Conquering

P 3296 Choose to Love.

/ DVH

“Those who are loved by God, let His love continually pour from you to one another, because God is love. Everyone who loves is fathered by God and experiences an intimate knowledge of Him. The one who doesn’t love has yet to know God, for God is love. The light of God’s love shined within us when He sent His matchless Son into the world so that we might live through Him. This is love: He loved us long before we loved Him. It was His love, not ours. He proved it by sending His Son to be the pleasing sacrificial offering to take away our sins. Delightfully loved ones, if He loved us with such tremendous love, then “loving one another” should be our way of life! No one has ever gazed upon the fullness of God’s splendour. But if we love one another, God makes His permanent home in us, and we make our permanent home in Him, and His love is brought to its full expression in us.”1 John 4:7-12 TPT.

Father God’s Love is not a theory or a lovely idea, it is the reason you and I are still here. Love can be voluntarily learned under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage – and we are here to learn to love those who treat us terribly, ignore us, hate us, or speak against us. Why? This very process is what forms Christ within us. As we co-operate with the Holy Spirit and the Word of God – we will learn to recognise what His love looks like. This means we are getting to know Him and His Ways. His love is not like this world’s love. God’s love is not indulgence, it is our pathway into holiness. 

So when we respond badly to our circumstances, we need to repent and repair things. However, every time we choose to follow the Holy Spirit, and we use our faith to respond differently — the Spirit of the Living God transforms us from the inside OUT. Suddenly we find we are walking with the Lord and it is easy. It is important to recognise that we are wasting our time fighting for our rights – dead people don’t have rights! The bible tells us to “RECKON ourselves DEAD to sin and ALIVE to righteousness.” Romans 6:11. 

This means that the way we regard the situations life flings at us, is what really matters. We can do what we’ve always done,  smile politely and say ‘that’s OK’ … but we know it isn’t!  We can avoid the person hurting us. Or we can sit about feeling sorry for ourselves and throw a pity party with our friends … OR … we can take His word and do what Jesus would do. 

The Lord Jesus saw satan for what he is – he’s a deceiver. A big bag of whispers, wheedles, half-truths and lies. he will tell us we can’t possibly do what God wants because that means we will be giving in. Then that other person will win. But we have the power within us to yield to love, not because of our own self-effort, but because of what Christ died to give us. This life is not about who wins and who loses – it is about learning to love like Jesus does. 

Let’s spend a moment thinking about all the people you have trouble loving — and see those people as neon highlighters. They highlight what is really inside us. Actually, that’s often why we get mad at them! We can all appear sweet and caring … until somebody pokes the bear!  BTW, we need to encourage each other into doing good works, not into losing our tempers. Love is not mushy, self-serving, or simply getting along with someone who is difficult. Love is an ACTION word. It’s a verb not a noun.  A noun is the name of something, a verb is something we do. We may not FEEL any love, but we choose to DO what love would do. 

Love is our first responder attitude to someone else’s hatred, fear, or rebellion. We start with love, we continue in love (Hebrews 13:1);  and we finish with love. (Proverbs 17:17). Love is not meant to be the default setting on our personal radar, it is a way to live. We need to go to love asap, and stay with it. Why?? Because LOVE always wins, it cannot fail! (1 Corinthians 13:8). Just don’t touch that dial in the middle of whatever is going on! Keep trusting Jesus. The Holy Spirit can walk us through any place of temptation, we don’t have to be afraid of it. (Psalm 23).

We didn’t just receive God’s acceptance and forgiveness, for all our sins, we also received an inheritance. Read the gospels and pay particular attention to the bits Jesus says. Conquering seemingly impossible things, is what our inheritance looks like! It’s what His kingdom looks like. If we could be like Jesus in our own strength, then He would not have had to die for us. When Jesus died, He didn’t leave us money, because we don’t need money – God Himself promises to supply our needs! 

So tell Him what you need, and if you need to love someone, ask for it! Then step out and act in faith like Peter did when he walked on the water.  We inherited the Lord Jesus’ propensity and desire to love the unlovely! Love can and will conquer all – just don’t let go of it and drift off into thoughts of spite, bitterness or revenge.

The Holy Spirit has a way through every difficult situation we find ourselves in. Our biggest trap is we have already learnt this world’s responses. Some of our responses are even automatic, because we’ve honed defensive weapons to protect ourselves—and when we feel threatened, we go straight to them. We’ve been deceived by our enemy into thinking we must work at it and solve things. But God promises to help and protect us. So in order to experience His help, we will need to lay our defensive devices down, and remind ourselves that here and now – “…our God is our protection and with Him we are safe, He protects me like a shield.” (Psalm 18:2.) 

