Adjustment

P3373 Getting to know Jesus more.  

/ DVH

Colossians 2:2-4:“I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God. Then you will have minds confident and at rest, focused on Christ, God’s great mystery. All the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge are embedded in that mystery and nowhere else. And we’ve been shown the mystery! I’m telling you this because I don’t want anyone leading you off on some wild-goose chase, after other so-called mysteries, or “the Secret.” 6-7: “My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live Him. You’re deeply rooted in Him. You’re well constructed upon Him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.”

Being woven into a tapestry of love kind of seems like a soft, dreamy, gentle thing to do, does it? Well, I’ve done some weaving myself — and a whole lot of clanking, banging and thumping went on. What I was making needed lots of ‘adjustment.’  The thing is as we choose to be woven together, our minds will be renewed simply by the way He chooses to weave us. Just like the shuttle collides with the material, we will bump into each other. It’s what we do about it that makes all the difference.

You know, the material on a loom doesn’t get to say anything about where it goes and how it looks. It is up to the Master Weaver to decide the best relationship between the colours, and which thread should go in which direction. He drafts the pattern and then He guides each piece into place. There’s a lesson in there somewhere! It reminds me a lot of the bible, written by 66 authors under the oversight of the greatest Writer of all time, the Holy Spirit.

I love to read the bible with others who are looking for new ways to discover things about Jesus, stuff that I don’t know yet. We need fresh insight every day. One of the things I’ve learnt when I study His book, is that I have to stop periodically and turn the sentences I am reading, around. I pray and then I look at them hard. What does it actually say? What doesn’t it say? How does that verse fit into the framework around it … the other verses near it? Just like weaving, it’s the way the verses go together matter.

In the same vein, the secret to true healthy digestion is that it begins in the mouth. What we say about what we read matters. Let’s read it… s-l-o-w-l-y. When we read the bible paying attention to what we read, no words are wasted, all of them will point us toward knowing Him. I want to treat the bible like the best chocolate, and let it slowly dissolve in my mouth … that’s where our tastebuds are, BTW. Rushing through the bible reading to compete our daily quota won’t give anyone much insight. If we are going to find any treasures and mysteries within, we will need to take our time. Try reading it like a letter from someone you dearly love – because that is what it is.

The Holy Spirit is so magnificent He can take a single bible verse,  and it will mean one thing to you, and another to me, and yet we will both be right! That’s because the bible is personal, hand-delivered, mail. Knowing overall what the bible says is our best back-up.  Our God does not contradict Himself. This means the best Person to help you interpret the bible is the One Who wrote it. You and I have the Author sitting right next to us so we can ask Him: ‘what does that mean?”

In my case, I almost immediately remember another verse from somewhere else, or something from His Word that I read earlier and that throws light on what I am reading now. I do my best to let the bible interpret itself. Why? Because as well meaning as we all are, we can misinterpret the meaning according to our own needs, and preferences, or even our church affiliations. Even brilliant scholars have already established opinions.

Also, I always ask questions. If I don’t get an immediate answer, I won’t just forget about it. Instead I repeatedly go back and ask Him again and again. I’ve learnt to insist and persevere – the Holy Spirit loves it when you chase Him! Our God is a God of revelation, but we won’t find pearls on the ground, we will have to dig for them. Because we are part of a weaving, other people may have insights that open up some of the puzzles for us.

Meanwhile, it’s good to want the Holy Spirit to know that you are serious. We all want to know Jesus, even when what we find out doesn’t actually suit us. The next step is to deliberately look for ways to apply what we’ve read in our daily life. We want to live it, see it, taste it, touch it, experience it – live and in person at our house! His kingdom is inside us. Remember to pray the scriptures over yourself, because that is yet another way to get to know Him. Remember, His disciples knew Jesus for a while, yet He surprised them over and over again. 

The Trinity will always be a mystery to us. But together, we can examine that mystery through reading what has been written, and learn more than we would learn by ourselves. We can easily fall into a hole when we do not value His Word enough.  Especially if we are embarrassed about who we are and we want to hide our faults away with a pleasant face and pretence. Pretence invites deception.

