all day long. After years of practice, his life was so positively transformed and his friendship with God was so recognizable to those around him that a high-ranking church leader sought out Brother Lawrence to be his spiritual advisor . They shared four conversations, and Nicholas wrote him sixteen letters that contained his insights into living in the manifest presence of God.

Simply put, Brother Lawrence had discovered that the way to sense God’s presence all day was to have lots of conversations with Him . His goal was to form the habit of talking and listening to Him all the time. The key was continually loving God and recognizing Him as intimately present, as Immanuel, which means “God with us.”

Brother Lawrence learned to set God always before him, to train his mind to continually turn toward Him. He was about his Father’s heart and business. After his death in 1692, a collection of those letters on the subject of the contemplative lifestyle were published under the title, The Practice of the Presence of God.

That little volume has become one of the bestselling Christian books of all time.

The essence of Brother Lawrence’s book is how to become friends with God, how to develop a deep and ongoing conversational lifestyle with Him. Our relationships can be organized into five stages, based on their intimacy. Every relationship begins as a casual one, and some progress to deeper levels of intimacy.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

“You Don’t Have To Stay Stuck In Discouragement.” – Watch Vikki Teach

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 19:41:00 GMT

Watch Vikki teach through the third part of her new book, “Loved Like Jesus.”

You can buy the book here and stay tuned for more refreshing teaching by Vikki!

“You cannot minister out of an empty tank.” – Watch Richard Waters Teach

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 20:06:00 GMT

Watch Vikki’s husband, Richard, teach through the fourth part of Vikki’s book, “Loved Like Jesus.”

You can buy the book here and stay tuned for more refreshing teaching by Vikki!

“What Jesus Needed As A Human, YOU Need Too.” – Watch Vikki Teach

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 01:35:00 GMT

Watch Vikki teach through the third part of her new book, “Loved Like Jesus.”

You can buy the book here and stay tuned for more refreshing teaching by Vikki!

“Can you imagine your life without your pain?” – Watch Vikki Teach

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 01:22:00 GMT

Watch Vikki teach through the second chapter of her new book, “Love Like Jesus.”

You can buy the book here and stay tuned for more refreshing teaching by Vikki!

“Child of God, are you living like an orphan?” – Watch Vikki Teach

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 20:39:00 GMT

Watch Vikki teach through the first part of her new book, “Loved Like Jesus.”

You can buy the book here and stay tuned for more refreshing teaching by Vikki!

Resolve to live like you are loved this year!

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:47:00 GMT

When we are wounded, it’s like a little place in our souls is broken or crushed. The more pain we experience, the more broken our hearts become. Since this process begins in our very early years, many of us grow up accumulating a lot of pain at the hands of others, our environment, our circumstances, and our own self-sabotage.

To try to make the pain stop, we self-medicate through addictive living. As a result, we end up in terrible bondage, wondering how to end the constant turmoil in our hearts. Only Jesus can heal the pain in our hearts. He is the one who came to bind up the brokenhearted (see Isa. 61:1); it’s His specialty.

But instead of turning to Jesus for healing, many people try everything else.

In my own life, I spent many wasted years self-medicating for a variety of reasons. Here are at least three:

1. I was afraid of being vulnerable because I didn’t know how to trust others with my heart. The unhealed filter of my past experiences taught me that the risk of trust would likely result in more injury through judgment, betrayal, and wounding.

2. At times, my pain was so familiar to me that I couldn’t imagine life without it. Even though it wasn’t helping or working for me, it was what I knew.

3. At other times, I feared being rejected and thought if people knew the real me or things from my past they would not like me. All this resulted in me rejecting most people before they had a chance to reject me.

Because of these reasons and more, many who seek greener pastures must come to the end of themselves before they will return to the Father.

When God’s children stray from His heart, it is often because they wrongly see themselves as unlovable orphans. This causes them to question the Father’s love for them, no matter what He does.

But just like the father of the prodigal son, watch how our heavenly Father responds to us when we stray from His heart and then find our way back home. He does not scold or punish or make us prove we have changed. He does not take away our status as His children and heirs in His Kingdom.

Instead, He welcomes us home with open arms, rejoicing in our return. And like the father in the story, He reminds us of our inheritance as His children. He gives us the robe of righteousness, which shows our right standing with the Father and membership in the royal family. He marks and seals us with His Spirit, who reminds us of our true identity as sons and daughters. And He gives us the shoes of peace, with authority to co-labor in the family business to establish His Kingdom wherever the soles of our feet tread. This is the Father’s heart toward us.

Friends, this year — resolve to live FULLY and DEEPLY LOVED BY GOD.

And if you need help doing that, I encourage you to read my book “Loved Like Jesus.” It will help reveal the lies the enemy has planted in you, release you from the bondage of shame, and help you walk each day in the acceptance and love of Father God. Start the New Year off right and order your copy today!

Last week, our building caught fire…

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 23:08:00 GMT

Hello Friends,

Growing in Grace Ministries needs your help!

Early Thursday morning of last week (12/15/16) our building caught fire in the space adjacent to us. Our suites of 3000 square feet sustained significant water and smoke damage. Our contents were declared a total loss and we’re not even sure what will happen with the building. Even though we have insurance, it looks like we will exceed our insurance limits.

As you know, Growing in Grace has prospered over the last few years and has helped equip thousands of Christians through teaching, prayer ministry and fellowship. Lots of good things have transpired and we continue to be extremely positive about the future for the ministry.

Our immediate priorities: We are looking for space for our weekly prayer ministry appointments. We need Divine wisdom and financial favor for another long term ministry and training facility whether we rebuild at the current location or somewhere nearby.

How you can help in a significant way:

Friends, let me assure you that God is Good! We are completely expectant that so many will be deeply touched and impacted by His goodness of provision. Our best times are now and ahead of us as we walk in bold trust and quiet faith. We can’t wait to see how Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit give BRILLIANT UPGRADES and RESTORATION!

Thank you so much for helping us continue to Advance the Kingdom!

— Vikki Waters

Looking For A Meaningful Gift?

