Channel

P 3147 Walking with the Holy Spirit.

/ DVH

Romans 8:5-9b “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you..”V5(NIV) “Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”

The battle over whether we daily live and walk with the Holy Spirit is first fought in our minds. Quite simply, the secret to walking with Him means we can’t even think about continuing to walk accomodating our flesh. When you and I gave our life to Jesus – He took it. It’s a done deal. Now, by our choices, we daily step out of this world’s way of thinking, into His Way of thinking.

The Holy Spirit loves to glorify the Father and the Son. That’s more than church or preaching or singing! It’s the way we live now. Walking in the flesh sadly comes naturally to us, after all, we’ve been doing that all our lives! But walking with the Holy Spirit requires hard choices. Cheer up! He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows what you can and can’t do – He will “let you learn at your own rate.”

There are some people who think that they have to be super-spiritual to walk with Him, or have some kind of supernatural encounter, or they need some special spiritual gifting! None of that is true. When we welcome Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit – we can’t be born into God’s Kingdom without HIM. Now we need to value Him, more than we value what we or others want, or think or feel. If we go about our days only doing the things we feel, or want, or we think we need —we are ignoring His input. He has a WAY for us to do those things that will give Him a channel to impact the people around us. The more we ignore Him, the less we will hear His voice saying:“…this is the way, walk in it whenever you turn to the right or to the left.” Isaiah 30:21b.

The Holy Spirit wants us to personally know Him, His voice. He came to be with us, to stay. This is how I think that works – when we choose to live this life mindful of Jesus and His Word and we take His word seriously, and obey what He tells us – we are walking with the Holy Spirit. The word mindful means your mind is full of Him and His Ways. Our ability to perform does not come into this – His ability to keep us, as we lean on Him, does. It is another way to look at our lives – which are now HIS. This is how we die to self.

It’s all about priorities. When we look at Jesus, our Heavenly Father, and the Precious Holy Spirit as add-ons to everything else in our lives, that is all They will ever be. But when we take our commitment to Christ seriously, and live each day with our spiritual antenna up, watching and waiting for anything that He might ask us to do — we will see His kingdom come …all around us, as well as in us. Honestly speaking, we cannot afford to hang onto our nasty attitudes, bad temper, lack of generosity toward others, cold-heartedness etc. and expect to walk with HIM! He loves people more than we can possibly imagine. Jesus has invested Himself in mankind!

Sadly, we’ve accidentally made a club mentality out of something that was intended for everyone. The Holy Spirit’s Way is living like Jesus did. He lived for the Father’s will. He “only did the things He saw His Father doing… He only said the things He heard the Father saying …”Now we too need to allow the Holy Spirit to flow through us, by yielding to God’s Ways.“How can two walk together unless they are in agreement?”That’s when we become a channel for His love to flow through.

Let’s think of other people, no matter what they believe, as people Jesus loves. He loves them so much He died for them. Now He has appointed and anointed us to be His witnesses and representatives, alert to what He wants, as well as the needs of others. We can’t afford to only love the people we like.

The bible is our guide and governor, under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage. This book daily shows us what God wants from us. We are alive in this world to demonstrate His word, His kingdom, and we’ve been given the honour of revealing His love to others. Let’s choose to see things through His eyes. Ephesians 4:17-18:“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.”

Every single time we say no to something the Holy Spirit brings up with us, we are hardening our heart against HIm. The Holy Spirit is gentle, mild, and unobtrusive, so He will quietly step down, and we will not even know that He is gone. I don’t care if you are the best preacher in the country – how’s your heart doing? The state of our hearts is our business, and we need soft hearts. We have been destined to live this life alive to the Spirit, walking with Him and yielding to His wishes, just like Jesus did. Bye. 👋

P 3139 We make life way too complicated.

/ DVH

Hubby and I love to pray for the-people-who-don’t-appear-to-know-Him-yet. We ask them if they need prayer, and if they say yes, then we pray simple, clear, un-preachy prayers about whatever is going on in their lives. People cry all over the place.This means we need to totally focus on the Lord coming with us wherever we go.”We can’t do anything without Him,’ it says so in the book! 

So let’s get that big fat lumpy bit of our personal pride out of the way, so we can be a channel of His love into the lives of the needy people around us. We need to live under His watchful care. We don’t have to be obsessive, but it is also important to make sure we haven’t bungled something or other, or offended anyone. In this current climate that is easy to do. People get offended, and hurt each other all over the place. Nobody wants to give anybody the benefit of the doubt. Here’s an interesting thought:  people aren’t necessarily doing things against you – instead they are doing those things for themselves! Sadly suspicion is rampant, and blaming someone else is the name of the game.