Getting to know Jesus means more than gathering information about Him, or what He does etc. When we know Him personally,  it is to our own benefit to allow His life in us to flourish, by living out the gospel in our day-to-day lives. Then we will discover that He wants to come everywhere and anywhere with us.  Bye. 👋

P 2649 Moving house will change your life.

/ DVH

“We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Romans 6:4,6,7,&11. “For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—  because anyone who has died has been set free from sin…”  In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Have you ever physically moved house? I have quite a few times. For those of us who haven’t ever moved, it is a long drawn out process that involves packing up your whole life, and putting everything into boxes, then shoving them into a moving van. Then you go to your new residence and you start unpacking etc. You won’t go back to that old house to live there anymore … because you’ve moved away from it.

Let’s look at what happened when we were born again. WE ALL MOVED HOUSE when we gave our lives to Christ. We left our old life behind us. There is no reason to try to live in that old house anymore, because we gave that house up in favour of living in a far superior new one. Somebody else was trying to kill us where we used to live, and that place we lived in was our life before we met Jesus.

Every time I have ever moved house, I have gone through my stuff and chucked OUT things I no longer needed.  I did not want to start my new life in a new house with junk I didn’t need anymore. When Jesus died for us – He took ALL OUR JUNK with Him to the cross. That junk is gone – just like the earthly junk I sent off to the Salvation Army! Amazingly, the bible says this: not only did we move house – at the same time WE DIED. This means we don’t NEED any of that old stuff any more! It belonged to our old way of life.

We gave up living there in favour of living in His presence, His kingdom. Our new house has given us a brand new way to live. Every part of us moved! Now our life has been hidden within Christ’s life, He took care of our sins, once and for all. Which is why sinning is a waste of time!! Why would we ever want to willingly go back to that old life where we were held hostage to sin? That was the place where sin ran the way we did practically everything.

Sin can’t have power over us the way it did before. The only way it can have power over us now is if we give it permission. Our permission, our choices are the criteria that will daily make all the difference. We simply tell satan we will not be dragged back into that old way of living! There will be some adjustment required because we are used to living in that old house, so familiarity could grab us.

But that was also the house where blame, shame, rejection and abandonment lived. In that old house love was conditional – it depended upon our behaviour. In our new house love is unconditional. Our precious Saviour oversees every single aspect of our lives now. To live fully alive there, all we need to do is simply follow our Master’s clear instructions in His book and leave the old house with its old ways BEHIND.

Nothing, not our current or previous circumstances, nor our old proclivities … absolutely nothing that happened to us before we were saved has the power to force us back into that old ‘house’ … even our old habits, our old ways of thinking, doing and being. We take our way of thinking, being and doing from the bible, now by choice. The bible is our illustration of what living in this new life looks like! Practically speaking, I can’t live in my physical old house anymore, because it is about 10 suburbs away and somebody else lives there now! That way I lived is now dead to me.

You and I could get into difficulties and become unhappy, if we decide we like the old way that we lived better than this new way. That’s why we actively look for His benefits in our lives. The bible tells us not to forget them … 

…one of the benefits of moving house for me, means my adult kids and grandkids live around the corner! Now I get to see them more. Plus I no longer live on the main road, with greatly increased traffic, now I live in a very quiet street.

When we gave our lives to Christ, we went from a life that had no purpose, no real meaning, into a life that moved forward and that new life propelled us into new exciting things. Things like getting to know the God of the Universe and beyond …!! SomeBody loved all of us enough to die for us. They WANTED us – we are not ‘extras’ on the vast stage of life, now we are HIS children. . 

In this new life/house we’ve been given, we all have a destiny. It isn’t just any old thing that someone made up so we wouldn’t be left out, this is something that only WE can do. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done. Now we can all ‘live for our Father’s pleasure.’ Our job is to learn to occupy our new house, so no trace of the old house/life is left. Moving house will change your life! 👋