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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
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Church was good today, and I started to be able to get through this. I could feel Satan in there just whispering that I did not really believe all this stuff that was being said, but I know that I did. The first thing I believed was something that Sid, one of the Sunday school teachers said. We cannot really appreciate God's presence unless we have felt His absence is what it meant for me. I don't remember his exact words, but that was the idea.
The sermon was about praise. One thing really stands out in my memory. God inhabits the praise of His people. That means, Pastor Lynch said, that "He lives in the praise of his people." Maybe the reason He is manifest when we praise Him is because He feels comfortable there, and Satan does not. "He flees from us," Pastor Lynch said.
The last song we sang was a chorus that says, "We bring the sacrifice of praise into the house of the Lord, and we offer up to You the sacrifices of thanksgiving. We offer up to You the sacrifices of joy." I remember someone saying once that praise is a sacrifice sometimes. It is a sacrifice when everything is going wrong and we don't think that God is working. And remember when I was talking about Amy Gaither and how we praise the Lord by devoting our hearts to the smallest things we do? That is what is called "a living sacrifice." I was willing to give Him that sacrifice by the time the service ended. It was hard, but I did want to do it.
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