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 15:02:00 GMT

Although I was too young to understand the words spoken over me, my little heart somehow experienced the power of the lies. As I grew older, the fruit of this was a painful longing to be loved, which began to show up in my thoughts about myself, my expectations of those close to me, and my self-protective behavior.

Deep down in my heart, I believed there was something fatally wrong with me.

This lie facilitated an explosive and destructive self-hatred, as I aimlessly searched for relief and love in all the wrong places. Even when I accepted Jesus into my life, my inner pain kept me from engaging with God’s heart from me.

Though I intellectually knew He loved me, my own wounds kept me for experiencing His love in a way that would heal and transform my heart.

My story is not unique. Though the reasons behind our pain are varied, this reality is common to many Christians. Like me, they have not experienced the first love of God for them, and as a result, they do not know who they really are.

Jesus told a story about a son like this—two sons in fact. Neither knew their father’s heart toward them. Though one turned to wild living and the other to performance, their need was the same: a revelation of the unconditional love of their father.

A relook at this well-worn story of two sons and their father (see Luke 15) is a first step on our journey toward knowing God’s love and who we are in light of His love. Most Christians have heard this story more times than they can count. Perhaps that’s because it contains one of the Bible’s most compelling analogies of Father God’s love for us.

Many Bibles refer to this story as the parable of the prodigal son. I like to refer to the father, not the younger son, in this story as the true prodigal, because the word prodigal, according to the Merriam- Webster Dictionary, means “one who spends or gives lavishly and foolishly.” It is true that the first son spent his inheritance prodigally—he “squandered his wealth in wild living” (Luke 15:13).

However, his actions pale in comparison to the prodigal nature of the father’s response to his son. It is the father—whose lavish and foolish demonstrations of love defy reason and responsibility—who is the greatest prodigal of this story. And his prodigal love gives us a picture of the reckless, extravagant, and unreasonable love of Father God for us.

This is God’s heart for all of His sons and daughters, for every person ever born. He is extreme, excessive, and extravagant with His love toward His children, even when those children have wandered far from His heart. In Jesus’ parable, we see in both sons a picture of God’s response to those children who have wandered from His heart.

Are you looking for a meaningful Christmas gift to help someone believe in God’s incredible love for them? Give the gift of LOVED LIKE JESUS .

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Do You Struggle With Receiving Love?

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 21:45:00 GMT

In my own life, I am beginning to experience how multifaceted and unending my Father’s love is for me. He is always with me, and He has given me the fullness of new covenant life—yet I am still learning to live in His presence and manifest His Kingdom.

The more time I spend in His presence, the more I become aware of all He has given me.

The more I experience His love, the more I long to know Him in fullness.

The more I experience His love, the more He renews my mind to who I really am in Him, and the more He enables me to live as the amazing person He created me to be.

Life has become, for me, a progressive revelation of my identity as a co-heir with Christ (see Rom. 8:17). The enemy is eternally defeated, and he no longer has the power to control me (see Col. 2:15). Instead, I “reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:17).

What a contrast this has been to the first years of my Christian life. Not until my late thirties did I realized how hard my heart had become . I grew up with wonderful parents who loved each other and loved my brother and me.

Yet, because of a series of traumatic events in my early life, I learned as a young child to protect myself at all costs. I built walls all around me. When people would try to get close to me, I rebuffed them. I did not want anyone to have access to my heart. Instead, I believed:

• I can’t trust people; they only want something from me.

• Loving others causes me great pain.

• I can keep people at a distance to protect myself from being hurt.

• I must reject others before they reject me.

• If things get difficult, I should cut my losses and run.

Of course, while this does apply to some people, it does not apply to most. Yet, because of the fear and pain in my life, I found it safer to apply it to all people in hopes of avoiding the bad ones. For nearly four decades, I lived with this framework of deep skepticism and mistrust for others . I was clueless about how to even receive love, let alone give it.

What I thought was my demonstration of love was actually demanding, conditional, and inconsistent.

It was not love at all, but I was unwilling to see that, because I had used the pain in my heart to justify my choices and viewpoint.

Not surprisingly, the first few years of my marriage were horrible. Both my husband and I came into the marriage with a lot of emotional baggage, and after we were married, we created collective baggage.

In my deepest of hearts, I wanted be to loved, yet I was terrified of being hurt and rejected, so I refused to let any love get through. I did not have room for love in my heart, because it was filled with fear and pain.

Driven by self-destruction, I tried on numerous occasions to persuade my husband to get a divorce. At the same time, I knew something was wrong, and I desperately wanted to change. I just didn’t know how. Then, I met Jesus!

Though Jesus had become my Savior, the walls barricading my heart remained. Some of them softened, but many of them were my closest allies. It’s hard, even for Jesus, to have a relationship with someone who has walls like I did. I only had so much capacity for His love.

Because I didn’t believe He really loved me unless I worked hard and somehow measured up to His standards, I held Him at arm’s length.

But Jesus was patient. Eventually he broke through those walls, and for the first time, I was able to experience the love God had always had for me.

When I came to the end of my own strength, I discovered that my Father’s arms had been surrounding me all along. I just did not know He was there. I did not know what His love was like or how to allow myself to receive it.

He wants to share Himself with me, no matter what’s going on in my life. In fact, this is one of the main things the Father does for us. It’s His specialty.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Making The Most of Every Opportunity – Including Your Trials

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 20:40:00 GMT

God wants us to grow from glory to glory in our relationship with Him and our revelation of who we are as His kids. Every situation in our lives, whether good or bad, is an opportunity to grow in these ways.

When life is wonderful and happy, we get to learn to cultivate our relationship with Him because of love, not because we need something from Him. In the difficult times, we get to learn how to turn to Him for comfort and how to believe His truth even when we don’t see it manifested.

Life is all about our perception.

Every blessing and every challenge we face brings an opportunity to increase in the Father’s love.

When we recognize this, we can live as Kingdom opportunists who always take advantage of an opportunity for growth.

Paul tells us that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). And Jesus promises that, though we often experience trouble and difficulty in this world, He has overcome it all (see John 16:33). That means, when life is hard, we can turn the challenges we face into opportunities to experience a greater revelation of the Father’s love and comfort in our lives.