We can learn, with His help, how to ‘identify the things that so easily trip us up‘ (Hebrews 12:1) and instead pay attention, and throw our lives into living like Christ did. The reality is, when we resort to sin, we aren’t trusting Him to look after us, and that’s when we need more of His love. Study His love. See for yourself what God’s love looks like, then choose to love with His love instead. Our choices rule our lives. Bye for now. 👋

P 2717 Let the Holy Spirit teach you how to add.

/ DVH

The principle of addition in the Spirit is a wonderful thing to learn, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance. That knowledge will save and help us from going under or giving up when storms, or even the wiggly daily annoyances of this life, hit us. 

Our Christian life is not just about survival, it is about overcoming. The word overcoming means conquering; subduing. By His grace, we conquer and subdue our old nature. Christianity is not about changing other people – it is about the Holy Spirit being charge of ME, my old nature. We can overcome anything when our knowledge of Who He is is bigger than whatever nasty attitude we have fallen into again. We simply turn our heads and instantly look to Him and ask Him: “Help Lord, please forgive me. How are You going to get me out of this mess this time?” 

As we read His book and take faith steps, we learn, experientially that God does not desert His kids ever. Even when He was teaching the Israelites about Who He is — He did not take His eyes off them. Our God is a promise keeper. He loves to keep His promises – and He has promised to never leave us. It is dangerous to put our feelings in charge of our circumstances.

Difficulties can occur if we only memorise promises that talk about making MY life better. We need to go on from that immature POV to understand Who He is, and what He wants from us. Knowing Who He is, is far more important than escaping from the trials of this life, because His faithfulness will hold us steady in contrary winds. We can walk with Him through minefields and His Presence will guide, teach and comfort us.

We need to know the Lord personally, and intimately. We can’t do that by pasting someone else’s testimonies and teachings over our lives. Under stress those things will fall off. Instead we need to ADD personal knowledge of Him into our way of life. This means we will continually, carefully be watching every word in His book for clues about what the Lord wants from ME. That is the seed bed of our faith.

When things drag on and on, and in this life sometimes they do … we use those unwanted opportunities to do what 2 Peter 1:5-8 says:“And beside this, giving all diligence, *add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We can short-circuit the Lord’s processes in our lives by choosing not to use our faith and follow the Spirit’s guidance – step by step into a new way to live.

Every test, every trial, every harmful circumstance has an opportunity within it to learn how to add ONE GRACE to another! Every single one of us needs this kind of addition in our lives. The things we read in the bible are not just words on a page – they are the personal revelation of His progressive sequences, with the goal of transformation at the other end. Instead of looking at all those words as a jumble of sayings, we need to start asking: ‘What does that mean Lord?” ‘How can I make this true in my life?’ ‘How does this scripture apply to me?’ This kind of personal revelation is the most wonderful thing – it will help us to personally have confidence in Him.

That means that the next time we want to give in and give up, we won’t!  Instead we will ask for help to make it through our lack so we can continue to add the things that will last. In the above verses we learn that we can add – by being consistently true to Him and using our faith to do it – we add greater knowledge of the Lord and His ways. As we take faith steps toward Him. That kind of deliberate obedient movement will get rid of extremes and help us gain restraint (choice).  Restraint can lead to patience;  and if we press in and keep on going we will arrive at godliness.

Godliness is not just a series of actions, but inner transformation. We will stop blaming others for our missteps and repent, repair and move on. The Lord wants us to learn that making bad selfish choices will not discount us from becoming an overcomer – but hiding from our stinky attitudes will!  At the end of all this adding we find we have been enriched by His benevolent, generosity – especially toward those in need or in disfavour. Plus we gain leniency toward other people’s sins against us. This whole thing is an ever-expanding process, not an arrival place. This means we trust Him to get us through every single issue we face. (And NO! I am not there yet, either! I panicked about something just last night!)

Knowing the Lord’s Ways teaches us that if we haven’t arrived at good yet, then whatever is going on is not over yet!  Our God has goodness in every single aspect of His nature. Even when He punished the Israelites for their appalling behaviour it was to help them – to bring them back under into the safety of His sheltering Love. Let’s use His book to prove His goodness in our lives, daily. There is nothing stronger than a personal testimony about God’s Grace in action in my own life! We all need to learn how to ADD. Bless you. 👋