The More I Grow - Alive in 2025
We can over complicate life to death! Literally!! We are a society dying from stress, anxieties, depression, all leading to stroke, diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks, suicide; absolute destruction of the very meaning of life. But you can join the conversation and break through the darkness. Get out of your head, and listen instead!
Diana’s Notes
Alive in 2025
The More I Grow, The Less I Know
Happy January! Just last night we celebrated the welcoming of a new year!! LOL Well, that is how it feels to me - Anywho (as my mom would say) !! Welcome to Heartfelt Conversations with Diana! So, last week we read in John that Jesus Himself tells us He is the Light of the world.
Here is what The Scriptures tell us in the NLT of John 8:12 -
John 8:12: Jesus spoke to the people once more and said, “ I AM the Light of the world. If you follow Me, you won’t have to walk in the darkness, because you will have the Light that leads to life. “
And together on this journey, we are learning to be like Him, we are learning to follow Him, to be like His image - the perfect likeness of Him; and Jesus made it about as simplified or easy or as basic as He could for us to grasp, to get it. My pastor Eric Jones said about his message last week, FORMED, that it was a pretty basic message. But that is exactly how Jesus rolls. Haha - Do people use that expression “that’s how I roll” anymore??
I believe Jesus was all about simplicity- K.I.S.S - Keep it simple stupid - Basic
The religious rulers wanted everything complicated, regulated, complex and hard so that people felt they could not understand the ways of God, but Jesus came to do away with all of their schemes, by making God’s ways so simple that unless you were simple hearted- pure hearted, innocent like a child - with childlike faith and trust, who simply believes in whatever their parent tells them; because when we are little children we trust our parents, we look for them to lead us and keep us safe. Being a child is not complicated - being a child of God is not complicated either. But because we have been raised up in a world that forgot the ways of God, and His Instructions have been disregarded and left out of our society, many of us grow up with wrong thinking, either because we don’t know about Jesus at all, or we have been taught more religion than faith and we have no relationship with our Heavenly Father, or maybe we have been given no discipleship - no roots, or maybe we reject the help of the Holy Spirit, so we get confused and weary and we crash and burn and turn our backs on God because we have been taught to complicate the most simple basic truth..
God is Love … Verse:
1 John 4: 7-8: Dear Friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
and He sent Jesus to be our Light - to light the Way back to the Father - Jesus is the walking, talking, living, breathing Truth of God’s love for us.
1 John 4: 9-10: God showed how much He loved us by sending His One and Only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him. This is real love - not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
Jesus is the Source of all Light - He will light the way for us to walk but it is up to us to make a choice and a decision to follow. And sometimes we complicate it with too much thinking and not enough believing.
We can over complicate life to death! Literally!! We are a society dying from stress, anxieties, depression, hate - all leading to stroke, diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks, suicide; absolute destruction of the very meaning of life. Instead we walk in death - darkness.
Romans 8:5-8 in the Message translation of the Bible says:
Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them- living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores Who God IS and what He is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
So if we are constantly thinking about our own self the way the world tells us to, then we remain blind and in the dark to the good things God wants us to be a part of and to experience and have in our life here. A good, satisfying, peaceful life. But if we are on the wrong path, we will miss it. We will be in the dark and unable to see. We have to stop thinking like the “world” that is lost and start seeking God for direction. We have to retrain the brain, no longer brain power but believing power. If you believe God can then that puts a crack in the darkness of our mortal thoughts that are easily maneuvered, and manipulated.
Romans 8: tells us the mind of the flesh (our mortal way) is us thinking only with our physical senses and the world’s point of view. Logic according to the world only, can often lead to destructive choices.