In our weakness, He shows off His strength.

Like Jesus did when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane, in our hard times, we must learn to turn to our Father. While God is not the author of hard times or suffering in our lives, He is good enough to bring good out of any situation (see John 10:10; Rom. 8:28).

Even when other people attack us and seek to harm us, God can redeem what they meant for evil. However, often this redemption hinges on our choice to turn to Him and trust in His goodness in our lives.

If, instead, we try to fix the problem in our own strength or respond with fear, anger, hopelessness, or other toxic emotions, we are effectively telling God we want to handle it on our own. And He’ll let us try it that way. He never forces us to run to Him. But when we chose anything other than running to His unseen arms and trusting in His goodness and grace, we miss out on the redemption

He wants to bring into every difficult situation we face. When we do this, we actually sabotage our own growth process and miss out on our opportunity to practice overcoming.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

More than hard work, it’s about your first love.

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:39:00 GMT

Yet, for the most part, I was still in the driver’s seat of my life.

Jesus was my Savior, but I had not fully surrendered to the transforming work of His Holy Spirit. Instead, I focused my energy on serving and “getting things done” for the Kingdom. I knew something was missing, and I was totally exhausted. I wanted more, but I did not know what that more was.

Then, one day while I was studying the Book of Revelation, God showed me something I had never seen before. He opened my eyes to a truth that would change my life. In Revelation 2:2, Jesus says to the church in Ephesus, “I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance.” These things are all commendable.

But Jesus continues, “Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:4).

I’d read this passage many times over the years, and I thought I knew what Jesus meant by “first love.”

But as I mulled over those familiar words, Jesus began to show me something deeper. He whispered to me that, though I had the deeds, hard work, and perseverance down pat, I still needed to experience that first love.

As I prayed over and meditated on this verse, the Holy Spirit showed me what I had been missing. He pointed me back toward the Father, who was inviting me into a special relationship with Him.

See, the problem that Jesus came to fix was the broken relationship between God and His children. Humanity had wondered far from His heart, and Jesus came to free us from the oppression of sin and death so that we could be reunited with our Father. He also restored our rightful identity as the children of God.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Be blessed, my friends.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

Will You Allow God To Turn Difficulty Into An Upgrade?

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 01:18:00 GMT

When we face difficult times, we always have a choice.

Will we run to our Father’s arms, which are always there, for comfort and strength? Or will we rely on our own understanding?

About three and a half months into my husband’s out-of-state job, I realized I had been internalizing my resentment about being alone.

On the weekends, we focused on being together, but during the week I focused on keeping busy with ministry and activity. Inside, I felt depressed and tired . These feelings were an old default that I had become used to in former seasons of my life. I didn’t like that I was returning to that place, but it was familiar and easy. Then, one morning while I was spending time with Jesus, I heard Him whisper to my heart, inviting me to pour out what I had been holding back.

As I described to Him my feelings of weariness and loneliness, I sensed Him saying:

“Vikki, I know you are trying to be strong, but you don’t have to do this by yourself. I want to give you a breakthrough in the area of discouragement. The enemy wants to rob you and bring loss into your life. He has tried this many times since your childhood, and he knows it has worked. The truth is that you are an overcomer because I live on the inside of you. Step into this reality, choose to draw a line in the sand, and say no to discouragement for good. I want you to press into the abundant life that only I can give. Abundant life is My part. Your part is to receive, embrace, enjoy, give it back to me, receive more, give it away, and receive more by stewarding expectancy and hope.”

This was exactly what I needed to hear. According to John,

When we are born again, we receive the ability to overcome in all circumstances in life. We are no longer under the power of the enemy or the oppression that fills the world apart from Christ. This is our reality as new creations. However, to live in this reality as overcomers, we need to practice turning to Christ in the midst of difficulty. We need to rewire our hearts and minds to the truth of God’s Word instead of believing the lies of our circumstances.

In effect, we are creating a new default pattern. This is the process the apostle Paul calls “renewing our minds” (see Rom. 12:2).

In the situation with my husband Richard’s job, I had a choice. I could steward discouragement, or I could steward life through expectancy and hope. I chose the latter and decided from that day onward to be an overcomer. In the years since then, I have learned more and more to steward hope in my life and to ignore hopelessness and discouragement.

And I have seen the fruit of this choice over and over. The year when Richard was unemployed was very difficult for us financially. Yet we chose to trust God’s promises and to run to Him with our struggles. And God transformed our difficulty into an upgrade. Not only did He provide for us in a variety of ways, but He enabled Richard to follow his dream and start his own company.

Also, He helped us to see that season as an opportunity to strengthen our marriage and reconnect with each other in a way that would not have been possible if Richard had been working full time.

From this we learned, like never before, that when we return to our Father’s unseen arms, we receive an infusion of His hope for our lives. He is never discouraged or hopeless. No situation is beyond His redemption. The question is, will we agree with His perspective, or will we empower a false and negative perspective on our lives?

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

“I went from needing medication every day, to living free from medication.”

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 14:39:00 GMT

Today we are sharing Lori’s story:

Before I went to Growing in Grace Ministries (GGM) , I had suffered from fibromyalgia for 10 years.

I basically went to work and then slept from dinner until the next day. I had extreme fatigue and pain. In addition, I was on 5 medications and suffered from depression and anxiety attacks. I was missing out on my life, my kids, and my husband. My day revolved around when I could go home and sleep again.

The process of inner healing came from a point of desperation where I just could not live like that any longer. My pain was indescribable, and my marriage was failing.

On the first visit to GGM , I felt like I could see in color for the first time in my life. I knew that when Vikki prayed over me, healing had begun in my body. I felt energized. Walking through the healing process was not something that happened in a second; it was work to train my default thoughts to be different.

I had to transform my mind into believing the truths that God says about me.

I was consistent in praying Godly beliefs over myself and my marriage. I felt like GGM was my cheer squad throughout that journey. With my doctor’s approval, I dropped each medication wisely and one at a time. I went from needing medication each day to living free from medication. My husband boldly prayed over me each day.

