Dead to sin

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 3145 Who Am I now?

/ DVH

Our identity is IN CHRIST. So if I want to find the real me, I can’t look in the mirror, or even at what our society says about who we are, or what we think we are. We will need to look into the mirror of His Word. Unfortunately, that’s also the place where we will discover the places where we are unlike Him as well! And our destiny lies in what we choose to do about those things. When we brush His Word aside, we can end up going round and round chasing the things of this world.. 

Romans 6:6-14 (bits of it) “For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, [that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin… …In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to Him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.”

What Paul is saying here, is that the way we regard ourselves now we are alive in Christ, matters. We have not been set free to please ourselves, we have been set free specifically so we can choose to obey Him. At the same time we no longer have to sin – those desires and their accompanying actions went to the cross with Jesus so we don’t have to live with them anymore. When we choose to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Him, every day, we are choosing God’s way over our own. 

Then we have put away the immediate gratification of indulging our feelings, or what we think we want, in favour of giving God what He wants.That’s when we act like His kids and begin to become more than conquerors. The biggest enemy in our lives for us to conquer, is the enemy of SELF, not somebody else. We must put away our old attitudes, hurts, actions, and the past, and begin to renew our minds by reading and obeying the Word.

The Lord Jesus was motivated and activated by what His Father wanted. Did He feel like it? We certainly know of one occasion when He didn’t!  But we are clearly told that Jesus was mirroring our Father’s attitude toward us and sin, and that helps us to see Father God more clearly. When our desire to please our Heavenly Father overcomes what we imagine that we want, we will begin to walk like Christ did. His Grace, and the power of God is there with us to undergird us, as we step forward into a brand new way of thinking about this life. This process is not a happy walk in the park! Each one of us still has some sort of wilfulness and a desire to get our own way, inside us. 

The Lord wants us to choose to do what He has said in His book, simply because we love Him and want to be with Him. Personally I am learning that I want the Holy Spirit’s guidance in my life – more than I want my own way. But it still can end up in a real wrestling match, especially in these dark times when everything we see around us is about self-gratification! Also we can each have a poor perception of what we can really accomplish –  mainly because we’ve been acting a certain way all our lives, and it seems insurmountable to us to act differently.

The point is what Joshua said: “Choose this day Who you will serve … as for me and my household we will serve the Lord!” Our obedience comes down to our choices. And when we choose His way, we will die a little. Personally, I have found that being dead looks much better than having my own way! Yes really!! Father God can do a great deal with even one ordinary person who is happy to stop living for themselves and start living for Jesus’ sake.

We simply don’t have to be slaves to sin anymore. Jesus Himself personally showed us the way through that trap – obedience to God’s Word works! Romans 6:17-18 “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” When we see something in the book that the Lord told us to do, that’s when we pray, ask for His help and go out and co-operate with Him.

It is good to ask the Holy Spirit if we are a slave to anything other than Jesus’ righteousness. There is no shame in discovering places inside your life where we’ve been trapped by our own dumb choices. But because we can see it, that means we need to pray over whatever it is, repent, and ask Him to show us the way through it. Then we go out and live differently. So, instead of saying something inflammatory, now we deliberately choose to go with love, kindness and patience etc …

Here’s a tiny clue that helps me: Pray first. Secondly, don’t expect happy feelings to overcome you, this is about stretching your faith. It hurts – just like stretching out a calf muscle will hurt! Find out what the Lord thinks in the bible, and do that. Things can seem to be very entrenched into our personalities – so repetition also helps! That’s how I learn who I am. I am His child, learning His Ways, because He chose to love me first. Bye. 👋

P 3141 The power of Choice.

/ DVH

These pictures directly above the blog, all look so pretty — the golden poison frog, the aconite flower, mercury, and the last one is deadly nightshade. All those things look harmless, but they can kill you in a heartbeat. So does sin. And most human beings are very poor judges of what will harm us. Plus we can be adept at finding thousands of great reasons why what we are doing won’t hurt anyone! The thing is —sin in our lives affects our spiritual hearing, our spiritual sight and we can’t recognise what the Lord is doing. The truth is we are dead to this world, and we no longer have to do anything. 

You know, dead people no longer have anything to do with the law, simply because laws don’t apply to the dead. They apply to the living. We are dead to sin exercising its power over us, when He died. When we chose to follow Him we died. Maturing faith continually chooses to enforce this new reality, day by day. We can’t afford to let the world tell us who we are, instead we let Jesus define us. Independence is overrated! It is a small-minded story thrown up upon the screen of our minds by a deadly enemy — who points out someone else’s sin, and says ‘poor you,’ whenever life is hard. We can end up living under the influence of a lie!

