Contradict

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 2719 Our faith is a faith of paradoxes.

/ DVH

“That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”2 Corinthians 12:10. Paul gets happy when most of us would run away. Ya might want to think on that for a bit. 🤔  When is the last time you cheered when everything went wrong and you couldn’t fix it? …. Me neither!! When is the last time either of us remembered that the weaknesses we feel are a sign we are strong in Him? 

“Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets.” Matthew 5:11-13. When we suffer for righteousness sake, we are blessed! And if people hate us then we are even more blessed. Yeah… r-i-gh-t! “How enriched you are when persecuted for doing what is right! For then you experience the realm of heaven’s kingdom.” Matthew 5:10 TPT. So, in keeping with the theme of today’s blog — when is the last time you ran about shouting gleefully: ”I’m rich, I’m rich?” — simply because people were rude to you, or cursed you, or criticised or threw rocks at you or made your life difficult. Rocks can be words too! 

Here’s another one to chew on:  “As unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed;…” 2 Corinthians 6:9. These are things nobody in their right mind would want to experience – yet when we chose to follow the Lord Jesus, that way of life became our portion. We have paradoxes by the bucket load:“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.”Matthew 5:3. As Heidi Baker once said: “My poor in Mozambique know they are poor, in the Western world, you don’t know you are poor.” Here’s a big fat revelation … she’s not talking about money or goods, etc. She’s talking about us being spiritually poor… Having stuff can cause a huge pre-occupation with keeping stuff … or getting even better stuff. We can be so obsessed with keeping our routines and systems ticking over, that our spirits can be in abject poverty. 

One of the greatest paradoxes of all is putting what we can see or feel above what He has already said in the book! Or maybe it’s thinking we can live this life however we want, and still enter His kingdom…?  Here’s another interesting one: “If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:3. Usually effort means we gain something!! But in this verse effort is secondary to something that is so ephemeral, so subjective – we need His book to define what it looks like!! And it looks like stuff we cannot naturally do – fancy God asking us to do stuff that we cannot do!

The real thing about paradoxes is that they run contrary to the way we want things to happen. Up becomes down;  in is out; and saved becomes a way of life, not just a ticket to heaven. The bible says that salvation needs to affect everything, especially the way we relate to others. If you find yourself getting snippy with someone, it’s time to do a spiritual check up, with His help. Just like you would check your temperature if you feel a bit off. Each time we say ‘yes’ to His Ways, we are saying ‘no’ to our own way, and that’s when we step into our own personal battle. 

The paradox of our faith is that it has no evidence until we act on it!  “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1. It takes faith to say nothing when you feel provoked by circumstances or someone else. It takes faith to speak to another person about the Lord. It takes faith to be kind when someone else is unkind.  Ya might want to think on things like that today. The Christian life is filled with paradoxes that cannot be understood except through the eyes of faith. Bye👋