The truth is, we won’t even know if the Holy Spirit is with us, if we insist on pretending to be something we are not. We can’t hear Him properly when we live like that. We are not meant to be experts, we are FOLLOWERS of Jesus! Please remember the disciples bungled things too! In my opinion we should all be still learning, even when we are nearly dead! Jesus IS truth – He doesn’t like deception – too much yukky stuff hides in deception. He is and always was, totally and absolutely real, and that means we don’t have to lie about our life with Him at all, because we are not trying to sell anything! Get used to being humble and not knowing the answer to everything.

Instead, our desire is to do our best to announce Him – not pretend to BE Him.  Acting ‘holier than thou’ puts people off. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that Christians can be so scared of making a mistake they don’t do anything at all!. You know it is not a good thing to give ourselves permission to be two people, depending upon where we are. The person who lives at our house, needs to be the one who interacts with everyone else! All that deceitful, hiding stuff will shoot anyone down in flames. We are all saved by GRACE – so what’s the big deal if you are an argumentative fathead and I am a nasty big mouth? Pray for me, and I’ll pray for you! 

I hate being politically correct OK? I call that sort of stuff lying. I’ve found that political correctness means I am being so careful not to press any buttons in you – I end up not wanting to love you and I will avoid you. But if we want the Holy Spirit to come everywhere with us, then we need to be the same born again, still-being-transformed-person we always were. Leave the fancy-schmancy acting performances on the stage …  be yourself. 

Ask Him to help you see and overcome those things that pull you into mindless silly games. And then… ‘ask and keep on asking…!!’ Especially if you know you have weaknesses, then pray for His strength to be strong in those weaknesses. There are no incurable diseases in Christ – He always has the last word – physically and spiritually!  “There’s a time to die…” remember? We’ve learnt that talking to anyone, and staying filled with His Grace, draws people to Him. You stay filled with Grace by acknowledging you need it. The bible tells us HE will separate the sheep from the goats, I have no idea why we would ever think that should be our responsibility.

Those people all around us are just human beings like us, and often we have no idea how that person arrived at all those nasty, ugly attitudes. Nor do we know what the Presence of Jesus will do, if we take the time to take HIM with us, wherever we go. The Body of Christ has lost its focus — we are like Esau, going for the immediate thing that suits us, but to get that, we have to give up our inheritance for no good reason except that living and walking with the Holy Spirit seems too hard. Actually, it’s easy. We just need to point our hearts toward that aim and get ready to be wrong and acknowledge it – OFTEN.

We already have a perfect example of how to live like our Father’s children. Here’s the VERY best advice on being yourself in the whole New Testament. “Then He (Jesus)said: I promise you this. If you don’t change and become like a child, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3. ‘Become like a child’ … remember that little children happily went to Him. And babies felt safe in His arms. We need to be childlike, not childish.The Lord is not like other people – we can trust Him.

Life is much simpler when you live with a childlike attitude. This means you hand your broken toy/life to SomeOne bigger than you are, and then hang around Him watching and waiting to see what He will do with it.  Then you obey Him. I love living like that. Complications give me a headache! Jesus has invited us to enter into a relationship with Him that is pure, trusting and real. Nothing covered up or denied. Be yourself and uncomplicate your life. Human beings aren’t actors in a role – we are just ordinary people saved by His Grace. Bye. 👋

P 3013 Our God is incredibly generous.

/ DVH

When the Lord comforts us, He is also giving us something we can pass on to someone else who is in need. Almighty God is so incredibly, over-the-top generous, He doesn’t only give us what we need, He gives us more than enough, so we have plenty to give way!!

“All praises belong to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. For He is the Father of tender mercy and the God of endless comfort. He always comes alongside us to comfort us in every suffering so that we can come alongside those who are in any painful trial. We can bring them this same comfort that God has poured out upon us.” 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 TPT. I’m a conduit, a channel. You are one too – all of God’s children are conduits of what He has given us.The secret to thriving in His Ways is not to own anything! I don’t just mean that literally, I mean whatever we have is always available to help someone else. Time, love, compassion, faith etc… as well as practical things.

We give away what we have already been given, because sharing is now part of our new nature. We don’t have to squirrel stuff away for another day, because we already know that:“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.“ 2 Peter 1:3. As the bible says what we have is: “…pressed down and running over…” This means we will always have more than enough! We simply have to be flexible and divide between our needs and wants. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Psalm 46:1. God loves His kids. Each one of us is precious to Him – He covers, guides and protects us.

We get comfort from Him, through other people, and through His Word, plus other people’s prayers for us – and then we give it away. I have found that right along with comfort we also get “hope” when ours has started to wobble and get wonky under duress. The next time something dastardly happens to you, instead of hunting about trying to find Him, just remind yourself that He is right next to you. The bible says that like this: “He ALWAYS comes alongside us …” That means we can bank on it. Don’t feel around to see if it is true, remember Peter — he got out of the boat and stepped onto the water, and LET GO, and then he did the impossible. 