In this modern world people covet getting their own way, because they think they know what makes them happy, and they know best!  True happiness can only be found in Jesus. That’s not just a pretty saying – it’s the truth. in reality, there is no happiness, peace, joy, love, faithfulness, kindness etc. outside of Him..“For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Romans 7:5-6.

One of the most wonderful things Father God gave Adam and Eve when He created them, was the freedom to choose. As we mature, we need to grow into making Godly decisions, through our daily choices. Our decisions can have huge ramifications, as we decide to die to self, we will need to walk away from the things that came naturally to us in our past. Now we have chosen to live a different way, and we want to cultivate the reality of the cross in our lives. It hurts to say ‘no’ when everything inside you screams ‘yes.’ Just ask a drug addict or an alcoholic – they grapple daily with choices. 

Human beings have become obsessed with sacrificing the long range benefits of this life, at the cost of immediate gratification. We want what we want now. And we will work day and night to get a holiday that only lasts 3 weeks, or slave to pay for a house we may never own.“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36. As Christians, we need to live our lives focussing on the things that will LAST! The thing that is wrong with leaning on our own understanding is that our own understanding is faulty!

When Jesus went to the cross, He took our sin WITH HIM. Now we no longer have to be held captive by the things that have haunted us our whole lives … “no longer to be subject to a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1. Our enemy daily tries to trick us into giving our power to him, so he can set up his nasty little strongholds in our lives.  But the answer is in the book – our obedience to God’s word. Choosing to die to self is the way to kill off our rampant self-centredness. It is foolish to indulge ourselves. It’s death in a prettily wrapped, greatly appealing, immediately gratifying box!

HOWEVER – right, here, right now – we have a Helper, a guide, a counsellor, a comforter Who wants to help us win! Babies cry and crank over lost things, mature people move on. Sin has no power to make us do anything – it’s all down to our choices. We need to practice asking the Holy Spirit to help us!  The power for us to be transformed was released over 2,000+ years ago. The Holy Spirit exploded all over Pentecost and demonstrated to those believers what God’s power looks like in action. Lives were irrevocably changed. That power is still here to transform us — we get it by using our faith as we follow Him.

The power of God looks like preaching when you are scared to death of it. It looks like praying for the sick when you don’t feel so flash yourself. It looks like owning up to the things in your past that you have tried to keep hidden, and then deliberately taking the time to fix them. Mature people don’t leave sin lying about – they take responsibility, and prayerfully and obediently, deal with it. Babies expect someone else to do that for them. We are suppliers of God’s love and grace, not consumers like the rest of this world.

Most Christians have faithfully memorised heaps of scriptures. Now we need to take those scriptures from theory into practice, and INTO our lifestyle. Agreeing with what God says, won’t change a thing unless we act on it. Obedience is the key to His kingdom, but it’s the one key we like to leave dangling on its hook! We can all have genuine reasons why we should hate this person or that circumstance. We’ve chosen to forget that we don’t have to live under any circumstances anymore, because Jesus has let us out of that prison. His love set us free and that love is so powerful, it will continually do it. Our daily choices are powerful. Bye. 👋

P 2649 Moving house will change your life.

/ DVH

“We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Romans 6:4,6,7,&11. “For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—  because anyone who has died has been set free from sin…”  In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Have you ever physically moved house? I have quite a few times. For those of us who haven’t ever moved, it is a long drawn out process that involves packing up your whole life, and putting everything into boxes, then shoving them into a moving van. Then you go to your new residence and you start unpacking etc. You won’t go back to that old house to live there anymore … because you’ve moved away from it.

Let’s look at what happened when we were born again. WE ALL MOVED HOUSE when we gave our lives to Christ. We left our old life behind us. There is no reason to try to live in that old house anymore, because we gave that house up in favour of living in a far superior new one. Somebody else was trying to kill us where we used to live, and that place we lived in was our life before we met Jesus.

Every time I have ever moved house, I have gone through my stuff and chucked OUT things I no longer needed.  I did not want to start my new life in a new house with junk I didn’t need anymore. When Jesus died for us – He took ALL OUR JUNK with Him to the cross. That junk is gone – just like the earthly junk I sent off to the Salvation Army! Amazingly, the bible says this: not only did we move house – at the same time WE DIED. This means we don’t NEED any of that old stuff any more! It belonged to our old way of life.