The first step to my healing was to believe what God says over my life. I had phantom pains at times when my heart was terrified that my healing wasn’t “real” or that I was walking out emotions, but here I am almost ten years later, and I have absolutely no symptoms of fibromyalgia. I have ventured out of my comfort zones in so many ways from mission trips to becoming a fitness instructor.

I realize that I had a false view of God. I felt like I needed to perform to make God love me. Vikki’s book helped me see God as He is and began a journey of rewiring the mindset of performance based living. For me, healing was about physical and emotional healing. My inner healing affected every facet of my life with the biggest positive impact being on my marriage.

Life is hard. There are times when I have to go back to the basics. I have come back to GGM to have SOZO sessions several times . I feel like GGM is always there to support me through life’s obstacles. Each session that I’ve had has been eye opening. I feel like Holy Spirit speaks voluminous truths there. As far as my life, I continue to entrench myself in the Word, put on my armor of God each day, and pursue my relationship with Jesus above all else. I’ve learned to sit at His feet and let Jesus whisper His love over my heart.

When I first heard about GGM, I was skeptical. I had taken “healing” Bible studies and although each teacher meant well, I was not in touch with The Healer-Jesus.

I truly believed that fibromyalgia was my “cross to carry,” but it is not God’s will for us to be sick. I was not believing God for His best for my life. I felt true love and acceptance when I walked in the door of GGM. They are my second family. My husband was so interested in my changes and healing that he, too, went through inner healing. Through both of our inner healing journeys, we renewed our marriage covenant placing God at the very center of our marriage.

Going through inner healing is more than just a desire to be physically or emotionally healed, it is opening a door to complete acceptance and freedom with Jesus. GGM counselors are equipped to lean into Holy Spirit’s leading to facilitate that freedom.

Rest comes from believing we are truly accepted by God…

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 14:24:00 GMT

Like we discussed in the last blog , resting from our works is a spiritual position.

But it does not mean we never do anything again.

Certainly, God has continued to act since His initial creation acts, and He invites us to reign with Him in this life (see Rom. 5:17). The New Testament is full of admonitions to work and labor for God, like this one to the Corinthians:

It is not work itself that is bad. It is important. What is bad is work done by orphan-hearted people .

See, orphans work to gain approval, while heirs work because of love for the Father. Thus, the rest we inherit in Christ is the rest of knowing that we belong and are eternally accepted. It is a rest from seeking to be good enough.

In other words, this spiritual rest has to do with our heart attitude, with our position before God. When we know who we are in Him and have stopped laboring for His love, we are able to labor for the Kingdom from a place of rest. And we are able to stop working, without feeling guilty, when we need a break. We are able to relax and enjoy life, knowing that this, too, is part of our inheritance as children of God.

Their hard work and labor for the Kingdom were rooted in faith, love, and hope. They were not performing to earn God’s love but performing because of God’s love springing up in their hearts. The distinction may seem small, but it makes all the difference in our ability to live at rest, no matter how full our lives might be.

In God’s presence we find the peace we need to stop striving. We find the ability to let go, to trust God, and to simply be with Him. With Him, we discover the rest, refreshment, and renewal we need to be active partners in the expansion of His Kingdom on earth.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus .

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

“I couldn’t shake the fear of letting people down…”

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 18:20:00 GMT

My name is Leah Presley.

I was first introduced to Growing in Grace Ministries (GGM) right after I graduated college. I had been struggling with fear and anxiety issues and had terrible nightmares when I slept. I was feeling overwhelmed and run down. I wanted to find freedom.

I had a major issue with people pleasing and couldn’t shake the fear of letting people down. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon GGM, but I’m so glad I did.

During my SOZO prayer session , I was able to reconnect myself with my Lord Jesus. It was remarkable. My inner healing process consisted of forgiving myself and other people for things in the past that were holding me captive. GGM partnered with me through prayer and counsel.

Shortly after my first session with GGM, I began attending the workshops on site where I found fellowship, genuine prayer, and support that inspired me further. I began to notice I felt better equipped to handle my fears and failures. When those old feelings would creep back up, I would remember to speak the positive truths I discovered during my time with GGM. I also never doubted that I could always connect to the counselors at GGM. As a matter of fact, nearly a year after my initial SOZO session, I found myself outside of my work in the parking lot on the phone praying with a GGM partner.

They helped me recall the truths and Scriptures the Lord spoke directly to me and I felt His peace and presence in such a powerful way.

Looking back, I remember coming into my first inner healing session at GGM feeling a lot of embarrassment and nervousness. I would encourage anyone who has never considered inner healing to hold nothing back and don’t be afraid. It feels like the weight of the world is lifted from your shoulders when you release your struggles to the Lord. Asking yourself good questions and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide your conversation and prayers will lead you into so many relationships that help provide freedom and healing in your life.

The benefits of inner healing are hard to describe simply — but I feel joyful, passionate, equipped, free, and proud. I am currently living happily in New Mexico while I confidently and passionately serve the Lord through college ministry and coaching, thanks in part to the growth I experienced through GGM.

“I was healed of 40+ years of traumatic events…”

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 16:14:00 GMT

Today we will meet with Mark as he describes his story with Growing in Grace Ministries:

My first visit was in March 2013. I had a lot of anger, depression, and addictive issues. I was dealing with a lot of disappointment on where my marriage was, what direction we were going in life, and not seeing a lot of hope.

The first SOZO session was a turning point in my walk with God. He really revealed Himself to me in my heart. I went through the first year of Ministry Training Bible School (MTBS) and gained a new perspective on the Word and who God was for me. My wife and I were still struggling, however.

At the end of 2014, we knew something dramatic had to change. I knew about Restoration Prayer Ministry (RPM) and really wanted it for both of us. She agreed, and we began RPM in Spring of 2015.

My process consisted of healing 40+ years of traumatic events, diving into the Word like never before, forgiving a lot of people (especially myself), and dealing with the roots of all my dysfunction – laying those things at the foot of the Cross. I noticed I could connect with Father, Jesus, and Holy Spirit individually and experience the love the Father has for me.