Believe God is with you because He is. If your difficult situation has not gone away, then He knows that together you and He can get through it. Ask Him to show you the way through. Some things are meant to be endured with patience because that’s how you get the fruit of long-suffering love. We cannot afford to consult our feelings when the ceiling of our life just fell in. Our feelings will react. It’s normal.  Read the book – Jesus had feelings! But … they were not in charge of His responses. 

The society we live in makes feelings way more important than they ought to be. In years gone by people elevated the brain. It seemed that knowing stuff was going to help us through any crisis. Information proved to be a dud, because our knowledge kept changing along the way! If we elevate our feelings over our faith we are missing out on His generous flow of wisdom and comfort that constantly comes our way. God wants us to win. Everything He has done is to help us win in this battle called ‘life.’

We are the people of His Spirit, so feelings and knowledge take a secondary place in our lives. They are still there – after all we are not stoics, beating our feelings into submission! We simply relinquish how we feel and whatever has happened, to the Holy Spirit. Jesus told us to pick up and wear the yoke He wore. His yoke was obedience to His Father in every circumstance. He saw the “Yes” of God and He saw the “No” and the result was the same – He continued to glorify God. We simply can’t afford to let our feelings stay in control of our lives or reactions. Cry if you have to, yell if you have to, but yell out to God for His help to walk through whatever has happened. 

We have been exhorted, with His help, to grow suitable, sustainable fruit… the fruit of the Spirit called “self-control.” That fruit grows in good times and in bad, as we ask for His help to watch over our inner lives.. As we yield our will to Him, and follow His instructions from the book, we prepare the ground for good fruit. Fruit takes time, so we need to be ready to persevere. That allows His fruit in us to ‘set.’ The very first year our mango tree appeared to have fruit, it got all these happy little nubs on it and we got so excited … fruit at last … then they all fell to the ground! The fruit had not set – it had not been successfully pollinated. God will pollinate our feeble attempts at faith, with more faith, because He is generous!

Our knowledge of Who He is, and the Way He does things, needs to be established in an ongoing fashion in our hearts, otherwise we will continue to flounder about like a fish out of water. We were born for this life. He chose us to be His, before the foundation of the world. Did you get that? He picked us to be His children before there were trees, stars, oceans, dry land, good food to eat! And Father God is incredibly generous, He will give us everything we need for a Godly life. So we can complete the works He sent us to do. If you don’t got what you think you need, then you don’t need it! Believe in your Father’s generosity – He believes in you. Bye. 👋

P 2438 Please don’t give in to despair …

/ DVH

… just like the tide, money is designed by God, to flow in… and out. Many people in these difficult days are struggling with providing their family with ordinary things …they are trying to make sure that they have food, shelter, and they can pay their bills. Money has become a huge scary monster, gobbling everything in its path. But our God is God, IN season and OUT. We are in a difficult ‘out’ season right now, and so this means we are all in a testing time. Father God is watching over us to see how we prioritise our funds.

Today I want to talk about how easy it is to pull back away from giving when times are tough.  However, all kinds of giving is actually our mandate. Our God gave – so we, His followers give! Because we are continually and evidentially being transformed by Christ, we are free of material obsessions, so now we can freely give away all kinds of things, including money! Freedom doesn’t come from feeling free … freedom comes from acting in faith. The feelings come later!

Every single day we have a limitless supply of incredible things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control because there is no law against those things. What does that mean? It means giving goods, money, love, mercy and grace are never out of season. We are always available to do good to others. Personally, I think that our own hearts are revealed to us by the way we give. 

Of course, every parent wants to provide for their own family – that’s normal. But we can sometimes forget about the poorer families in our society who struggle, through no fault of their own, to provide for themselves. The bible exhorts us to look after “widows and orphans.” So much so, James calls these actions pure religion. James 1:27.“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”  

So while we are carefully watching out for inappropriate intake from all kinds of sources;  at the same time, we need to make sure we help those people who cannot help themselves. God calls that pure religion – religion that is untarnished by this world’s agendas. I can tell you from personal experience, we cannot out-give God.

At the same time we are also encouraged in the bible to make sure our pastors and their families are cared for. The bible tells us that we should make sure those people who work hard in leading us and feeding us, are highly respected and well-paid. 1 Timothy 5:17-18: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honour, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For Scripture says, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.” 

