Are You Looking for a Bible Study that Will Encourage & Equip You?

Are you looking for a Bible study that will encourage and equip you to become all that God created you to be? If so, join Cherie as she shares about the inspiration for her latest book--the Clothed in Righteousness In-Depth Devotional Study Guide--at the book's launch party. 

Your host, Cherie Fresonke, has been discipling brokenhearted people since 1993 in both the United States and Eastern Europe. She is an award-winning author of 7 books, two being Clothed in Righteousness and Clothed in Righteousness In-Depth Devotional Study Guide, which inspired this podcast series. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Are you looking for a Bible study that will encourage and equip you to become all that God created you to be? If so, I have exciting news for you. Welcome to Embrace Truth, a podcast for the woman who desires to become all that God created her to be. I'm your host, Sharif Rzonki, international speaker and teacher, and an award-winning author of seven books, one being Clothe in Righteousness, which inspired this podcast. On May 30th, the Clothe in Righteousness In-depth Devotional Study Guide was released. We held a launch party, something I've never done for any of my books before. Usually I write a book and then move to Bulgaria in Eastern Europe. That's not a very good marketing plan. So this time I decided to do it right. The party was great fun, and I recorded it to share with you. So listen in to part one of the Clothing Righteousness In-Depth Devotional Study Guides launch party. I especially enjoyed the question and answer time. I have some opening questions for you to ponder. Have you ever wondered why people make such wrong choices for their life? We've already sort of been talking about these things, huh? It's amazing how God does that. And have you yourself ever struggled with making decisions based upon your feelings and emotions? And if you have, do you desire to make wiser choices? And do you desire to become all that God created you to be? Have you ever thought about that? Like, you know, I've gone through my Christian life, you know, for years and years and years, you know, and I know I'm growing, but I never really thought, wow, I have the potential to become all that God created me to be. And what would that look like? What would it look like if each one of us actually grew up in Christ and really became all that He created us to be? I mean, we could do some amazing things for the Lord. And so, anyhow, I want to tell you about two books that the Lord inspired me to write that hold the key to being set free and to help us each become all that God created us to be. And first is this little book. It's titled Clothe in Righteousness. And this book was published many, many years ago. And you one time I went in the bank and she's like, Have you written a book? And I'm like, Yeah, she somehow got a hold of this book. Somebody told her about it. Which I'm like, that's really weird because I really don't know a lot of people here. And um, she read the book, so that's why I'm like, hey, I'm having a book lunch, but um, anyhow, this one uh the Lord had me write many, many years ago, but when I wrote it, I always wanted to write the companion Bible study to it, and it was in my heart, it's just time, time, it's really it takes a lot of time for me to write. And the second is the Bible study. I finally wrote Clothing Righteousness in-depth devotional study guide. So they go hand in hand, and I'll explain more in a little bit about how they work and what they're actually about. So, Clothing Righteousness is a unique curriculum that weaves together the importance of understanding your identity in Christ, along with a balanced biblical view of how Satan operates. Because a lot of us we know we're loved by God, we know we're forgiven by God, but we know it in our head and not our heart. And it's really important to move it to our heart because when we move it to our heart, that's what's life-changing. But how do we do that in a tangible way? A lot of times we've heard this, we know it, but we're not a lot of times taught tangible ways to actually walk in it. And that's one of the things the book does. But it also teaches a balanced biblical view of how Satan operates. Because there's people that will say, Oh, like, remember Flip Wilson, and he's like, the devil made me do it, and everything, the devil made me do it, you know, and it's all the devil. And then there's the other extreme that says, Oh, Satan, you know, he doesn't, he does he even exist, you know, does he affect us? But both of those are extreme. We need a balanced biblical view of how Satan operates because then we can be equipped to walk through the spiritual battle that we go through all the time in life. You see, Satan wants to take you and me down, he doesn't want us to be victorious because if we were victorious, we might be contagious. And if we were contagious for the Lord, we could be dangerous, right? And so the enemy wants us to just be like everybody else out in the world. He doesn't want us to look different, act different, appear different. But God has made a way for you and I to stand victoriously, and he has equipped us to be victorious. But just like the Navy SEALs, right, who are some of the world's top fighting men and women, they need to be trained in how to handle their equipment and their armor effectively. We as Christians need to be trained as well, right? And a lot of times, like for years, I as a Christian, I never really knew hardly anything about spiritual warfare. I remember as a child going to uh children's ministry and singing Onward Christian Soldier. That was my favorite song, you know. But what did that mean, you know? And as an adult, I remember one time I was going through something really, really hard. It was when God first called me to start my ministry to help women heal over the issue of abortion. And I had seen the pastors, they uh uh worked with me and had me learn certain things, and then I just was getting attacked, right and left, right and left. And