Bondage

P 3059 Up close and personal!

/ DVH

“Your hand-to-hand combat is not with human beings, but with the highest principalities and authorities operating in rebellion under the heavenly realms. For they are a powerful class of demon-gods and evil spirits that hold this dark world in bondage.” Ephesians 6:12 TPT. 

Ignoring our enemy may well be one of Christianity’s biggest mistakes so far. But I totally believe in the Lord’s great all-encompassing goodness. I know He is raising up a generation of believers who will face all of our enemies, unashamed, and fearless. The way we can enter this brave band of brothers, is to practice fighting the good fight in our own little lives, every single day. Up close and personal! I pray all the time for His Grace to be abundant upon me because I’ve lived long enough to know that I need it!

Lately it seems the Lord is stretching my patience, while He is perfecting me and transforming me …Sigh. So there is a big l-o-n-g space between whatever bad event just happened in my life – to finally being able to see the Lord’s outcome. I will always need a big dollop of His hope daily to cope. Here’s a freebie …put your hope in Jesus, not in the Answer. Sometimes we don’t actually know what is good for us. My faith can be feeble and self-serving, and without His help, impatience will jump up and down on the inside of me – demanding my attention.

I battle with a sense of overall tiredness daily. It’s the kind of tiredness that makes you want to sleep for a week and hope that everything will be fixed when you wake up! I sort of understand the whole deal with the Israelites when they left Egypt and wandered around in the wilderness. I don’t like to live my life feeling uncomfortable either! The solution is easy – instead of waiting for my circumstances to change I need to give the whole thing to Jesus and walk away, leaving it with Him. And refuse to pick it up again..

God is good ALL the time. I simply need to cultivate my spiritual eyes and ears and make what He wants my priority. The problem is not with Him. It’s me!! There are days when I realise there is much more of the world inside me than I’ve comprehended so far. You know some days I also understand the Israelites longing for the leeks and garlic of Egypt, even when Manna fell out of the sky every day. It seems to me that there’s not that many ways you can cook Manna over an open fire! Boiled? Scrambled? toasted? I have a limited diet but manna porridge every day for forty years seems hard to bear. That problem is not with what I am eating – it is with what I am thinking!

The bible says in Galatians 2:20:“I have been crucified with Christ [that is, in Him I have shared His crucifixion]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body I live by faith [by adhering to, relying on, and completely trusting] in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” I love the bible so much,.it shows me clearly there is no way forward without sticking to, leaning on, and totally surrendering to Jesus. ‘By faith’ means He is now my reference point, not the awful circumstances, or my feelings, but Jesus.

I love the bit in Galatians that says: “in the body.” My ability to conquer what’s going on in my head is already inside me – it came in when He came in! Salvation is not just something that happens only once. I am saved from all kinds of sin every single blooming minute of every day! Especially when icky thoughts float through my educated-idiot-box if I am irritable. That thing says stuff inside my head to the person who is annoying me: “If I give in to you, I am letting you win and there is no way you should win … because I don’t trust you!” Look at me, thoughts of reconciliation flowing about like a river! Hah! Fighting with YOU will not help ME overcome!!

That’s what this verse from Ephesians 6:12 is about. It is reminding us …“The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.” 2 Corinthians 10:4. The war we fight daily, sometimes minute by minute, has nothing whatsoever to do with guns, spears, swords, or nuclear weapons – but it has everything to do with my own private thoughts … by the time that junk comes out of my mouth, I’m sunk!

If I let irritation with you pull up a chair in my private thoughts … then … all by myself, I can personally conjure up why you said what you said, and what you meant by it!   You did get the whole “conjure up” vibe right? I mean that junk floating about is not valid. It shows me that somebody else has been whispering to me:  “They said that because of this – and they mean this because of that!” That’s like one step away from necromancy and that stuff is bad news according to the bible. Saul lost his kingdom and his life to that sort of Chinese whispers because God did not answer the man according to his timetable. 

All of this fight is internal, and most definitely up close and personal! However, yielding my will to His, when I am in the middle of it, changes everything. When I choose to daily learn to give up quickly, and lay my life down for His sake, not yours …then He can make whatever He wants to make, out of it – and it is always good! Bye 🤗 

P 2815 Single-mindedness.