The biggest obstacles I faced were spiritual ones. I was in a session where I was praying through forgiving people. The last part of the prayer had to deal with forgiving myself. As I attempted to verbalize that part, my jaw locked, and I couldn’t speak for what seemed to be about a minute. My freedom came as I was able to pray though that.

I still journal when I can. My wife and I are doing well together. I’ve become involved in a prison ministry called Kairos, and we minister to inmates at Walker State Prison in Georgia. God has laid out the carpet for me, as it were, to be an instrument of His love. This process hasn’t been struggle-free, but He encourages me to come to Him.

He is more than willing to help and to love.

When some people hear the term “inner healing,” they think something spooky or weird is going to happen. It is not something to fear, but a process that will enable you to know God in a way that you have always wanted. You will find a safe, secure, non-judgmental environment. You can be as transparent as you allow yourself to be and not be shamed or feel condemned – you will be loved and encouraged.

God has used GGM to bring more healing and hope to my life than any book, seminar, or conference ever has in my 30+ years as a Christian. He brought closure to over 40 years of emotional wounds in about six months.

I would encourage anyone thinking about inner healing to ponder these words from Graham Cooke:

Allow God to do what He has always wanted to do in your life.

What Jesus Needed To Fulfill His Destiny — And You Do Too

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 20:08:00 GMT

Though Jesus was fully God, He had set aside His deity to become a man, and as a result, He could only accomplish His call by the power of the Spirit. Just like us, He was completely dependent upon the Spirit for all He did during His life on earth. This is why the Father needed to anoint Jesus with the supernatural power of the Spirit in preparation for His earthly ministry.

Acts 10:38 clearly explains the origin of Jesus’ earthly ministry:

In His humanity, like us, Jesus needed the anointing power of the Holy Spirit to carry on the work God had assigned to Him.

Though Jesus did have a relationship with God and the Holy Spirit from childhood (see Luke 2:52), as far as we know, it does not seem that He had any special power or abilities until the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on Him like a dove.

This was the crucial moment in Jesus’ life, the moment when He stepped into His role as Messiah and Savior of the world. Only through the anointing of the Holy Spirit could He fulfill His destiny on earth.

The same is true for us.

Not only does the Father have the same love and approval for us as He did for Jesus, but He also empowers us with His Spirit to do the work of the Kingdom. In our humanity, we need the same anointing Jesus received.

And, as Jesus taught, the empowerment of His followers to do all He did (and more) has been God’s plan from the beginning (see John 14:12). Just as Jesus’ work of redemption on the cross was only possible through the Holy Spirit, so too, our work in expanding the Kingdom of God on earth is only possible by God’s Spirit.

When Jesus returned to Heaven, His job description became ours. He commissioned His followers to take His Kingdom into all the earth, and He sent His Spirit to make it possible.

When we are embraced by our Father’s arms, secured in our identity as His beloved children, and when we are overshadowed by His dove, then we will be ready to minister His good news to the world.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,
Vikki

How Do I Have A Conversation With God?

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 18:09:00 GMT

Several years ago, I attended a conference on how to hear the voice of the Lord. There I learned two life-changing skills— how to have a conversation with God and how to soak in His presence.

Both of these are part of learning to be. At the conference, I learned four simple steps to dialoging with God, based on Habakkuk 2:1–2.

1. Become still and quiet in my thoughts and emotions.

2. Fix my eyes on Jesus. Use vision like King David did by picturing Jesus (see Ps. 16:8; Acts 2:25).

3. Recognize His voice as spontaneous flowing thoughts.

4. Write down the flow of spontaneous thoughts which come to me while my eyes are fixed on Jesus.

Using this simple pattern, we can connect to God’s heart and learn to hear His voice in response to our thoughts and questions. At first, it may feel difficult to know whether we are hearing God’s voice or not. That is normal, because we are just beginning to train our spiritual senses to hear from God. The most common way for God to speak is through a still small voice, which is the voice we hear in our hearts. It wells up from within us.

Of course, it is important to always test what we hear against the Word of God. God will never contradict the Bible. And He also always speaks for the purpose of encouraging, strengthening, and comforting. His voice is never accusing, destructive, or condemning.

Even if He is convicting us of sin, He does it in a loving and hopeful manner. He tells us who He made us to be in Him, and that never involves condemnation or fear. God has many wonderful things to say to us. He is always speaking to us. We just need to develop our spiritual senses in order to discern His voice.

The second skill I learned, which has since become one of my favorite activities, is soaking prayer. In a nutshell, this is practicing Psalm 46:10, which says, “ Be still, and know that I am God .” To be still means to “cease from something, to cease striving, to relax, to become quiet.”

Of course, stillness is not the goal; it is the vehicle for the goal—which is knowing God. We become still in our minds and bodies so that we can know and sense Immanuel with us. The word know in Psalm 46:10 means “to learn to know, to perceive, to be made known.” It means knowing someone relationally and experientially. This is the goal in our intimate human relationships, and it should also be the goal in our relationship with God. We do not seek to simply know about Him but to know Him with our hearts.

That is His invitation to us. As our Father, He does not just want to know about us (which He does), but He wants to have personal relationship with us. Thus, He invites us, saying, “Stop what you’re doing, relax, and come into My presence so you can know Me personally, relationally, and experientially.”

By becoming quiet (not talking, praying, or doing anything) and totally focusing on Him, we are able to listen, enjoy, and be with Him. As we commune with Him, He gives us fresh revelations of His love and power in our lives.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

When Difficulties Steal Your Focus

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 18:15:00 GMT

What we meditate on will be the reality we experience. What we focus on we empower.

In other words, what we focus on has our complete attention. If we focus on the difficulty, the problem, the crisis, then we are not focused on Jesus. When this happens, we begin to evaluate our circumstances through the lens of our opinions, experiences, and perceptions.

This is the makings of a major disaster.

That is why Paul says to focus on the good things of the Kingdom:

The result of this correct focus is, as Paul says in the next verse:

Paul had modeled a life of faith in God, believing in His promises even in difficulty. This is the example he had set for the Philippians, and he encourages them to, like him, access the peace of God already within them by focusing on God’s truth. This is what is possible in Christ. This is how we are made to live, as new creation believers.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Are You Weary of Performing?

