Category: Soul

My Friend. My God.

Sheri YatesLeave a comment
God, You cover me in cloaks of grace and love.
I will live my life for You.
I have fallen short of Your glory.
Let Your mercy rein and cover my sin.
Let Your grace hide all I have been.
Let Your love consume me now.
Make me new.
Like a hammer, life hit me hard, but You caught me in Your web of love.
I am new.
My heart and mind will change.
Only for You, my heart will sing all of what You do.
You took my life, a life of sin, and said you can start again. All you need is to ask and receive all I have for you.
My life is not my own, but please let me show I am new.
My life belongs to the Savior of my soul, the Redeemer of my life.
You have done what only You can do.
You have won me.
You love me.
Your love stays with me even when I’m beneath the sin no child of Yours should know.
Can You show me I’m not too far? There’s still hope for me?
You came to me.
I didn’t choose You, but You chose me to be part of Your family.
I want to know, do I show what You did for me?
Do I shine with Your love?
Do I give to the least of us?
Am I a friend to the lonely?
Do I go beyond religion?
Do I show all You want us to know, that You are never mad, never angry, never bitter towards what I’ve done, but You love and still call me son?
Your grace is with me.
I will be a family to those who cannot see; I will be their eyes.
To those who cannot hear, let me be their ears.
To the girl who ran away and lost herself, she needs to know that she can still follow You.
Give her Your hand and save her from sin.
She is Your daughter, and You love her still.
To the boy who lost everything, all your days trust the Lord. He is good. He will follow you, too.
God forgives all we’ve done.
He will still call me son.
He doesn’t want anything more than for us to know His love.
His grace carries us in this rat race.
He covers my sin and will carry me till the end.

• Authored by Josh Pugh •

Being Obedient to God

Sheri YatesLeave a comment
This is a dangerous statement because our society today tells us, “Just be you. Be who you are. You know who you are. Do what your heart desires. Fulfill your desires.”

I’ve learned the hard way to be careful about sharing this because it only exists for those people who are searching the heart of God in all of their ways—not some of their ways, not only in church on Sunday morning, but in all of their ways. They acknowledge God in all of their ways.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV) 

That word ‘acknowledge’ there means to know God relationally. In everything you do, be in communion with God. That’s really what it means.


If you go out and do what you want to do, and that includes sleeping around and making immoral choices, then you are not acknowledging God in all of your ways. He is not a God of sin. This message is not designed for people who are trying to fulfill their fantasies or their sinful desires.

This is for people who are truly seeking God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength. They are seeking to know Him. They read the Word. They are falling in love with God more every day. Those people can do this. God gives them the desires of their hearts.

When you’re not really seeking Him, when He is not your first priority and you are not pursuing Him with everything you have because He is good and you want to know Him, then the desires of your heart may not be purely His. They may be your desires for the old things your flesh used to want—you know, bigger house, nicer car, better body, somebody to love you, somebody to fill your void. 

Well, God is your void filler. He is your house. You are His house. You have everything you need in Him, and there is nothing that you lack. Lack is not your portion when you are in Him. I think it takes a while after we begin seeking God for the desires of our heart to transfer from our old, worldly desires to His desires.

But once you are seeking Him and you really know who you are as His child, He puts His desires in your heart. He puts in you the desire to take care of orphans and widows. He gives you the desire to help people. He gives you the desire not to honk the horn and be mad at somebody who road raged you or drove you off the road. He gives you the desire to offer freedom and forgiveness. He gives you the desires of your heart because He is placing His desires in your heart.

The more you seek Him, the more you find Him and the more He gives you His desires. When that happens, you’ll know. If the desire in your heart is to go out and smoke and drink, that’s not it, okay? You’ll know when it’s God’s desire. If you’re walking and you see someone and think, “I feel like I should give this person twenty bucks,” that’s probably God’s desire in your heart. He is going to provide the twenty bucks, and He is going to want you to give the twenty bucks away.

You can trust that when you are seeking God with all of your heart, you are hearing from Him and He is putting His desires in your heart. When you are first learning to distinguish between God’s desires and the desires of your flesh, what you want to do is check His Word. See whether the desire in your heart lines up with how God teaches us to live in Scripture. If it doesn’t and it’s sinful, then you don’t want to follow that desire.

You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more. (Psalm 10:17-18 NIV)

One of the things I do is let the peace of Christ rule in me. I wake up with God on my heart, and I want to be with Him all of the time. I am with Him all of the time, and He is with me. Before I do anything, I stop and wait for the peace of God to run over me. I ask, “Is this the peace of God?” There’s a difference between man’s direction and God’s, and God’s is always surrounded by tremendous peace.