We gave up living there in favour of living in His presence, His kingdom. Our new house has given us a brand new way to live. Every part of us moved! Now our life has been hidden within Christ’s life, He took care of our sins, once and for all. Which is why sinning is a waste of time!! Why would we ever want to willingly go back to that old life where we were held hostage to sin? That was the place where sin ran the way we did practically everything.

Sin can’t have power over us the way it did before. The only way it can have power over us now is if we give it permission. Our permission, our choices are the criteria that will daily make all the difference. We simply tell satan we will not be dragged back into that old way of living! There will be some adjustment required because we are used to living in that old house, so familiarity could grab us.

But that was also the house where blame, shame, rejection and abandonment lived. In that old house love was conditional – it depended upon our behaviour. In our new house love is unconditional. Our precious Saviour oversees every single aspect of our lives now. To live fully alive there, all we need to do is simply follow our Master’s clear instructions in His book and leave the old house with its old ways BEHIND.

Nothing, not our current or previous circumstances, nor our old proclivities … absolutely nothing that happened to us before we were saved has the power to force us back into that old ‘house’ … even our old habits, our old ways of thinking, doing and being. We take our way of thinking, being and doing from the bible, now by choice. The bible is our illustration of what living in this new life looks like! Practically speaking, I can’t live in my physical old house anymore, because it is about 10 suburbs away and somebody else lives there now! That way I lived is now dead to me.

You and I could get into difficulties and become unhappy, if we decide we like the old way that we lived better than this new way. That’s why we actively look for His benefits in our lives. The bible tells us not to forget them … 

…one of the benefits of moving house for me, means my adult kids and grandkids live around the corner! Now I get to see them more. Plus I no longer live on the main road, with greatly increased traffic, now I live in a very quiet street.

When we gave our lives to Christ, we went from a life that had no purpose, no real meaning, into a life that moved forward and that new life propelled us into new exciting things. Things like getting to know the God of the Universe and beyond …!! SomeBody loved all of us enough to die for us. They WANTED us – we are not ‘extras’ on the vast stage of life, now we are HIS children. . 

In this new life/house we’ve been given, we all have a destiny. It isn’t just any old thing that someone made up so we wouldn’t be left out, this is something that only WE can do. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done. Now we can all ‘live for our Father’s pleasure.’ Our job is to learn to occupy our new house, so no trace of the old house/life is left. Moving house will change your life! 👋

P 2634 Bloom where you are planted.

/ DVH

Jesus Christ was planted on this EARTH, He was planted into a DRY place in a time when nobody understood who He was and why He came. A place where His knowledge of God and His ways, when Christ was twelve, confounded the leaders. But then when they heard Him speak as a grown man they called Him ‘blasphemous.’

His mother heard everything that was said and she kept it in her heart. She knew personally, He was a miracle. However, His family once tried to help Him raise up a publicity campaign to fulfil His God-given directives! 😳 And one other time, His hometown tried to throw Him off a cliff! It seems nobody had a clue Who He really was! People caught a glimpse but they did not comprehend Him. ‘He came unto His own and His own received Him not!’ John 1:11-13.

“My servant grew up in the LORD’s presence like a tender green shoot, like a root in dry ground. There was nothing beautiful or majestic about His appearance, nothing to attract us to Him. He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.” Isaiah 53:2-3.There was nothing whatsoever about Christ that would make anybody look twice. The Lord Jesus simply looked liked everyone else around Him – Jewish! And right after He was dead, He was planted back into this earth’s dry ground – He was buried in it. Praise God that’s not the end of that story!!

Some of you reading this blog today have been planted in a very dry, unGodly place. Cheer up! The Lord Himself has already gone before you. He knows what that is like, and He knows how to bring that planting, that seedling of His life inside you, into a full grown plant for God’s glory. You and I, we are a blessed people,we have now been planted in fertile heavenly ground by the Spirit of the living God! We are here, right here, right now because there is something that we can do for His Kingdom that is a unique expression of God’s love into this world. But we aren’t here primarily to preach, or teach — first of all we are here to learn to love and live, like He loved and lived. 

WE’VE all been planted INSIDE the passion of Calvary. No dry ground for us!  Incredible passion sent the Lord Jesus to the cross, and passion kept Him there until it was all done. Finished! What He did was so remarkable it left eternally fertile ground!  We can renew our passion by gazing at that cross and realising that ‘I put Him there.’  He loved us all that much. Love is defined by its actions.