Mon, 30 May 2016 22:36:00 GMT

Immediately before Christ ascended into Heaven, He commissioned His followers to spread the Kingdom:

Many Christians are rightly passionate about fulfilling this incredible mandate from Jesus. We should be driven to share the gospel with those who need to hear it. We should be compelled to love as Christ loves.

The problem is when we make the Great Commission more important than our personal intimacy with God.

Many believers have these two foundations of life with God out of order, and because of this, they are trying to fulfill the Great Commission on their own strength, without first being filled to overflowing with God’s love. The truth is, if we have not yet experienced the life-changing love of God and received healing in our hearts, from the inside out, we are incapable of truly loving others. To give real love, we first must be filled with that love from

When I first became a Christian, because of my inner pain, I was terrified of receiving ministry or love from others, let alone from God. Even the idea of it made me feel terribly vulnerable; so instead,

I busied myself serving. After all, if I was the one serving, I didn’t need to worry about someone trying to minister to me. I used the busyness of ministry—helping others, building programs, making sandwiches Jesus didn’t order—to keep a lid on my bottled-up pain.

Like me, people who live this way become exhausted, weary, and bored. We can only travel so far on empty. Over the years since my personal encounter with God’s love, I have had the privilege of coming alongside many individuals, couples, and ministry leaders from all over the country.

Like me, they had been serving fervently for years without realizing they were missing a key piece of their inheritance as a child of God. They didn’t know about the Father’s heart, His love, and His power. They didn’t know they could have a relationship with all three members of the Godhead. Some of them were tight with Jesus, but they didn’t know the Father. Some knew the Father but believed He was distant.

For some, the Holy Spirit wasn’t even on their radar. They had no idea they could be “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). But once they encountered Father God and tasted His love, everything changed. The weariness and need to perform left, and they were finally free and able to receive God’s love and also to serve people with the overflow of that love.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

The Secret To Loving Others

Thu, 26 May 2016 08:20:00 GMT

When a Jewish teacher of the law asked Jesus which of the Old Testament commandments was the most important, Jesus responded with what is commonly called the Great Commandment:

Instead of telling this man to perform a certain religious duty, Jesus pointed him toward love. First of all, love God. Second, love others. Jesus was declaring to a culture obsessed with rules that a heart of love matters to God more than anything a person might do.

This was the foundation of the gospel embedded in the old covenant, which Jesus came to unveil in the new covenant. Thus, toward the end of His ministry, Jesus gave His disciples a new command about love. He told them that the standard for love was no longer how much they loved themselves (as it says in Mark 12) but how much He loves them. According to the old covenant, they were only obligated to love others as much as they loved themselves. Now, as they faced the beginning of the new covenant, Jesus told them they could actually love others as much as He loves them.

Three times during Jesus’ teaching in John 13–17, directly before His arrest and death, Jesus explained this new standard for love to His disciples. First, He said:

Then, again, He repeated this new command, using it to foreshadow the ultimate act of love that He was about to commit on the cross:

Then, a third time, Jesus repeated the command to love, this time identifying it as the fruit His disciples are called to bear:

This is a profound revelation. And it is the foundation of the new covenant message, the new covenant law of love. We were made to be loved by God, and from that experience of His love to love others in the same way. I first heard this idea from Jonathan Welton, Understanding the Whole Bible (Rochester, NY: Welton Academy, 2014), pg. 329.

When I discovered the Father’s love for me, my life changed drastically. As I began to mature in this love relationship with my Father, His love became the catalyst within me, enabling me to love Him back and to love others with His love. The more I experience the Father’s love, the more I learn about how to receive and give healthy love. This is what it means to be transformed into His image (see Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:18). This is the essence of our faith, the foundation for everything else we do.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

How Do I Know I’m Being Led By The Spirit?

Tue, 17 May 2016 22:45:00 GMT

A few years ago, a young woman name Michelle made an appointment with me to talk about the direction of her life and her desire to serve Jesus wholeheartedly. I was drawn to her the moment we met. She was really smart, well versed in the Bible, and contagiously enthusiastic about making a difference for the Lord. She was feisty and inspiring! As we talked about her life and dreams, she eventually shared with me the frustration she felt about her spiritual life. She had been serving in a ministry that was focused on the Great Commission but, unfortunately, had not taught her very much about intimacy with God.

She had begun to feel dissatisfied with her Christian life because it did not look at all like the apostle Paul’s. Paul seemed to be continually led by the Spirit. She wondered, How did he know it was the Spirit? Was it an audible voice? Did he feel a push? Or was he just a super Christian who was gifted with the ability to always hear God’s voice? Unwilling to believe Paul had a special lifestyle that was unavailable to the rest of us, she began to pray, “Lord teach me how to be led by the Spirit.” Though she wasn’t sure exactly what she was asking for, she knew she wanted what Paul had.

As Michelle and I talked, we both began to sense that God was up to something big in this meeting. It wasn’t long until she was in tears. As the peace of God permeated the room, I asked her, “Michelle, how important do you think it is to know how to hear the voice of the Lord?”

She paused. Later, she told me that this question had caught her off guard. After all, she prayed every day and had read through the Bible. She had memorized hundreds of Bible verses and regularly told people about Jesus. I’m not spiritually stupid, she thought. Of course I think it’s important. But then she realized the truth. Looking at me with something akin to amazement, she said, “Apparently not that important, or you wouldn’t be asking me the question.”

What Michelle had realized in that moment was that her theology of God was based on working to earn His love. The very thing she lacked and longed for was an intimate relationship with Him in which she was led by His revelatory voice and heard His perspective and answers to the questions on her heart. For so long, she had taken pride in over-analyzing and creating answers to life questions on her own. While she talked to God and asked Him questions, she did not know how to listen to the still small voice of God, and she did not really expect Him to answer. She was so busy finding her own solutions that she didn’t know how to be still and connect with His heart.

