We are talkin' my kind of language today! Not only am I a personal trainer and life-long athlete, but I am running the race that The Lord has put before me to endure to the end when He calls me home. The title of this post is my all-time favorite: Woman's REDEMPTION. My book, "My Story, God's Glory: A Story of REDEMPTION" is a great testimony to what God can do in a person's messy life when the person surrenders all to Him. When He saves us and redeems us, He is displaying His power in the lives of everyone who thinks they have messed up too much or have gone too far. Praise God! That is not the case! 

Giving our hearts to Jesus does not mean that the rest of our lives will have no struggle. Faithful Christianity doesn't mean we all 'live in the burbs safe and sound with kids who are perfect and obedient.' It means that God has shown favor to us and we are laying aside every weight and sin that does so easily trap us - we must run with endurance the race that God has set before us to win that crown in Heaven. 

When we talk about weight and sin, we are talking about what fuels and feeds our sins. What is a sin to one person, may not be a sin to another. Example: Exercising in-and-of-itself is NOT a sin. But when you put it above God, it turns into an idol, which then becomes a sin. For me, personally, exercise became a sin because I put it above my family, above God, above everything. For someone like my husband, exercise is not a sin. He loves to eat and more often than not, he tends to eat too much. In Proverbs 23 it states this about gluttony, "Be not among drunkards or among gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags." You are a slave to whatever is ultimate to you.

We need to take our eyes off of ourselves and fix them on Jesus, there is a new kind of humility and meekness, but also an explosion of confidence because we know that WE can't, but He can. He is the author and perfecter of our faith and there are times that difficulties aren't there to be solved, but are there as a measure of God's grace. God doesn't love the future version of you, He loves you right now. When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, He cancelled out the debt we owed because of our sins and our old version was killed on the cross with Jesus. Christ died on the cross for our sins, He cancelled out our debts and REDEEMED us! We can live a life of freedom and redemption all because of what Christ did on the cross. 

Blessings,
​Shannon 

The pain of childbirth is a reminder, according to the Scriptures, that the world is broken, and there is a longing for something more. When sin entered the world, disordered desires now rule the feminine heart. Every desire for each person is different; it usually is a void in their life that they are trying to fill. 

Our desires should be God first, then our husband. Due to sin, our desires sometimes turn towards other things of the world - addictions, affairs, money, shopping, our jobs, our children, etc. Don't get me wrong, we can desire good things, my desires are chocolate and coffee! But if we elevate those desires beyond where they are suppose to be, the desire becomes disordered and we become a slave to that desire. 

Most women set up men as idols and look to them to provide emotionally, spiritually, and physically what only God can provide. Apart from Christ, men oppress women in return, hence the modern day coping mechanisms of independent self-sufficiency and control for dealing with that male oppression. 

I know us as women, we want our husbands to want us. With all of the easily accessible pornography and "dating" websites, we feel we are being compared to other women every day. Other women are just a "click" away from our husband. That is when a woman becomes enslaved by comparing intellect, beauty, body composition, style, and fashion. An untrue image of oneself will always lead to discontentment and insecurity. We must always find our identity in Christ and never from a TV screen or a magazine.

Perfectionism is the disordered desire for righteousness and perfection apart from Christ. Where perfection is not attained, we become paralyzed. When we start desiring perfection apart from Christ, that is when the enemy slips in and tells us lies about who we are. Once we believe those lies, our eyes and minds start to wander to seek other people's approval instead of God's. We don't have to be a perfect wife and a perfect mother to be a great wife and a great mother. We take on the perfection made available to us in Jesus Christ. 

God created man from the beginning. God saw that it was not good for man to be alone so he then created woman from the man's rib. God created one woman for one man and she is to be his companion and helpmate in life. 
Many people misunderstand the scripture about the woman submitting to her husband. What they seem to miss as they continue reading, is that as the woman submits to the man, the man submits to Christ. So when the wife submits to her husband, she is actually submitting to Christ and His follower. God made woman and man to be equal, one is not inferior or superior to the other. 
When God says that he has a woman "fit for him" (him being man), it leads us to the idea of a complementarian relationship, not a competition relationship. They are to work through this world hand-in-hand taking on hardships and responsibilities together.
The amount of power God has given women, wives in particular, on the souls and hearts of men is staggering. It is important in a marriage to have the wife build up the husband. A quick text saying, "I love you" or a note in his lunch once in awhile saying, "I miss you" or any type of flirting, is so extremely healthy for a marriage. It helps to keep the eyes from wandering as well. Never sacrifice intimacy for protection, especially in the covenant of marriage. God made intimacy to be a beautiful bond between husband and wife. 

The man is intended to work outside the home by the sweat of his brow and provide for his family as the woman is to endure labor pains in having and raising children and taking care of the home. Together, as each one plays the roles that God gave them, the design is beautiful....