Being in our own thoughts, our head, can lead us to a lot of unnecessary arguments and fights that only leave wounds and tears that destroy trust, and that can take years to overcome and heal from. When we are consumed with our feelings ironically we create wounds and hurt others. Hurting ourselves or harming others is not love, so it can not be of God. We need to guard our hearts on how we treat other people. This is a lesson I stumble on every day. I am a work in progress but thankfully I am not as obtuse to others as I used to be. And be careful of judgment against others, because it is way too easy to find yourself on a path you swore you would never go down until one day you wake up and find somehow you have been betrayed, hurt, wounded, damaged, broken and now, you too, are on the Island of Misfit Toys. HAHA for anyone who has ever watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer classic
James 4:1-3 is a stern talking to about our attitudes and motives, but I have learned these past 7 years to heed the warning of this verse and not have to have the last word. Right or wrong doesn’t matter as much as having peace. Arguing is the opposite of peace. This is what James 4 in the Message says:
Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves. You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it. You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it.
You wouldn’t think of just asking God for it, would you? And why not? Because you know you’d be asking for what you have no right to. You’re spoiled children, each wanting your own way.
That is a pretty stern talking to. But sometimes we are thick headed and there is no other way than to be clear. You are acting like a brat! Like a spoiled-rotten baby! Haha - I just had a memory of when my daughter was little and there was a program on TV, called Rugrats and there was a naughty little girl named Angelica. Three of my daughters brothers would tease her when she was wanting her way and tell her she was just like Angelica. She would get so mad! I think she even used to have a tshirt with a picture of Angelica on it. LOL I don’t know why that is such a sweet memory for me, but it is. I guess I thought it was kinda funny.
Okay, so…
I wasn’t a spoiled child when I was little growing up, but when the hardships and heartbreaks of life came along, I was not strong in my faith. I was not rooted in what God’s word says, and I lost my way. I survived. I was living, but I was the living dead. I was so lost in my own self, my own pain, me, me, me, that I was not there to be the mom my children needed me to be.
God knows when we learn to do good, to help others, to care about others, it keeps us from going into a dark place of selfishness. It doesn’t necessarily begin as a selfish attitude, but sometimes when we have been so deeply wronged, our hearts want justification. We need someone to pay for what they broke in us. Well, Jesus did. He did pay for all the brokenness and to restore us wholly fully back to the very image God created us to be. It is only in Jesus will you ever find yourself. Your true identity. And the more you grow, the less you will know. Meaning, all the stuff you thought was truth was maybe a version of some of the truth, but walking with Jesus in the light, you begin to see the real truth, the whole truth and it is nothing but Truth and it is the Truth that sets us free.
Jesus is the Way, and He is also the Truth
John 14:6: Jesus answered, “ I AM the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
As we learn to be more intune with our spirit, we begin to tune into the Holy Spirit Who leads us on the right path as Jesus reveals the way. The Holy Spirit is our Helper, Whom Jesus gave to us as His gift - His promise to His bride (believers, the body of Christ) that He would return, but until then, He was leaving us His Spirit, the same Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the grave lives in us and we never need to be afraid of rejection or fear or sorrow or shame or terror or anything or anyone ever again.
When we have Jesus, we have everything we will ever need for a full satisfying life filled with joy and love and peace.
…you are complete in Him, Who is the Head of all principality and power. Colossians 2:10
When we receive Jesus as our Savior, God gives us everything we need because God placed Jesus above all things. One day every knee will bow to Jesus, and there is no power or principality that can change what God already spoke to be.
Jesus came to bring life to us. God saw that there was no way mankind would be able to find their way through the shadows and darkness and traps and snares that the enemy intends for every single human being ever born because we ARE in the likeness of God. We were created in the image of God and that makes the devil, Satan, Lucifer fuming with rage and pure dark hate and evil towards every single one of us. His desire is to make sure he tricks as many of us as possible to end up in eternal darkness separated from God for all of eternity because he knows how the ending goes - he looses- BIG
And everyone who is able to remain faithful, keeping their eyes fixed on Jesus and learning to remain Seated IN Him - staying on the path He reveals to us as we walk, we will never fear the darkness for it will not be in us.
But, we have to wake up. We have to come alive in order for God to power us up with His Living Spirit. I want to leave you with a verse that helped me to “wake up”. It is a little weird, but if you take in the spiritual implications of this verse and ask God to awaken you, then you will begin to see the evidence of His hand at work in your life right now.