I went in and I made an appointment with the pastor, and I'm like, what is going on? My health is horrible, this is happening, this is happening, and he's like, Sheree, weren't you going to start a ministry? Yes. And he's like, to help women heal, yes, to help women become victorious, yes. And he says, You're experiencing spiritual warfare. And I like, I am cool. It changed, it changed everything. It changed my instead of going, oh, you know, poor me, it's like really there's a battle, there's somebody trying to stop me from doing what God's calling me to do, I can walk totally different then, right? And so a lot of us though are like how I used to be, where we don't realize that what's going on is spiritual warfare, and that God has made a way for us to actually be able to walk victoriously through it. And so that's what the curriculum is about. It's based on two uh passages. One is Ephesians 6, 10 through 18, which is the armor of God, and the other is Ezekiel 16, 4 through 14, which is the passage about Israel as the bride. And you see, the moment that you and I have accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we were grafted in as the bride of Christ. And so we need to understand how to apply our spiritual armor that we're equipped with, and we need to understand how we're adorned as the bride of Christ, which all relates to who we are in Christ. And again, going back to not just believing the truth of who we are in Christ in our head, but moving it to our heart and walking in it. Because when we do that, it's powerful, it's life-changing. And so there were two inspirations for the book and an additional inspiration for the study guide, but they all go hand in hand, and they even inspired a podcast titled Embrace Truth that the Lord had me begin uh last October. And so I have a small bookmark back there you can get later, and it's a podcast. Most of the podcasts are really short. We're busy as women at seven, eight minutes. Some of them are long, like we just did a retreat recently. So I'll put on the retreat um messages, you know, that might be 45 minutes or an hour. But um, they're all mostly focused on who you are in Christ and how to walk victoriously. And in each one, it will also say how the enemy will use that truth of who you are in Christ against you if you allow him, if you allow him. But if you're ready, he can't use that against you, right? Or you even if he is at first, you might recognize it and go, wait a minute. In fact, not the one that just came out this week, but one that came out prior. It's about spiritual warfare. And so, if you want to look, it's that one's a little bit longer because it's foundational, but it it gives you ways, seven effective ways to overcome spiritual warfare, if that's interesting to you. So, the first uh part of the inspiration came from this Bible study that we already sort of talked about a while ago. So, my very first book was this little book called Um Go in Peace, and I wrote it specific for the issue of abortion because when I was a teenager, I had fallen away from the Lord far, far, far away, and I became pregnant at 16, and I was scared to death, I didn't know what to do, and I believed the lie. There was a free clinic down the street from my high school, and they said, Um, you know, your secret's safe with me, and I chose abortion, and I did it again at 18, and so I'm responsible for the death of two of my children, and I was so hurting that I tried to numb the pain. I started drinking, and when that didn't work, I started doing drugs, and I even got to the point where I wanted to commit suicide, and so then I finally came back to because nothing was working, I finally came back to the Lord, right? What a concept! Lindsay, my daughter, she was like maybe two when I went back to church, right? So I took her and her little sister and I'd go to church every Sunday, and God was just like healing my heart, like like I just couldn't believe what he was teaching me. And pretty soon he said, Cherie, I want you to work with other women. I want you to teach them what I taught you. And so we started these weekends, and um, and we would have post-abortion weekends for any woman who had that issue and wanted to be healed over that issue. Well, then we started having women come and say abortion's not an issue, but we heard about your weekend. Can we come? And I'm like, of course. Well, you know, God's word is all sufficient, come. And so we started ministering to women over any issue, and that's when I wrote the curriculum. And the curriculum's for anything. It says, uh, do you know someone struggling with depression, anxiety, fear, rage, relationship difficulties, andor self-destructive behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, cutting, or even suicidal thoughts. Do you desire to help but don't know how how? The go in peace curriculum will give you the answers. And it goes on and says more. But it's really for any issue. And what we found, we ended up reaching even more women and men. We're talking about that funny. I don't write to for men, I write for women, but men started looking at it. We started reaching more people because it was for any issue. You know, maybe they came because they struggle with anxiety, you know, or or maybe they came because they were bulimic. But throughout, it does talk about it, we'll say for the post-abortive woman, and then usually they're saying after the third or fourth session, Well, I had an abortion too, and God brought them there. Maybe they would have never come to a post-abortion weekend, right? But God brought them there for the other issue, and they saw how some of it was tied together. And so that's that curriculum. But when I wrote this book, there is a section in here, a chapter, and it's called Your Worth. Let me find it. Your worth in Christ. And it um we go through, it's pretty cool. We have this list of like 48 I am statements of who you are in Christ. And we would go around the room during the weekend and you would say, I am loved, I am forgiven, I am set free. And it's so fun because the woman who really needed that