“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”  John 14:12. If Jesus hadn’t left when He did, we’d still be stuck and powerless over our sins and enemies, personal and otherwise. But He left, it is in the book – so-oo-ooo – we are no longer powerless.

That means it is a mistake to think that our enemy has the upper-hand in any situation – personal or not! Jesus died for this world, and everybody who was ever born into it, our job is to tell them they can belong to Him too. HE WON. satan cannot ever win again, at all, unless he tricks us into believing that what he says is the truth. God gave us power, the same power Christ had! Power to live a godly life – power to do the things He sent us here to do.Meanwhile, satan’s idea of truth sounds a lot like our own feelings. God’s word IN US needs to be stronger than how we feel and that takes practice. 

When we gave our lives to Jesus, that means that God is in charge of us, and whatever happens to us. He does not cause trouble, but – He will work all the bad things together for our good according to HIS purposes. So when things do not look the way we would like them to look, then that’s the time to start speaking to our souls. The Psalms talk about speaking to our souls and telling them to pipe down and hope in God. That is great advice! This life that we are living now, we live by using our faith in what Christ did for us …because His death and resurrection gave us the power to see and live this life differently. 

We are here on this earth, right here, right now – to be salt and light. Salt and light add flavour and clarity. Those things give us, and the people around us, the opportunity to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’ This means that we are His people who speak His flavour and His clarity into situations around us. The Lord Himself did this: John 11:4: “When Jesus heard it, He said, “This sickness will not end in death but IS for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” That’s clarity! It wasn’t about the sick person it was about other people understanding WHO Christ is!

Here’s another example of Jesus speaking salt and light into a prejudged situation. John 9:2: “His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, I must do the work of Him who sent Me.” That’s clarity again. Because He said that now we can see that something else is going on that is not obvious to the people involved. Did you get the fact that the Lord Jesus Himself said: “It wasn’t anything to do with any of them – there was another reason?” There is often w-a-y more in what Christ says than we comprehend. We don’t ever want to be a people who look but do not see, so pray for the eyes of your heart to be enlightened. (Ephesians 1:18) He often has a purpose we cannot see.

The Lord Jesus spent a lot of His ministry and preaching time on clarifying things that already existed in people’s minds – and sometimes He was very SALTY! Some of the things the Jews had been taught were not all of God’s truth – even though they were taught by rote by the religious experts of their day. The thing that often shoots our spiritual comprehension in the foot, is that we read the words, but we miss what they contain. It is not enough to just read the bible like you might read a newspaper, nor is it enough to like the story. We have to ask Him, like the disciples did, “What does that parable mean, Lord?” Sometimes I ask myself: “What is He NOT saying?” OR “How does that apply to me?” 

Years ago, practically everybody I knew that was a Christian were busy sticking out fleeces, here, there and everywhere,  to discern the will of God for their lives. It was almost like a ‘fashion.’ We all ended up playing hokey pokey with a fleece like Gideon did. But the bible itself gives loads of scriptures that talk about how to know the will of God. In the end I came to the conclusion that most people didn’t really want to know His will, they just wanted to find something that would put a big ✔️ on what they themselves, actually wanted. If we want to walk into the will of God and display His mighty works, we cannot follow spiritual fashions – we must follow the book and the book says we have received power from the Holy Spirit. It’s that simple.

There has been a false doctrine that says that everything that happens to us must always be good, because we belong to Jesus now. What a load of twaddle! Sometimes I think we treat being born again, like an arrival place. But becoming a Christian means we’ve started a journey that ends when we leave here. Perfection happens in heaven when we see Him face to face. Down here there is no arrival. Christianity is not a competition to try to be the best Christian ever either  – SomeBody already did that better than we could. HE saved US!  But failure or messing up does not disqualify us from rising from the ashes by His Grace, and going on to do some of those greater things. The power lies in His grace and humility. He will help us, because He dearly loves us. 👋🏻