Being Obedient to God

Sheri YatesLeave a comment
This is a dangerous statement because our society today tells us, “Just be you. Be who you are. You know who you are. Do what your heart desires. Fulfill your desires.”

I’ve learned the hard way to be careful about sharing this because it only exists for those people who are searching the heart of God in all of their ways—not some of their ways, not only in church on Sunday morning, but in all of their ways. They acknowledge God in all of their ways.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV) 

That word ‘acknowledge’ there means to know God relationally. In everything you do, be in communion with God. That’s really what it means.


If you go out and do what you want to do, and that includes sleeping around and making immoral choices, then you are not acknowledging God in all of your ways. He is not a God of sin. This message is not designed for people who are trying to fulfill their fantasies or their sinful desires.

This is for people who are truly seeking God with all of their heart, soul, mind, and strength. They are seeking to know Him. They read the Word. They are falling in love with God more every day. Those people can do this. God gives them the desires of their hearts.

When you’re not really seeking Him, when He is not your first priority and you are not pursuing Him with everything you have because He is good and you want to know Him, then the desires of your heart may not be purely His. They may be your desires for the old things your flesh used to want—you know, bigger house, nicer car, better body, somebody to love you, somebody to fill your void. 

Well, God is your void filler. He is your house. You are His house. You have everything you need in Him, and there is nothing that you lack. Lack is not your portion when you are in Him. I think it takes a while after we begin seeking God for the desires of our heart to transfer from our old, worldly desires to His desires.

But once you are seeking Him and you really know who you are as His child, He puts His desires in your heart. He puts in you the desire to take care of orphans and widows. He gives you the desire to help people. He gives you the desire not to honk the horn and be mad at somebody who road raged you or drove you off the road. He gives you the desire to offer freedom and forgiveness. He gives you the desires of your heart because He is placing His desires in your heart.

The more you seek Him, the more you find Him and the more He gives you His desires. When that happens, you’ll know. If the desire in your heart is to go out and smoke and drink, that’s not it, okay? You’ll know when it’s God’s desire. If you’re walking and you see someone and think, “I feel like I should give this person twenty bucks,” that’s probably God’s desire in your heart. He is going to provide the twenty bucks, and He is going to want you to give the twenty bucks away.

You can trust that when you are seeking God with all of your heart, you are hearing from Him and He is putting His desires in your heart. When you are first learning to distinguish between God’s desires and the desires of your flesh, what you want to do is check His Word. See whether the desire in your heart lines up with how God teaches us to live in Scripture. If it doesn’t and it’s sinful, then you don’t want to follow that desire.

You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more. (Psalm 10:17-18 NIV)

One of the things I do is let the peace of Christ rule in me. I wake up with God on my heart, and I want to be with Him all of the time. I am with Him all of the time, and He is with me. Before I do anything, I stop and wait for the peace of God to run over me. I ask, “Is this the peace of God?” There’s a difference between man’s direction and God’s, and God’s is always surrounded by tremendous peace.