Whatever you decide to do about your own financial matters is none of my business, but I would exhort everyone to take what the Lord says about finances, seriously. I am writing this today out of my own experiences in this area. Our Heavenly Father cares deeply about our leaders, as well as the helpless and the tormented. Remember Jesus Himself  said in Luke 6:38: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”

Sometimes our inability to get free in some areas can be directly related to our ongoing generosity and attitude of gratitude. We can put a ceiling over our own heads by the way we bless, regard and treat others. Hubby and I have found that the more we give, love, kindness, money, things …the more we will live pressed down and running over!  We see our lives together as a channel, and just like the tide, stuff comes in, and it goes out again. We have also purposed that if we don’t got it then we don’t need it because:“my God shall supply all my needs according to His riches in glory..” Philippians 4:19. 

We live with our eyes on the benefits of His tide flowing over us, and we are totally aware that it sometimes goes out … but we know it will come in again.  I love giving of all kinds. Including loving people, giving gifts, money, help, you name it, this giving thing is my all time favourite thing to do! As Malachi 3:10-12 says, this man challenges that giving is a place we can prove God for ourselves. He tells us that we will see the results with our own eyes. 

The marvellous side-effect of all this giving, from my own POV, is that the more I do it, the more cheerful I get about doing it…“and the Lord loves a cheerful giver.”  Win, win!  Father God loves it when we share with each other. People can call that charity, but in my mind and heart it is simply sharing, caring for others. Please don’t despair about your own current financial situation – just keep looking for ways to give, no matter what is going on. The Holy Spirit will show you how. 👋🏻

P 2173 The way through to love.

/ DVH

Recently I realised that my inability to love some of the difficult people I know is actually a weakness in my character. Well yay! Boy did I get happy! 🥳 🎉!! No, I haven’t lost my mind – I think I actually finally found it again. The renewed bit anyway. You see, I remembered something from the bible. My bible says – ‘His strength is made PERFECT in my weaknesses.’ The Apostle Paul struggled with this, yet he says in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10. “when I am weak then He is strong!”  Plus it says to ‘rejoice’ or ‘take pleasure’ in our weaknesses! The greater the resistance to change, the more potential I have to build up strength … 

A lack of love in me reminds me that I have an opportunity to throw myself upon His strength, His mercy, His Grace, and all I need to do is to let Him help me. The Holy Spirit won’t sovereignly just take over and do it for me, I have to resist the devil for myself, and draw near to Jesus. Now, with His help, I have positioned myself to become a channel of the Holy Spirit’s love toward that other person. I simply need to follow the His prompts, step by step. Plus I will probably have to do quite a bit of ‘holding my tongue’ as well! That’s when I ask for His Grace.

My husband shared this thought with me the other day, about hearing the Holy Spirit. He said: ‘If we can hear the enemy, inside our heads, accusing us and reminding us of our faults etc. – then we can most definitely hear the Lord of ALL telling us He loves us and guiding us into His ways!’ The bible says our enemy accuses us ‘day and night before the throne of Grace.’ However, the One sitting on that throne IS THE GREATER ONE! Ya might want to think on that for a bit! Moving on …

If we choose to want to see His good in difficult situations, or ask Him to show us something good in them … that is when we cultivate looking through His Eyes of Love. Because: ‘Love hopes all things, believes all things etc.’ Nevertheless, we can’t do that repairing and restoring work by ourselves – we always need Him! When His Presence becomes more important than my opinion and hurt feelings, I am in a prime position to overcome what comes AT me. When we set our hearts to see the good in situations, that’s when He helps us, and we will start to see other people the way He sees them. Looking at sinful humanity through the Lord’s eyes is life transforming. Jesus is incredibly compassionate …

Then I need to remember that the Lord dearly l❤️ves Me, and His love is not based on my performance it is based on His own Character. Whenever I feel rejected and unaccepted, that’s when I can easily react, instead of acting in faith. His new life inside my heart will remind me from His Word, how to give away acceptance in the face of rejection. I always have the power to change my responses, but I need to use my faith to access that power. I have to put down what happened to me, and how I feel about it, and deliberately ask Him for His eternal viewpoint. 

You and I are always able give grace away, because we also need to constantly go to the cross ourselves to receive His grace for our own stinky sinful attitudes. We live this life of faith in a place of utter gratitude, this means I can give away love because I already have His love shed abroad in my heart. Love looks like the cross – and the cross is a place of suffering – you die (to self) there. 

In those moments when we choose to die to self and say nothing – or even proactively extend kindness;  we are refusing to bow down to our own limited understanding. Instead we seek His greater wisdom. It helps me to remember that the other people involved may not be following the Lord’s heaven-made script at this particular unhappy moment in my interaction with them. This is actually my moment to learn …but it may not be theirs.🤗

We don’t always have to like this process – nobody wants to walk with the Lord through the valley of the shadow of death! And dying to self is a form of death. Think about this for a minute, do you need to find God? He is always in that valley! The 23rd Psalm tells us that He is there to comfort us. Let us remember He suffered at the hands of mankind too! 👋🏻