particular I am statement, she would get the one that was for her, and she could hardly get through, you know, like her the tears would just come because God was just washing their hearts. And then we would go through and read the actual verses for each one of those statements to change their life. And I could tell how powerful this teaching was, but we were just sort of teaching the surface of that topic, and I realized that I needed to write more to take it even deeper for the women, that it shouldn't just be one session, it needs to be its own curriculum, and so that was the inspiration to write the book, but again, life's busy, you know, and we were living in Eastern Europe. We've worked in Bulgaria since 1993, and I would go at least every year, sometimes twice a year. And during that time frame, over 30 years, we lived in country for 10 of the years. And in country, I just never had time to write, you know, because we're busy being missionaries, we're busy doing seminars, we would do a lot of women's seminars. I would do Go in Peace with everybody that we would take that we that's in Bulgarian and Romanian and the little books in Spanish, so it's in other languages too, and so we were just busy. And so the Lord gave me a second inspiration that just blew me away. It was when we were living in Bulgaria, and a really good friend came to me one day and she said, Sheree, you have to pray for my niece. She says, My niece is gonna leave the country with this guy she just met a couple days ago. He has all of her documents, they got married in less than 24 hours, and she's going to leave with him. And I'm like, No, I mean, Eastern Europe, you know, is a huge trafficking hub. And Bulgaria, I forget at that time, it was really high. Like in the top, you're on your hand, you could count where they were worldwide of um of the highest being trafficked from there. And I'm like, no, she can't leave if she leaves. It sounds like she's gonna be trafficked. And she goes, Well, I told her that, and she said, I would rather be a prostitute in a foreign country than live in the hopelessness this country had to offer. And the young ones in Bulgaria, they really thought that it's a post-communist country. There really wasn't a lot of hope that they could see, especially for someone who doesn't know the Lord. There was no hope in their country. And she's thinking, everybody thought if I just get out of Bulgaria, I'll find hope, right? And and she goes, I said that to her, and that was reply. And so I said, Well, call her up right now and see if she'll meet the American woman now. Back then there weren't a lot of Americans in Bulgaria, and it really was a good tool you could use. So she calls her up and says, Hey, Cherie wants to meet with you. Do you want to go have coffee with Cherie? And so she said, Yes, you know, and we were like really surprised that she was willing to do this. And so as I'm walking to meet her, I'm praying, Lord, what can I say to this young woman? You know, she was maybe 19, 20, she's beautiful, so beautiful. And I'm like, what can I say to her? You know, what can I make a difference? Her aunt has already talked to her, she won't listen. And the Lord just put on my heart, speak to her fear. And I'm like, okay. So I get there, we sat down, and my heart's just breaking. I'm like, so beautiful. And so I'm like, Lord, okay, you want me to speak to her fear, but what do I ask her? And the Lord had me ask the same question, and I said, Aren't you afraid that you're gonna end up in a foreign country in prostitution and you won't be able to leave? You won't be able to leave at all. There's no way you will be able to escape. And I said, Aren't you worried about that? And I expected the same bold reply, like yes, you know, like teen, you know, how they act, you know. And she just goes, I go, Aren't you afraid? And she says, Yes. And I said, then don't go. And we just really started working with her at that point. In fact, we helped her get to a safe place. Her mom had gone to the police to see who this guy was, and the police said, Do not let your daughter leave with him. He's horrible, he'll do horrible things to your daughter, and there's nothing we can do about it. Back then, the cops didn't do hardly anything about that type of thing, unfortunately. And then the guy came to the apartment building and he's yelling, he's pounding on the door, he's yelling, and he's yelling, give me your daughter. He goes, I've invested a lot of money in her, she is mine. He's like, I'll kill you. I mean, it was a really scary time for a little bit, but praise the Lord. She was able to file for a divorce, you know, even though she had married him, you know, there was just a lot of things she had to now go through because there's consequences, right, to our wrong behavior. And praise the Lord, the Lord protected her. But on the way home from that meeting, I'm walking down. If you could picture like Sofia, Bulgaria, the capital of Bulgaria, I'm in the old part where the roads are so small that the cars park on the sidewalk because there's no parking and there's trams going down, you know, and I'm and so you sort of get jostled with people and it's all cobblestone. And I'm walking down back to my apartment, and I'm just praying, and I'm just thinking, Lord, if she would know who she is in Christ and how much you love her, and if she could learn that truth, how to apply it to her life, and how the enemy wants to trip her up, her whole life could be changed. And I ran home and the Lord gave me the whole outline for that book, Clothing Righteousness, right then. I'm just like, boom, and I was like, I can't believe it. I'm just if only I could write the whole book that fast. The outline came really fast. So that was the beginning of it, and so I'll tell you a little bit in a minute about rushing home, but let's stop and do some more gifts. So, where's the you have the little basket? And I'll pull a couple more names. Did you get a ticket? No. Oh, she needs a ticket. So cute. Did you put hers in my? Yep, I stuck it in there. Okay, good. Let's see. So we have 4105729.