Holy Spirit

Sheri YatesLeave a comment
Maybe your parents always told you that you were the best and the brightest. You are the smartest and the sharpest. You’re the best looking and the kindest. Maybe they always told you great things. Maybe you made tenth place in your athletic event and your parents are like, “Good job for trying! We’re so proud of you. You’re so awesome.” Maybe they always spoke in positive and encouraging words even when you fail—if you got an F on your test, they were like, “It’s okay. It’s no big deal. You still are smart and sharp. You’re the sharpest and the brightest.” But the truth is that there’s a lack of understanding there.
The truth is that we’re made up of three parts: body, soul, and spirit. In your spirit, that is all true. In our spirit, we’re perfect. We couldn’t be more perfect. Our spirit is seated at the right hand of Jesus Christ and a finished work. Our spirit is perfect, a masterpiece, chosen, holy, blameless and so loved. So viewed from the eyes of God that our sins are so far removed from us. But while we are on this earth, our body and our soul—which is our mind and spirit—they are being renewed in the likeness of Jesus Christ every single day.
Our job on this earth is to tame and renew our mind so it comes in line with the Holy Spirit. Our job is to train up our body to come in line with the spirit. Our job is to command the body to stop craving the desires of this world like sexual immorality and quick fixes. Our job is to train up our emotions to not be emotion-led but to be spirit-led; to understand when our emotions flare that tells us that we have a trust issue with God. There’s an issue when our emotions flare up. We need to go seek God about and say, “God, why am I so angry about this? Father, why am I so sad? Help me align my emotions with you, God.”
They are a dashboard—like in a car. Your car has a dashboard. It will show up a yellow light and say “low fuel.” Everybody knows what to do. Go to the gas station. Well sometimes, a light comes on and it says, “check engine.” That might actually spark a panic attack in you or anxiety because you start thinking like, “I don’t have the time or the money to go have my engine replaced. Am I going to have to replace my car?” You automatically start thinking about the negative what ifs because it’s expensive and you think, “Oh my goodness!” But that’s not what the car manufacturer intended it for. They gave you the dashboard so they tell you there’s a problem. Don’t continue on this trip any longer until you have this problem checked out or you may have a bigger problem. It’s a warning system to give you a warning to tell you, “Hey you need to check the engine. There is a problem.” They didn’t do it to frustrate you or to cause you to have an anxiety or a panic attack. They did it to help you.
God did the same thing with our emotions. What he did with our emotions is he gave us a yellow light to tell us, “Oh my goodness, there might be a problem here. Don’t go any further. Stop blabbing your mouth. Don’t tell someone off. Just stop and pause and check in the engine,” which for us would be do a heart-check. “Heart-check me, God. Show me what I’m missing or why is this causing me to get so flared up?”
So our job on this earth is to continue to get our emotions and our will in line with the Holy Spirit. You know what, God has a work that he wants you to do. He’s called you, he’s chosen you, he’s pulled you out, plucked you before you were born to do work. And the truth is, you can say no or you can say yes. He’s got it for you and it’s your choice. So what is your decision? Well, every day we have to get constantly conform our will into God’s. Even like, Jonah. God told him to go to Nineveh, but you know what, he was like, “Whatever. I’m not gonna line my will with yours, God. I’m gonna align my will on my own. I’m gonna go to Tarshish and I’m gonna do what I wanna do.”
Our job on this earth is to stop and listen to God and say, “God, I wanna do what you want me to do. When you say go to Seven Eleven, I wanna go to Seven Eleven. When you say, turn left out of your neighborhood instead of right today, I wanna go that direction.” That’s maturity. Maturity is learning to obey at the very moment God speaks and to not delay.
Our job is to continue to reconcile our mind and our will into the Holy Spirit’s perfection; continue to say yes; continue to be refined by fire; continue to make the hard decisions even if you don’t want to just because God said so; and to get our body in line with the Holy Spirit. Like, “Body, you know what, you’re not gonna sit here and lie to me and tell me all these things are wrong. I’m going to command you to listen up and obey the Holy Spirit. I’m not gonna be sexually impure anymore. I refuse to use my eyes for purpose which they were not designed. I refuse to use my body for that which it was not designed by God and I refuse to allow pain to rule me so I can’t do the work of God. I refuse. Body, you listen up to the voice of the Holy Spirit.”

The truth is, sometimes our body and our soul, they fail. We make mistakes because we’re human and we’re being transformed. We’re in the process of being transformed. Because we’re being transformed and we’re in the process, we’re going to fail. So if you were raised by parents who never let you see your failures or they caught you every time before you failed—or you’re a parent raising kids, you catch your kids before they fail or you never let them see their failures, you’re doing them a disjustice, because they’re going to hurt so bad later when they fail. They’re gonna be so mad, they’re not gonna know how to respond or how to even handle any negative criticism from an employer or spouse or a child for that matter. You are doing them a complete disservice.

The truth is, your spirit is perfect but your body and your soul is not. You have to understand that it’s not so you know you need a savior to get through every day and you need to day yes. It gives you a dependency on God when you know that you fail without him. Failing doesn’t mean, “I am a failure.” Failing means, “I did something that wasn’t in the perfect mark of which God has asked me to. Failing means I did something without a hundred percent of my heart or I didn’t do it unto the Lord. I didn’t do it as if I was serving God. Failing is doing it on my own apart from God. Failing is leaning into my emotions and giving way to them and yelling at my children or my spouse or my friends and taking them out because I’m mad and I choose to fail. Failing is not recognizing that I’m still human and I need to make the decisions that God has asked me to make so I can be made into his likeness in every area and bring those other two parts into submission into the Holy Spirit.”
The truth is, everyone needs to understand you’re made up of body, soul and spirit and your spirit is perfect. Yes, you are a masterpiece. When you know who you are and you stand on it, it’s way easier to bring your body and your soul into submission and say, “Hey soul, stop trying to go your own way. Stop trying to be emotion-led because you know what, God is worthy and he’s made me a masterpiece already and I’m gonna stand up in the masterpiece, chosen, loved, holy, blameless person of God that I am and I am gonna stand fully on that. I refuse to go my own way, I refuse to live out of my emotions, I refuse to let the sun go down on my anger tonight because my Father who has named me and adopted me is worthy. I refuse to let my body command me and lust to rule me and selfish ambition and my selfishness to take me to places where God never intended me to go.”
I, Father, wanna stand in who you say who I am and bring my body and soul into submission, the end. In Jesus’ name, I bind all these. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

