Our Guest: Vickie Gaskins
Vickie Gaskins worked for Somebody Cares as a ministry outreach coordinator and worked with Hurricane Ike Recovery. Her zeal for the Lord, desire to know Him, and willingness to lay down anything that hinders her walk with Him is always an inspiration and encouragement. She and her husband, Terry, live in Texas and have four adult children, all but one married and three grandsons. She’s worked in the custom home industry, served the Lord in various ministries and been an eager student of the word.
Key Thoughts and Scriptures:
“When you accept the fact that sometimes seasons are dry and times are hard and that God is in control of both, you will discover a sense of divine refuge because the hope then is in God and not in yourself.” – Chuck Swindoll
- When we understand that in all things God is with us, that He is good, that in His kindness and faithfulness, He is at work for us, we can live in each phase with confidence that He’s in control.
Isaiah 46:3-4 NLT …I have cared for you since you were born. Yes, I carried you before you were born. I will be your God throughout your lifetime—until your hair is white with age. I made you, and I will care for you. I will carry you along and save you.
- Vickie felt like the Lord was done with her because she had been taught that it’s all about what you did and not who you are.
- “Because if I had told him, I don’t want to go to high school anymore. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t want to learn math. He would have said, ‘Oh young lady, you’re going to school.’ But because it was church, he said, ‘You don’t have to go.’ And that was not a good thing.”
- When Vickie’s daughter needed healing, she began to cry out to God and try to earn His approval.
- We come to the Lord, but we don’t realize all the things that need to be removed from our lives before we can have that free and full trust and flow of relationship with the Lord.
- The Lord began to talk to Vickie, but she had to come to a place first where she recognized that God loved her for who she was.
Jesus cares for us.
John 17 NLT Jesus’ prayer for us
- “Would you want to give that to Jesus?”
Exodus 8 NLT …Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and begged, “Plead with the Lord to take the frogs away from me and my people. I will let your people go, so they can offer sacrifices to the Lord.” “You set the time!” Moses replied. “Tell me when you want me to pray for you, your officials, and your people. Then you and your houses will be rid of the frogs. They will remain only in the Nile River.” “Do it tomorrow,” Pharaoh said.
- God can take all of those painful things that we want to give to Him and He’ll carry them if we’ll allow Him.
- Many times the Lord sent people to help Vickie through the process of something that was coming that she didn’t even know was going to happen.
- Things happen to us and we have a choice in how we can respond.
- God is so wonderful and heals our hearts if we lay them on the altar.
- “Once I got rid of that bitterness and I allowed the Lord to help me to forgive, suddenly my life began to soar.”
God gives a vision and though it tarries we need to wait for it.
Habakkuk 2:2-3 NKJV Then the Lord answered me and said: “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, It will not tarry.
Romans 11:29 KJ21 For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.
- First thing Vickie figured out in ministry is that nothing works on a schedule. Everything is about relationship.
“Relationships define our destiny.” – Doug Stringer
- She also learned that waiting on the Lord is important.
- “You’re acting like you don’t trust me.”
- “I love you and I’m working on something. You just need to trust me.”
- “People would come to me and say, ‘I just feel like the Lord wants me to tell you that he’s gonna replace double everything that the enemy took from you.’”
- God gave Vickie a new heart.
- God gives us such beautiful, precious gifts that you honestly can’t out give God.
“Vickie felt God tell her, ‘You’ve always been a Martha; I want you to learn how to become a Mary.’”
- “I was so busy doing ministry that I didn’t have time to be with him.”
- Vickie was thinking that the Lord was punishing her, but God in His kindness told her something different.
- Life is full of ups and downs and all kinds of seasons, and He’s with us in all of them.
- But God also began to show her the value of each and every season.
- We tend to think that certain seasons have more value than others.
- There’s value in the valleys just as much as there are in the mountains.
Psalm 23:4 NKJV Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
- Jesus is with us and therefore there’s nothing that’s too difficult for Him and it just makes it all so much easier to walk through those seasons.
- If we can embrace Him in those seasons, there is joy.
- Part of the value is the fact that we get to be with Him.
- Infirmity is the weakness that comes as we get older.
Luke 13:10-13 NLT …When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Dear woman, you are healed of your sickness!”…
- Jesus was moved with compassion over her infirmity. He wasn’t upset with her because she was getting old.
- Do you put more faith in your faith or do you put your faith in Jesus?
Psalm 121:1 NKJV I will lift up my eyes to the hills—From whence comes my help?
Mary’s Story
- Mary loved Jesus well.
- She could step outside of herself and focus on Him.
- “So often I have been so caught up in my own thing and what it meant for me that I failed to realize that it was about Him.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-14 NLT For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest…Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end…. And I know that whatever God does is final. Nothing can be added to it or taken from it. God’s purpose is that people should fear him.
- God doesn’t cause us pain, but He does use different seasons in our lives to show us who He is so we can stand in awe of Him for His beauty, for His goodness, for His kindness, for His faithfulness.
Ephesians 1:17-18 NLT Asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.
Links:
- Barbara Johnson
- Ecclesiastes 3:14 Fear
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