unknown 19:09

That's me.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Oh, yay! You'll go pick up, go pick a package. And we'll do another one. 4105731. Oh, yeah, okay, we're gonna pick one. You guys can open them and we'll see what they say. I'm gonna use what you say. There's a method to my madness.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

So you have to have someone that was really same situation. She really needs to hear that difference between because she's struggling. Do I still need to speak to my father?

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Or mine says you are a child of God. Okay. Yeah, so since the whole book is about who we are in Christ, I found little gifts that had those themes. So she got a kitchen towel. Yours was a child of God. And um John 1, 12 through 13 says, But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. To those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And you are a child of God. And I love what says Abba Father. When you look up what Abba means, Abba means daddy. When when you hear God being called Abba Father, it's like daddy. Oh, like so cool. He's our daddy. We can run to him. And you got the t-shirt. I've had that t-shirt for a long time. I'm like, I'm gonna use this for a book lunch someday. And so the t-shirt has all kinds of it has you are victorious, you are enough, you are capable, you are strong, you are beautiful, you are chosen, you're never alone, you are created. And it says this some of the scripture references to that as well, I think, which is really cool. But Matthew 28, 20 says, and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. So you are never alone. God is always with you, which is just it's so precious to think. He's always with me. In fact, Psalms 139 is my favorite chapter in the whole Bible, and it says, Where can you go from his presence? It's impossible to go anywhere that he's not with you. It's just, it's just so amazing. Okay, so I'll finish up this story. So after I ran home and wrote the whole outline, I'm like, okay, I just need to at least start teaching it because who was saying when you teach something, weren't we talking about that? When you teach something, you learn God's word even deeper. With somebody we were talking about that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because when you do teach. Teach God's word, you really learn it deeper, it goes deep inside of you. And so I'm like, I just gotta teach this to the women, and it will help me start writing, you know, a bit of the chapters. And so I went to my staff. We had a foundation in Bulgaria called the Truth and Hope Foundation. In Bulgarian, it's called Fandatzia Isanainatajda. And it was funny because when we were applying to have, it's like having a nonprofit. We wanted to do the Truth Foundation, and the government came back and said, you can't have that name because nobody knows the truth. So we're like, okay, well, Lord, what name do you want us to name it? So that's when we did Truth and Hope Foundation. You would think that'd be turned down too, right? If nobody knows the truth. And they approved it. And it actually was a better name because if you have the truth, you have hope. So that was like really cool. So we had our foundation, and I told my staff, let's start a weekly women's Bible study. And they go, Shri, you can't start a weekly women's Bible study. And I'm like, why not? They're like, oh, everybody's tried it, they don't work here. And I'm like, okay, explain why not. It's a different culture, you know. So just explain to me why, and we'll see. And they go, Well, because all the old ladies will take over and you won't be able to teach anything. I started laughing, and I'm like, guess what? I won't let them take over. We'll be fine. And so we started doing the weekly Bible study. Lindsay was just in high school, and we met in this office in the center of the capital city of Sofia Bulgaria. And the apartment is like so small. And there was a main room and one bedroom. And the main room had a big table, about the length of the table where the little gifts are, and a little bit wider with chairs around it, like a boardroom meeting, because it was a pastor's office that he was letting us use every Monday night. We could only fit 20 women into this apartment. It was like two rows of chairs around that table, and that was it. That's all we could fit. And they would just come and they would just cram in there, and this was so long ago that we we said, well, not everyone can come, let's just take tape orders, you know, the cassette tapes. And they're like, um, they're like, okay, so they would sign up and they'd pay like a love to order a tape to cover our costs, and we would get a hundred tape orders a week for this message. That's how powerful this message was. So the problem was we didn't have a tape duplicate. How are we gonna do this, you know? And so there was a church that we could drive an hour across Sofia if there wasn't traffic and borrow their tape duplicator, take it back to our apartment and drive back. So you're losing like three or four hours a week if you went when there wasn't any traffic. And if we did that, it would make three at a time, and so that was faster, or really close to us, we could borrow another tape duplicator that only made one at a time, and that would take Keith eight hours a week to make the tapes to give out the next week at Bible study. And the hard part for the one that did it faster is it was a really old one, like churches in America would donate these things to the churches, and so if it broke, there would be no parts. So we used to lay hands on it every week and pray that it wouldn't break because they said you can use it, but if it breaks, you have to fix it. And we're like, oh my goodness. And so that was Keith's part of Keith's missionary work in Mulgaria was making these tapes every week. It was just amazing, you know, what God was doing. But that's how powerful the message was. But then the inspiration, you know, because I really wanted to write the Bible study. So the inspiration for the Bible study, it always stayed with me all these years. And I would get people asking, Are you ever gonna write that Bible study? Yeah, someday I'm gonna write that Bible study. And so we moved here to Ohio because we have grandchildren here, and I didn't know anybody because we moved here in February of 2020, and um, you know, that's sort of a hard time to make friends. And so at first, you know, there was a lot of things going on health-wise in our lives and stuff, but finally it was like, Lord, what do you want me to do? If we moved to California, I'd be teaching. If I go back to Bulgaria, I'd be teaching, and here I'm not doing very much. What do you want me to do? And it's like, why don't you write the book? Oh, what a good idea! Okay, and so I finally was able to just sit down, write the book. And so, does anybody have any questions that they want to ask?