/ DVH

““Heaven’s kingdom realm can be illustrated like this: “A person discovered that there was hidden treasure in a field. Upon finding it, he hid it again. Because of uncovering such treasure, he was overjoyed and sold all that he possessed to buy the entire field just so he could have the treasure.”Matthew 13:44 TPT. 

The Lord taught me a great lesson from this particular scripture today. Every single time I’ve read it in the past, I got stuck on the fact that it seems to me that this guy who found the treasure is deceitful. Today, I read it in countless versions, and that premise remained the same to me! Like I’ve said before – sometimes you have to insist! I kept on getting stuck on the fact that this field was did not belong to the man who ended up with it — in my mind he cheated the legitimate owner to get the treasure! Talk about missing-the-point-101!

Look I need to say first up that I can see that this parable is about the priority we give to His kingdom and it is clear that it must be first. But what the Lord and I talked about together today, was a clarification of motivation and inspiration. In my mind, the passer-by should have told the owner about what he found in the man’s field.  However, Jesus Himself told this story so I was pretty sure He had a worthwhile point, and it obviously wasn’t about deceiving people! And then the Lord said this to me …

“You are looking this story from the point of view of honesty and good manners. You have a man-made filter. You do that a lot. Good manners are not the same as the kingdom of God!  And good manners won’t get you into My Kingdom either! They can lock you into a place where you are no longer truthful – you make decisions about what is acceptable and what is not. Instead, you need to be looking for the kingdom of God in everything you see and do. Some times good manners and kingdom things are mutually exclusive.” ‘Ok-ay’ … says I not quite sure that I wasn’t just having a conversation with myself! 😶

The Lord went on: “As a little child you were taught to have good manners, to say please and thank you, and that you mustn’t take or touch other people’s things. So in your mind, good manners and honesty are a precedent … over everything else. However, it was not My Spirit Who taught you that, but experience. And sometimes it was often a painful one. But you cannot do things from My LOVE when you are in bondage to fear. Love and fear cannot occupy the same place – LOVE must always win.

The man in My story who owned this field had never found the treasure in it, he had never even looked, and the sale of this field was a legitimate contract between these two men. And the man who bought it, bought it because he treasured what was in it so much, he gave up everything else. That’s the way I want you to treasure My kingdom!”

Yeah, now I was getting it! I suddenly remembered a number of times when I have used good manners as an excuse to avoid confronting someone else. And then there was a time when I didn’t do or say something because it didn’t seem polite to point it out. Hmmm. Suddenly good manners had rapidly become overrated, and I could see that I was hiding the truth in some situations, under the guise of having ‘good manners.’

What I got from what the Lord said to me was — having good manners are sometimes incompatible, and obstructive to the kingdom of God. We are not meant to be rude to anyone on purpose, but if we are to be led and taught by the Holy Spirit, we may need to rethink the skills we were given as children. Because an automatic response is not the same as permanent transformation. Father God desires us to give things to others freely – not because we are obligated.

I know there are many scriptures telling us how to treat each other, even unbelievers, but it seemed to me the Holy Spirit was pointing out that I had an overriding precedent and it was not from Him.  Then He kindly explained to me that we can speak the truth in love without betraying His kingdom. It is all about our heart’s attitude, not what is or is not said. In the meantime I was hiding my real self behind something I learnt when I was small — for safeties’ sake. If I was not rude to others then that meant I dodged a smack. But the Lord is my hiding place not social niceties. 

The thing is the Kingdom of God is about taking risks, and suddenly my former theology had a hole in it that I could drive a mac-truck through!  Being polite is not the same as being Godly – it just looks the same, to everyone else. If we want to be led by the Holy Spirit then we are going to have to re-learn to do things His Way. The kingdom of God needs to be our priority over everything else, including manners etc.  What the Lord and I talked about together was a clarification of motivation, as well as inspiration.

The bible teaches us that: “a double minded man will not receive anything from the Lord.” And I can see that the conflict between my manners and His kingdom has helped to make me double minded. Those two things are not the same. So I repented! Manners are a man-made way of dealing with society. But we need the same sort of single-mindedness the Lord Himself had. His one purpose was to glorify God, not just keep Himself well regarded and safe! He is always our place of safety. Please feel free to pray for me as I learn how to discern between these two things, Bless you. 👋