Crowds

P 3440 We need EYES.

/ DVH

Jesus gave us His power to impart His life, healing, deliverance into other people’s lives. We need His power, otherwise we will end up trying to love others without His input. We must be filled with His love over and over and over again. I’ve met many people who inadvertently get this concept around the wrong way. Maybe they think that being loving is meant to come from inside us. Well, they might have lots to give away – but I plumb run out – all the time! 

When we realise we’ve run out of love, we need to go back to the Source — or like a broken down car, we will be running on empty. Unfortunate things can sometimes happen when we do good for the wrong reasons. We must go to Jesus our Supplier, ask for His Grace, and then go and do whatever He tells us to do, using our faith. Our reliance is upon God’s POWER, not ours, that is a key factor, not an optional extra. We must lean on Him.

Love comes from God Himself. It can come in many forms but it always includes the grace to share it. The grace to even see other people and their needs comes from Him, and the grace to meet those needs also comes from Him.  We don’t have it and we can half kill ourselves trying to dredge it up. If we cannot be persuaded to engage with Him and then others, then we will expect someone else to do it and step back. 

But engaging with other people’s needs, requires prayer, then action. Meanwhile, we can be running toward something while we are praying, but please remember we need to PRAY. The Lord has so many miracles for us to share with others — we can’t do them, but He can. Let’s do things the way He tells us. We also can’t afford to postpone our participation in the works He has prepared for us for a time when we feel up to it. I know I fight that all the time, when I feel unwell, and I am tempted to withdraw.

 “We have come into an intimate experience with God’s love, and we trust in the love He has for us. God is love! Those who are living in love are living in God, and God lives through them.” 1 John 4:16 TPT.  The secret to our participation is to choose to live in love – then we can see other people’s needs. I’ve been reading a lot of written prayers recently – do you know that they all sound the same? “Please Lord help me with this, that, and the other. Please fix this and that about my life, please help my life.” Amen. It’s like we are ordering take-out! 

He is Almighty God, we serve Him and others. We cannot afford to allow any of our own needs, doubt, anger, disappointment, frustration, opinions to separate us from the Love of God. If we are not actively participating in His love then we are not truly living.  

Father God knows the end from the beginning – He knows LIFE wins! However, our faith will contain mystery – it can’t be faith without it. If a thing is a certainty then no faith is needed. But our little steps of faith responding to His love can move mountains. As we spread His steadfast love around us, we will help those who have never known or seen it before. And in the process we get blessed as well. That’s what God’s economy does – it blesses everyone it touches … we need eyes to see what is going on around us. 

We will also need to give up compromise. What do I mean by that? Perhaps we can see someone who needs help, or a bucketload of God’s love tipped over them, but we know them and they can be so grumpy, especially when it comes to the things of God. Nobody wants to run into the back of the truck of someone else’s prejudices, or hit the edge of their rage, because that person thinks the Lord didn’t do what they asked Him to do. Maybe rationalise away what we can SEE, by telling ourselves we don’t want to make things worse. We can’t afford to take that kind of risk, we could alienate someone we care about – so we don’t say anything.

We must look at others through His eyes of love and see them the WAY Jesus sees them. Which is impossible without the precious Holy Spirit’s help.  All we can see is the bluster or their external disguises on the outside, those things are put there to protect the person. Jesus can go right around the external and wave at them, and sometimes He says: “peek-a-boo.” 

Hubby and I have seen Him do it. We even had one person ask us: “What was that?” We explained it is a WHO not a what … and that led to an interesting conversation. Looking at this world through His eyes can give us a fresh perspective on the way this life was designed by God Himself to work. What we see as bad, our Heavenly Father has designed for our own good.

Let’s continually pray for love’s eyes to see what is really going on, because His eyes can see things we can’t. Otherwise our prejudices regarding what is good and what is bad … get in the way. I need more input from the Lord Himself and His eyes to see and understand what He wants from me, as He sends  me. Bye. 👋.

“And great crowds came to Him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at His feet, and He healed them,…” Matthew 15:30.

P 2874 Our attitudes help define our understanding …

/ DVH

Luke 8:15 “But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.”Jesus is teaching the people who choose to follow Him around, about God’s kingdom, and how it works. First, He uses a story about a sower, and then He explains that further. However, His meaning is only clear to those passionate souls who want to truly hear about God. We, have been incredibly blessed – we get to hear both versions!

After the sower parable the bigger crowds dispersed, then the Lord took the time to expound that story to His disciples. He treated these people differently than the crowds who followed Him around, because they were the people who were going to take His place! He wanted to teach His disciples, His dedicated followers, the ways of the kingdom. He was incredibly wise and He knew that those people in the facebook crowd can have hard hearts and little application! 😶

So after the crowds had left, Jesus expounded His allegory and made it clear and applicable for their lives. The Lord wanted His disciples to see, through His loving insight, that the gospel can fall upon deaf ears, or busy ears, or hardened hearts, as well as being subject to other unforeseen things which can literally pick up our knowledge of God and carry it off! Plus the real eternal life which is in what He tells us personally, can be choked out by our own fear, doubt, carelessness and disobedience.

He is showing us the way to ensure and increase our participation in the things of God. To do that, we need to learn to take note of the dangers, and make sure we are not involved in the sort of stuff that will drag us under. Our default settings are not getting the job done – we get distracted and the birds of the air, the cares of this world, are picking off our potential. Jesus has taught us that today, right here, right now, we need to pay attention and participate in the Ways of God.