Whatever we both did before we met Him was enough to send Him up that awful hill to His death! And He would have done it gladly, just for one of us. Every terrible thing this world has done, went on that cross … and it killed Him. The awful weight of human sin killed Him. Yet we both know that most human beings walk around mindlessly, totally unaware of that great and grave weight in their lives. That stuff squeezed the life and breath out of Jesus’ precious body. 

Our passion for Christ grows as we further understand what we have been GI-V-E-N. We’ve been planted in the warm, fertile, blood-soaked ground of His sacrificial, all-conquering love!  Ain’t NO ground better than that! “He sacrificed Himself for us that He might purchase our freedom from every lawless deed and to purify for Himself a people who are His very own, passionate to do what is beautiful in His eyes.” Titus 2:14 TPT. “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.” 1 John 4:9 TPT.

Jesus didn’t just die so we can get on the glory train at the end of our lives and chuff off into heaven! He died to release to each one of us the potential to participate in His earthly ministry. He prepared stuff for us to do before we ever got here. We must pray we find it and do whatever it is, for His glory!

My hope is this, that we would all just stop worrying about who has this gift and who has that one, and run after and concentrate on the thing that every single one of us finds difficult and impossible in our day to day lives. LOVING THE UNLOVELY. We all have people like that –  some of us are so blessed we have a whole bunch of them! They will teach us how to love people like He did – if we let them.Those gifts we run after, will not operate properly without His love – unless you want to spend your life sounding like a brass gong! 

So let’s LIVE this life more and more passionately for Him. Bloom where you are planted – in Christ Jesus! ‘Count yourself dead to sin but alive to Him.’ Romans 6:11. Bye. 👋

P 2526 Some thoughts on what maturity looks like.

/ DVH

To begin, I need to say that I do not think the things I have mentioned here indicate a place of arrival, rather they are personal sign posts. I wrangle every single day with all of these things… but I refuse to lower my aim just because these things are hard! Becoming like Jesus to other people means everything to me.Today, I have added in my own thoughts as well, but I think that this is one of those times that I need to let God’s word speak for itself. 

It is also good to look carefully at Jesus in the Gospels to see how God’s Grace operated. How HE took it in and breathed it out. Maturity sees Grace as the coin of the realm, they freely give Grace away and they also receive it in. Romans 8:29: “For God knew His people in advance, and He chose them to become like His Son, so that His Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” Mature Christians have walked way past being dead to sin, that’s a no-brainer! Instead they are so alive they challenge you by the way they live.

Galatians 2:20 TPT “My old identity has been co-crucified with Christ and no longer lives. And now the essence of this new life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives His life through me—we live in union as one! My new life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God Who loves me so much that He gave Himself for me, dispensing His life into mine!”

I think we all have a need to mature in the Western World, because, sadly, immature people follow fads as well as people — not Christ Himself. Ephesians 4:14 ”…so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.”  The Body of Christ will grow in spiritual maturity, by learning to persevere through the trials and challenges of our life. Mature people are humble because life itself and the Word of God has taught them, who they really are, without the Holy Spirit’s help. 

James 1:2-5 “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.”  Trials are an opportunity to stretch and grow our faith!

Mature believers seek to live a life that is Spirit-filled — that is, they learn to be aware of and listen to God’s Spirit, who lives within all Jesus’ followers. Romans 6:11-14 says: “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to Him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.” 

These people Paul talks about understand that sin is a choice and the more anyone gives in to it, the harder it becomes to resist! So they “…present their bodies as a living sacrifice …” instead. They want what the Lord wants. They may not always know what that is … but they will take the time to wait on Him to find out! These people are a generous people. They not only share, but they make sure that their love is demonstrated not just talked about. Their only desire is to please the Lord above everything and everyone else. 

Mature people will quickly admit their faults and their lack, but they also know exactly where to go to repent and be filled again. Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God has forgiven you.” Forgiveness is never an optional extra to these people, it is a way of life. This means they do not judge others either. They know how to repent and admit that they were wrong, because their aim is Christ’s likeness not vindication. So they always repent quickly, then usher in real restoration, and go back into relationship again. Psalm 15:4:“They keep their promises to their neighbours, even when it hurts.” 

Philippians 4:11&12. “I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”  These saints have found their contentment in knowing God Himself, and the Lord and His Presence in their lives is all they want. They never have to pray – they simply want to talk to the Lord because they love to be with Him. Maturity will refuse to define what other people’s love should look like, it accepts what the other person gives them with His Grace.

Lastly, in order to grow spiritually and mature in our faith, we must draw near to God, because we cannot mature on our own. Without His personal input into our lives – our works and efforts are worthless.

Bless you and bye for today! 👋