Thank you for joining us for Episode 2!
We are excited for this and grateful for the opportunity to connect with you! If you’d like to connect with the Women Encouraged Community online, we would love to welcome you to our closed Facebook group which you can join by clicking here: The Women Encouraged Facebook Community
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Here are the show notes, including a transcript of the ending devotional at the bottom of this page.
About our guest this week:
Carlos and Becky Pliego
Becky Pliego has a deep love for the Lord and His word and a love for helping women engage with and understand the Scriptures. She lives in Mexico City with her husband Carlos and their youngest daughter, and she teaches Spanish at the online school Wilson Hill Academy.
We know Becky as the webinar teacher (in both English and Spanish) for the wonderful, guilt-free Bible Reading Challenge put on by the church she is a member of in Idaho. You can find out more about the Bible Challenge in this video:
For more from Becky, listen to her talk at Thrive about reading your Bible or listen to one of the past Bible Challenge webinars here.
As we mentioned in the podcast, if you’d like to join us in the reading challenge, just jump right in! You can find the Facebook group here. And we love the Instagram page as well.
The books we mention (click the picture to see them on Amazon).
Becky talked about this book by John Piper.
Brittany has mentioned this book a few times.
This was the book Bethany said she was loving. We are excited to talk with Hannah Grieser soon on the podcast and can’t recommend this highly enough!
Episode 2 Devotional Transcript
“And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” 1 Thessalonians 2:13
One of the most beautiful assurances of the Gospel is that through Jesus Christ, God takes us exactly as we are, but He doesn’t leave us as we are.
God our Father is constantly at work in us, and as Philippians 2 tells us, we are called to work out our salvation with fear and trembling because He is at work in us both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Just one chapter earlier, Paul declares his certainty “that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ”.
Our faith rises as we draw near again and again to the word of God and come in faith, believing He will work through that word to shape us, change us, remake us so that we are conformed more and more to Christ. It is that living and powerful and active Word, the word that never grows old or fails to accomplish its purpose – that is the word which is at work.
And so we walk forward in hope and we come to warm our hearts at the fire of God’s word. We will never need Christ less, and the more we come to Him, the more we will desire Him, and the more we will know our need. And when we fail to come to Christ, or when we lack the desire or the will to come, we only need to cry out to Him.
As our friend Becky Pliego has said, “Don’t pray for more willpower to be consistent in your devotional life. Pray for more hunger and thirst of God. He will answer you!”
“He satisfies the longing soul,
and the hungry soul he fills with good things.” Psalm 107:9
Charles Spurgeon said once, ““I have a great need for Christ: I have a great Christ for my need.”
You have a great Christ, sister. Come to Him.