To do that we are going to need dedicated obedience and prayerful watchfulness established in our lives in order to be able produce a good crop. He explained that we have a great need for hearts that will not swing about all over the place. Add to that, the ability to listen carefully to whatever He tells us, and esteem what we’ve heard, and ACT on it. Without HIM we are nothing. We can come up with great schemes, but only God can bring us through tough times.

I strongly believe it is essential to retain the word by making it a part of ourselves, so that we are transformed by ingesting it and becoming it. Did you know if you eat too many carrots for days you can turn ORANGE? That ingestion leads to an outward change everyone can see. As we live out what the bible says, it becomes part of the way we think, and act – it stops being a theory, or even a great admirable teaching, and becomes our way of life. Who we are.

The circumstances of us living this life – on again, off again, in and then out – can conspire against us and leave us fruitless when we finally stand in front of the Master Gardener. He has given us two options in this parable. Believe it or not both are useful. The first story shows us that life can and will conspire against us, plus circumstances can occur that can harden our hearts.

The second story shows us how incredibly important it is to walk daily with Him. The people who wander off from following Jesus do not plan to wander off. The cares of this world overwhelm their devotion to Him. And His teaching becomes story-like – interesting, instead of LIFE-GIVING. That’s when we are less likely to hear what He wants to say to us, right here, right now!

And obviously this parable shows us the need to choose the right way, if we want to be fruitful. That often comes at a very inconvenient time!  We must never forget we live in enemy territory and that means we are subject to other people’s agendas, and life’s circumstances – they can steal away the reality of what Christ has said. Only by progressively allowing ourselves to be changed, will we stay available to His heartbeat. 

Christ has already provided the answer to these difficulties that haunt us every single day. His death on the cross is the single ingredient that makes our ongoing spirituality available and viable. We dare not factor Him out – otherwise we will become groupies instead of disciples. Groupies follow someone for the fun, for the excitement and notoriety.  Disciples lay down their lives. Our attitudes define what we understand, we must choose to press in and press on. Bless you 👋

P 2779 Let the book change your mind.

/ DVH

The bible is filled with miraculous stories. And if you or I want to see miracles with our own eyes, then we need to believe the bible and be prepared to look out for them. I’ve noticed that miracles hardly ever happen in a rarified, solemn, silent atmosphere. Nor is there quiet background organ music, or angels in white nighties with huge flaming swords!

Jesus did all kinds of incredible miracles with big crowds all around Him. Some people missed them, and they were there! Most sick people didn’t stand quietly in a healing line! They pushed and shoved, and called out. Hungry people, sick people, smelly people, mentally unwell people, little kids shouting and screaming! It wasn’t quiet like church!!  Forget the postcard pictures of Jesus with a halo round His head … if the Lord had had a halo, everyone would have noticed!  Instead think about these things like this – what if someone famous from today’s world was trying to get through a crowd? That’s a more realistic picture. Wherever Jesus went, it was along dirty, dusty crowded streets with very little shade, or privacy. There was no pretty music!!

Yet our Lord loved it all – simply because He loved people. He never got angry or annoyed at all the people pushing and shoving and crying out. Speaking for myself I know I have seen quite a few miracles … but I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, and didn’t know they were miracles until much later when I thought about it. We aren’t half as smart as we think we are, trust me. I’ve seen some really brilliant things, and my first thoughts were: “Are they making that up?” “Is that real?” “Do you think it will last?”

The whole idea that the miraculous depends on us and our faith, is just plain silly. I know the skin I am in and it is not faith-filled. We need eyes to see what He is doing all around us. Our faith is in Him not in whatever is going on. My point is this: miracles occur all around us while this life keeps marching on – but do we stop to see them – have we let disappointment stop us? We need to let His book make miracles part of our thinking.

They often happen in messy situations – I had someone hand me a baby that was totally blue in the face and utterly lifeless and they begged me to fix it. It’s a long story… with a happy ending... I shook the kid and yelled at it: “Don’t you dare die on me.” Whereupon said baby opened it’s eyes and screamed its little head off. I gave it back to its mother and quickly went back inside my house. It was only afterward… when the mother insisted on thanking me over and over again… then I realised what God had done. We need Holy Spirit inspired eyes prompted by His book to see the miraculous.

Giving away bibles etc. means we’ve experienced all kinds of totally impossible things.. One of my favourite occurrences is when hubby says: “hello” and he smiles, and the person in front of him immediately bursts into tears and starts sharing their life story…   I dunno how that happens — maybe he’s got a crying anointing. Or maybe I’ve gotta stop him from wearing those Dracula fangs! (Only joking OK?) 🤣 … moving on … quickly.

Our pastor is ordinary, but heroic – what a champion! I saw this lovely man pray for a child who had broken a bone in his arm at church and after being checked by a doctor, by the end of the service the kid’s arm was fine. We need to look at this new life we have been given as a real thing. God’s loving passion is inside us, and it surrounds us, and then it flows over onto other people-who-have-not-met-Him-yet.

The secret to spiritual eyes, is to aim at love, and keep insisting that you need it. BE POOR IN SPIRIT. We give up on the kind of love that endures anything, far too quickly. I believe that loving others is the biggest key on our Kingdom keychain. We read His book to find all the ways He has loved us and to learn new ways to love others.

Our God is marvellous, He always wants to help us! Listen to this:“So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing Himself to the worst by sending His own Son, is there anything else He wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—Who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us.”

“Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture: They kill us in cold blood because they hate You. We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one. None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.” MSG bible.

I dare you to read the above scripture three times in a row. Now, let it change your mind and act accordingly. Let His love embolden you. Bye. 👋