Ezekiel 37:1-4: (Amp Bible) The Hand of the LORD was upon me, and He brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the midst of a valley: and it was full of bones. And He caused me to pass round about among them, and behold, there were very many human bones in the open valley or plain, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O LORD God , You know! Again, He said to me, Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O you dry bones, hear the Word of the Lord.
Do you have dead, dry bones? I did! I tried and tried and tried every way I knew to get my life on a track that didn’t always lead to misery but my bones were dry and my soul was the desert they laid in.
God said, prophesy to the bones. Tell them to hear the word of the Lord.
As I was learning to follow Jesus, I knew if I wanted life, a real spirit -filled life, then I needed to tell my spirit to wake up. To tell all my dead dry bones to wake up.
Listen to what happened when the dead dry lifeless bones had God’s Living Word spoken to them -
Verses 12- 14 of Ezekiel 37
Therefore prophesy and say to them , Thus says the Lord your God; Behold, I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, O My people; and I will bring you(back home) to the land of Israel.
And you shall know that I AM the Lord (your Sovereign Ruler) when I have opened your graves and caused you to come up on out of your graves, O My people.
And I shall put My Spirit in you and you shall live, and I shall place you in your own land. Then you shall know, understand, and realize that I the Lord have spoken it and performed it , says the Lord.
That verse I have verified in my own personal life. It took me awhile to get a good full breath of God’s Spirit because my brain was still clinging to the grave, but eventually my heart and my spirit didn’t give my brain power, I gave it to God and He was finally able to give me a good full breath of life, of power, and might, and authority in the Name of Jesus to overcome. Overcome anything I needed to. Period. I came to know personally and know and realize that I was seeing the evidence of God working out the big ball of knots that I steamrolled my life into.
Verse 14, the last verse - re-read
It’s kinda like if Jesus is your karate instructor and you are the student - you would want to follow the example of your teacher very closely so that you can learn to master karate like Him.
This week, instead of allowing yourself to be overtaken by the dead things of this world, ask God to shine His light onto your dead dry life and breathe new life, His life into your bones. Tell Him you don’t know as much as you thought you did, and you need Him to guide you onto the path of truth.
Then, begin to speak God’s truth over your life. This is how we slowly begin to transform our mind off of dead things that keep us tangled and trapped in this world and we begin to speak life, God’s supernatural, abundant life and as we faithfully trust Him, we will begin to see life come back into our souls and hearts and then our minds will begin to come out of the fog. But it does not happen overnight. So get really good at celebrating your victories. The personal victories that only you and God know you wrestle with. No matter how little or small or insignificant each one may seem to your brain, they are all huge giant steps of learning to walk in the light.
That is why I encourage you to have a bible to read every day and write in and date as God speaks to your heart. Get a journal and record your journey in there and a verse that encourages you. You’ll be amazed at how different you are as a person when you flip back through the pages in the weeks and months to come. You simply begin with small basic simple steps of faith and trust
Get into God’s Word and let His Word replace the dead words we unknowingly speak out against our own life every day.
I’m no good, I am nobody, no one cares anyway. Every time I try something goes wrong so why bother.
NO, No , No - Stop that!!!
I am so bad at it!!! At negative self talk. But, I have spent the last 4 years really trying to lay hold of this principle and it has made a life changing difference in my thinking.
God can restore the dead things- but we have to breathe in His Life giving Word to give us a new breath for new life.
Like Ezekiel 37:4 said earlier, , O you dry bones, hear - the - word - of- the - Lord.
John 5:28 says - Do not be surprised and wonder at this, for the time is coming when all those who are in the tombs shall hear His Voice.
It doesn’t matter if it is a spiritual state and today you are hearing God’s word and He is calling you to life, or if it is a physical death and you did not answer to the voice of God while you were able to - you will hear His voice calling you out of a real grave and that is not what you want!!! Believe me. Dead and without Christ = eternal death.