Being Obedient to God!

Sheri YatesLeave a comment
This is a dangerous statement because our society today, in our world—that’s what they say. “Just be you. Be who you are. Just be. You know who you are. Just do what your heart’s desire. Fulfill it.”

I’ve learned the hard way to be careful of sharing this because really, it only exists for those people who are searching the heart of God in all of their ways—not some of their ways, not only on church on Sunday morning—but in all of their ways. They’re acknowledging God in all of their ways.

Proverbs 3, 5 and 6 says, “Acknowledge God in all of your ways and he will make your path straight.” That word acknowledge there means to relationally know God. So in everything you do, relationally, just be in communion with God—that’s really what it means—in all of your ways.

If you go out and do what you wanna do, and that includes sleeping around and being immoral and making immoral choices, then you are not acknowledging God in all of your ways. He is not a God of sin. So this message is not for you. This is not designed for someone who is just trying to fulfill their fantasies or the desires of their heart.

This is for the person who is really seeking God with all their hearts, soul, mind, strength. They’re seeking to know him. They’re reading the word. They’re in the word. They’re falling in love with God more every day. Those people, they can really do this. God gives us the desires of our heart.

When you’re not really seeking him, and he’s not your first priority, and you’re not pursuing him with everything you have and chasing after him because he’s good and you just wanna know him, then that the desires of your heart may not be purely his. They may still be yours or for the old things that your flesh used to desire. You know, bigger house, nicer car, better body, somebody to love you, somebody to fill your void. Well God is your void filler. He is your house. You’re his house. You have everything you need in him and there’s nothing that you’re lacking. There is no lack. Lack is not your portion when you’re in him. I think that it takes a while after seeking God for desires of our heart to transfer from our old, worldly desires to his desires.

But once you’re seeking him and you’re really knowing who you are and you’re his child, you know what, he’s gonna put his desires in your heart. He’s gonna put the desire to take care of orphans and widows. He’s gonna give you the desire to help people. He give you the desire to not honk the horn and be mad at somebody because they road raged you or drove you off the road. He’s gonna give you the desire to offer freedom and forgiveness. He’s gonna give you the desire of your heart because he’s placing his desires in your heart.

The more you seek him, the more you find him; the more that you find him, the more that he just gives you his desires. When that happens, you’ll know. The desire in your heart is to go out and smoke and drink—that’s not it, okay? That’s not what it is. But you’ll know when it’s God’s desire. If you’re walking and you see someone and you think, “Gosh, I feel like I should give them 20 bucks,” you know what, that’s probably God’s desire in your heart. You know, you can sit there and say, “Well is this God or is this me? I don’t know. Is this God telling me to give him 20 bucks?” I mean, honestly, it’s probably God. You can trust that. You can trust that he’s putting his desires n you and they’re becoming your desires. He’s gonna give you the desires of your heart. He’s gonna provide the 20 bucks and he’s gonna want you to give the 20 bucks away.

So you can trust that when you’re seeking God with all of your heart, that you’re hearing from him and he’s putting his desires on your heart. What you wanna do is make sure you know that what he asked you to do lines up with the scripture. If it doesn’t and it’s sinful then that’s when you don’t want to listen.

So when you’re just first learning to just follow the desires of your heart because you know God put them there, just check them against the word of God.

Psalms 10:17 basically—if you read that and dissect it, which would be great with your walk with Christ, it’s another scripture to show you how God is putting his desires in your heart.

For me, one of the things that I do is I let the peace of Christ rule in me. I wake up with God on my heart and I want to be with him all the time. I am with him all the time. He’s with me. I just stop and let the peace of God run over me and I just kinda wait for it before I do anything. I’m like, “Is this the peace of God?” There’s a difference and man’s direction and God’s is always surrounded by tremendous peace.