SPEAKER_00 26:43

That could be me. So Shri, how long did it take you to write books?

SPEAKER_01 26:47

It takes me years. Oh my goodness. Um, some people, you know, they write books like in they write four or five books a year, and I'm like, how do you do that? Usually that fiction authors write pretty fast, they have these stories, but I have a couple fiction that aren't published, and that still takes me a long time. But um it took me probably from when I really sat down and said, Okay, I'm gonna start writing this again. I had written part of it in Bulgaria, it took me about a year and a half, and then and then the editing takes a long time. I'm I'm blessed. My editor, God just gave me this editor and he edits all my books. He is an acquisition editor for one of the top five publishing houses in America. And so, even though I'm indie published, I make sure I do it to a professional level. And so it takes me years to write a book. So and some of it I start like there's another nonfiction book following this that I want to do, and it's debates on our spiritual gifts and discipleship and how we're all called to go and make disciples. But the way that we're gonna make disciples is by using our gifts because each one of us is uniquely made, and God has a unique call on each one of our lives. And so I teach that topic sometimes at women's events and stuff like that. And so I just keep those notes. Like I probably have half the book done just from all my notes I throw in a in my file all the time. I just need to sit down and write it. But yours, unfortunately. I wish it was faster. Any other questions? Thank you for listening to Embrace Truth Today. I'm your host, Sharif Rzonke. I hope you enjoyed listening to the Clothe in Righteousness in-depth devotional study guides lunch party. If so, feel free to share it with not just one friend, but two. We can change the world for Christ by linking arms. And if you'd like to listen to part two of the party where I go deeper into how the Bible study works, or if you would like to take a peek at lesson one of the Clothing Righteousness Bible study, or if you'd even like to see the Go In Peace curriculum, which was also mentioned at the party, visit embracetruth.net. This will take you to my webpage. Then simply click on the books tab, find the book you're interested in, and you will discover all sorts of goodies. One being a view book sample button when you are on the Clothing Righteousness in depth devotional study guide page. And another goodie will be access to part two of the launch party where you can see how the curriculum works. I hope you enjoy it. God bless.