You may may not be where you want to be, nobody who is humble and honest with themselves and before God is; but be ready to receive, life-giving energy and power and might to persevere because your dead dry bones will be brought back to life as we continue to learn how to come ALIVE in 2025
Read out loud Isaiah 42:16 as a personal promise from God to you that as you step out in an unfamiliar road, a path you are learning to follow Him on, believe that He will be with you, that He will not abandoned you as you make yourself vulnerable before Him
Isaiah 42:16: God’s Word Translation
I will lead the blind on unfamiliar roads. I will lead them on unfamiliar paths. I will turn darkness into light in front of them. I will make rough places smooth. These are the things I will do for them, and I will never abandon them.
Ephesians Prayer
For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all of the saints, do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers, that theGod of our Lord Jesus Christ; the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of of Him, I pray that the “eyes” of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His Might”( Ephesians 1:15-19)
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from Whom every family in heaven and on earth derives it’s name, that He would grant you , according to the riches of His glory, to be enlightened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. “ (Ephesians 3: 14-19 NASB)
Meditate on God’s Word and allow the eyes of your spirit to be enlightened.
I have put a link to Pastor Eric and Alexa’s podcast -Trusting God With Your Future - on the notes for this week.
You can find the link of the message on -
Heartfeltconversations.com - https://www.heartfeltconversations.com/
Remember, we are learning to transform our minds so that we re-learn to have the mind of Christ.
Continue Learning How to Walk in the Light! God bless and I will see ya next Time!
Joyce Meyer: The Mind is a Battlefield - https://joycemeyer.org
And a few other links as well
Steven Furtick: Triggered Taking Back Your Mind in the Age of Anxiety
JimmyEvans: The time is Now to Change Your Attitude
https://endtimes.substack.com/p/the-time-is-now-to-change-your-attitude
Beth Jones: Getting a Grip on the Basics is a great resource to help you get the basics of how vital you are to God and how good He desires to be to you
https://www.thebasicsuniversity.com
Songs to inspire you
RATTLE! | Official Lyric Video | Elevation Worship
Jireh | Elevation Worship & Maverick City
Trust In God (feat. Chris Brown & Isaiah Templeton) | Elevation Worship
Foundation Verse
Romans 8:11
The Spirit of God, Who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Chrisr Jesus from the dead, He will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living in you. “
Additional Resources
Prayer of Salvation
Jesus has given salvation, healing, and countless benefits to all who call upon His name. These benefits can be yours if you receive Him into your heart by saying this prayer:
Heavenly Father, I come to You admitting that I am a sinner. Right now, I choose to turn away from sin, and I ask You to cleanse me of all unrighteousness. I believe that Jesus rose again from the dead so that I may be justified and made righteous through faith in Him. I call upon the name of Jesus Christ to be the Savior and Lord of my life. Jesus, I choose to follow You, and I ask that You fill me with the power of the Holy Spirit. I declare right now that I am a born again, child of God. I am free from sin and full of the righteousness of God. I am saved in Jesus’ name. Amen.
This prayer and the comment above, were taken out of the book:
Secrets to Powerful Prayer - Discovering the Languages of the Heart
By Lynne Hammond and Patsy Cameneti
If you have just received Jesus as your Savior, please write Lynne Hammond Ministries at:
PO Box 29469
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55429-2946
Or, email one of the ministries listed on the Additional Resources Tab and let them know that you are a brand new christian and need some direction on the next steps for your new life in Christ.
Or email us here at Heartfelt Conversations with Diana and we will pass along your information for you.
Congratulations if you are a brand new Christian or if you have Returned Home! Welcome!!! Get in God’s Word and get it into you!
Diana’s Home Church:
Valley Family Church - Pastor’s Eric and Alexa Jones
www.valleyfamilychurch.org
Other recommended Jesus-centered churches who teach the True Word of God:
Elevation Church - Steven Furtick
https://elevationchurch.org/
Joseph Prince Ministries - Joseph Prince
https://www.josephprince.org/
Joyce Meyer Ministries
https://joycemeyer.org/