This realization was the beginning of a transformation. Instead of being self-led, Michelle began to be Spirit-led. Instead of living by the evidence, she began living by faith, and she learned to respond to crisis with peace instead of fear. She no longer sought to simply understand God with her mind but to love Him with her heart. All this happened because of an encounter with love. At the bottom of Michelle’s struggle was a void in her heart. Like me, she needed to meet her heavenly Father and experience His lavish love. When she finally did, she discovered how easy it is to serve and love people from a place of overflow.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

What Jesus Did In The Face Of Suffering

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 09:57:00 GMT

When we face suffering, we can look to Jesus’ example. As His mind was filled with the coming cross, Jesus sought out His Father, and the Father once again affirmed Him with words of love. In the presence of Peter, James, and John, Jesus was transfigured into His heavenly body, momentarily, and the Father audibly said:

In those moments, Jesus faced a greater personal need than ever before. His response to that need is an example to us. He chose to climb the mountain for a special encounter with His Father.

There, enveloped by the Father and the Spirit, Jesus received a fresh revelation of love and a fresh resolve to walk forward in the power of the Spirit. By drawing closer to the Father and receiving His loving affirmation, Jesus received the strength He needed to continue forward in faith, trusting in the goodness of His Father.

This was how Jesus lived His life—not just when the cross loomed large but at all times. We see this in His persistent choice to get alone with His Father and cultivate their love relationship (see Matt. 14:23; Mark 1:35; 6:46; Luke 5:16; 6:12; John 6:15).

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

How To Rise Above The Lies

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 09:39:00 GMT

Recently, God spoke to me about the power of seeing my life from His perspective. Occasionally, I will look back at old prayer journals to remind myself of the answered prayers and direction I received from God in those seasons. As I was doing so, the Holy Spirit showed me that for many years my journals were filled with a continual pleading for the same needs —my marriage, my relationships, my parenting, my finances, and so forth.

For years, I had spent much of my prayer life begging God to meet the same needs without realizing that He has already provided the solutions for every dilemma I face. Our Father knows our needs, and He meets them (see Matt. 6:7–8, 31–33). We don’t have to beg Him. Instead, we can trust in His goodness and focus on seeing our lives from His perspective. When we do, we will begin to use our authority to access the storehouses in Heaven for the answers to our prayers—and also for needs that transcend our own personal lives. After all, our purpose in life is bringing the atmosphere of the Kingdom from Heaven to earth.

So often we get stuck in a bubble of our own need that keeps us from impacting the world. The answer to this is simple: know who we are and live from Heaven’s perspective.

When we do this, we will overcome . God wants to increase our revelation of our identity so that we can overcome in any situation we face. We possess the fullness of victory in Him. We have already overcome, because we share in Jesus’ victory over sin and death. But we always have a choice about whether we will live in the victory He has already given us.

God does not force us to overcome. He does not force us to say no to discouragement and hopelessness. He has provided all we need to rise above those lies, and they are not part of our new nature in Him. Yet, we still have a choice. And sadly, many of us chose to wallow in hopelessness instead of trusting by faith in the never-failing hope that is in Christ.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Are You Still Keeping Jesus At Arms Length?

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 09:31:00 GMT

Though Jesus had become my Savior, the walls barricading my heart remained. Some of them softened, but many of them were my closest allies. It’s hard, even for Jesus, to have a relationship with someone who has walls like I did. I only had so much capacity for His love. Because I didn’t believe He really loved me unless I worked hard and somehow measured up to His standards, I held Him at arm’s length.

But Jesus was patient. As I described in Chapter 1, eventually Jesus broke through those walls, and for the first time, I was able to experience the love God had always had for me. When I came to the end of my own strength, I discovered that my Father’s arms had been surrounding me all along. I just did not know He was there. I did not know what His love was like or how to allow myself to receive it.

I had no idea that God is, as Paul puts it, “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3) and could heal my broken places. When I discovered His healing love, I realized that in every circumstance of my life, the compassionate and comforting Father desires to come alongside me and listen, encourage, console, reassure, calm, strengthen, and counsel me.

He wants to share Himself with me, no matter what’s going on in my life. In fact, this is one of the main things the Father does for us. It’s His specialty. The Old Testament prophet Zephaniah described this aspect of the Father like this:

Over the course of several intense years, He mended the broken places in my heart, quieted me with His love, enabled me to hear His songs of deliverance, and celebrated with me every step of the way. He also brought people into my life who had also received His compassion, comfort, and healing, and they walked alongside me. They were a safe place, and they patiently pointed me to God for help in working through the baggage.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

God Does Not Love Us Out Of Obligation

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 10:23:00 GMT

The Passion Translation of Psalm 84 gives us a beautiful picture of God’s wrap-around arms:

We think, Sure, God loves me, because He is God and that’s the holy thing to do, but I doubt He really likes or enjoys me. In this way, we interpret His love as an obligation and miss the reality—that it is the overflow of His heart toward us. Yes, we did nothing to earn it, and it is not based on our performance, but it is based on who we are as His kids. God loves who we are in the truest and most intimate sense.

He loves us at our core, and because of that, He is patient with our weaknesses. Truly, He is the best of fathers.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

God Gave Jesus Two Things: Love & Approval

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 10:15:00 GMT

Jesus, like the rest of us, needed love and approval from His Father; He needed to know who He was as the Son. In other words, He needed to understand His identity. The Bible doesn’t tell us how much Jesus knew about Himself from childhood, but somewhere along the way, He began to realize who He was and the special call on His life as the Messiah.

Now, as a thirty-year-old man, ready to begin His public ministry, which would end on a cross, Jesus needed to be publicly affirmed in His identity. Thus, as John baptized Him, symbolically commissioning Him for His ministry, “A voice from Heaven said, ‘This is my son whom I love. With him I am well pleased’” (Matt. 3:17).

Here, the Father spoke to His Son’s heart the two most important identity messages: love and approval .

In the original language, the Greek word agapetos, translated in the NIV as “loved,” is more accurately translated “beloved.” In other words, the Father declared, “This is My Son, My Beloved.”

The Greek definition reveals the weight of this carefully chosen word, which would have communicated something like, “Son, I love You dearly; I adore You; I love You as My favorite!” It was as if Father God was wrapping Jesus tightly in His unseen arms. That’s the emotional intensity portrayed in this scene.

This is what Jesus meant to the Father, and it is what we mean to Him, too.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

You Don’t Have To Perform For Significance

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 10:07:00 GMT

When we adopt a performance-based mindset, we welcome shame and fear into our lives. Shame tells us something is wrong with us. Fear tells us we will be rejected, we don’t belong, and we won’t measure up. The result is control. Without realizing it, we begin to overcompensate by trying to exert control. Control tells us to strive to win the approval of others. Then we will feel better about ourselves, be accepted, and fill our love void. But it is a lie, a very futile and exhausting lie.

Like many of us, I spent years striving for love and approval because of this mindset. When I first met Christ in my late twenties, I had been wandering in the fields of independence for years, determined to do it my way. When I finally came home to God, instead of getting to know the heart of my extravagant Father, I went directly into the fields of performance and began searching for something I already had access to.

Well-meaning friends and church members saw my enthusiasm and energy for serving the Lord. They quickly began giving me advice about things to do and activities to get involved in. Being young in the Lord and perhaps a little naïve, I thought that was what a new Christian was supposed to do. So, for the first few years of my Christian life I continued to busy myself in one ministry activity after another. What I did not realize was that I had a lot of unhealed pain in my heart. My default mode, when I had lived in independence, was to cope with my pain through busyness, serving, and performing for significance.

As long as I was on the go, I could keep a lid on my heart issues, and no one would know how miserable I really was. This mindset transferred into my life with God, and instead of allowing Him to heal my heart, I self-medicated the pain through good Christian service.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Welcomed Back As A Son, Not A Servant

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 09:47:00 GMT

When God’s children stray from His heart, it is often because they, too, wrongly see themselves as unlovable orphans. This causes them to question the Father’s love for them, no matter what He does. It causes them to expect, like the younger son, that they will not be welcomed home as children, but only as servants. Of course, the father’s prodigal response to his son’s return is the opposite of all he had expected. Jesus tells us the father saw his son coming, even when he was still far away (see Luke 15:20). That means he was daily waiting and looking for his son to return home.

At first sight of him, the father ran to meet his son, embraced him, and kissed him, even before the son was able to voice his apology. Quickly, the father demonstrated his forgiveness and acceptance, welcoming the son back as his son (not servant) and showering him with extravagant and undeserved gifts (see Luke 15:20–24).

Though the son was dirty, the father put a bright new robe on him—a special garment signifying his belonging within the family. The father also put a signet ring on the son’s finger; this ring would have been the son’s proof of his identity as the son of his father.

Finally, the father gave his son shoes. In that day, servants did not wear shoes, and the son had most likely returned barefooted. In answer to the son’s suggestion that he could be a servant in his father’s house, the father gave him new shoes, placing him above the servants and making him an heir in the family business. In this way, the father demonstrated that he was fully restoring the son to his identity as a son and to his relationship with the father.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

What Happens When Our Hearts Have Unhealed Pain?

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 09:39:00 GMT

The first problem [resulting in us looking for greener pastures] is unhealed pain in our hearts . When we are wounded, it’s like a little place in our souls is broken or crushed. The more pain we experience, the more broken our hearts become. Since this process begins in our very early years, many of us grow up accumulating a lot of pain at the hands of others, our environment, our circumstances, and our own self-sabotage. To try to make the pain stop, we self-medicate through addictive living.

As a result, we end up in terrible bondage, wondering how to end the constant turmoil in our hearts. Only Jesus can heal the pain in our hearts. He is the one who came to bind up the brokenhearted (see Isa. 61:1); it’s His specialty. But instead of turning to Jesus for healing, many people try everything else.

In my own life, I spent many wasted years self-medicating for a variety of reasons. Here are at least three:

Because of these reasons and more, many who seek greener pastures must come to the end of themselves, like the younger son, before they will return to the Father.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Who Was The Real Prodigal? The Father or The Son?

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 09:25:00 GMT

Many Bibles refer to this story [in Luke 15] as the parable of the prodigal son. I like to refer to the father , not the younger son, in this story as the true prodigal, because the word prodigal, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means “one who spends or gives lavishly and foolishly.” It is true that the first son spent his inheritance prodigally—he “squandered his wealth in wild living” (Luke 15:13). However, his actions pale in comparison to the prodigal nature of the father’s response to his son. It is the father—whose lavish and foolish demonstrations of love defy reason and responsibility—who is the greatest prodigal of this story. And his prodigal love gives us a picture of the reckless, extravagant, and unreasonable love of Father God for us.

This is God’s heart for all of His sons and daughters, for every person ever born. He is extreme, excessive, and extravagant with His love toward His children, even when those children have wandered far from His heart. In Jesus’ parable, we see in both sons a picture of God’s response to those children who have wandered from His heart.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.

Thanking Him for you,

Vikki

Are You Looking For More?

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 17:42:00 GMT

The decision to invite Jesus into my life changed everything—especially for my family. Prior to the retreat, my husband, Richard, and I had been experiencing serious marital issues. We had been on the brink of divorce more than once. But, my encounter with Jesus had changed me. When I came home from the retreat, it didn’t take Richard long to realize something big had happened in my heart.

Because of this, he began to seek after what I had experienced and eventually also gave His heart to God.

In the wake of my God encounter, like most new Christians, I began enthusiastically getting to know Jesus. Over the next eleven years, I diligently sought Him with passion and dedication. As a result, I was growing and experiencing positive change in myself and my relationships. Yet, for the most part, I was still in the driver’s seat of my life. Jesus was my Savior, but I had not fully surrendered to the transforming work of His Holy Spirit. Instead, I focused my energy on serving and “getting things done” for the Kingdom.

I knew something was missing, and I was totally exhausted. I wanted more, but I did not know what that more was.

This is an excerpt from my new book Loved Like Jesus.

Order my book today for yourself and an extra copy for a friend, your pastor and/or your small group.