Directives

P 2441 Faith steps are essential.

/ DVH

“IF the Spirit is the source of our life, we must also allow the Spirit to direct every aspect of our lives.” Galatians 5:25 TPT. And here’s the NIV version: “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” And the last one, the MSG bible: “Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives.” 

We must always remember, salvation is not a one off – it’s an ongoing, active, co-operative process. You see, the problem is that we think that because we have been given an option, a choice, we can still opt out of obedience and it will make no difference to our walk with Jesus. Just because the owner of the vineyard is absent that does not mean we can do whatever we like! We can ignore His directives, but we do that at our own peril. This is why…

It is the Spirit of God Who leads us and inspires us, and when we ignore Him, or whatever God is saying to us, we are actively rejecting Him. We are telling Him we don’t want His help. Remember Samson?  That guy wanted what he wanted, and due to God’s investment in his life, he could get most things without any consequence. Boy, is this man’s life a cautionary tale! He shows us that disregarding the Lord’s instructions can have dire results. We can walk with the Holy Spirit and experience His power through our lives, and if we are not careful, we can see His power flowing through us as His approval of WHATEVER we do. Our God doesn’t take His gifts back – He’s not an Indian giver.

Samson was accustomed to the power of God being with him in whatever battle he faced. Then he got careless. A beautiful woman wore down his resolve and he disobeyed God’s instruction not to cut his hair. Because of this Samson lost his connection with the Holy Spirit … and he didn’t even know it.  Like I said – a cautionary tale! Judges 16:20; “Then she called out,“Samson,the Philistines are here!” When Samson awoke from his sleep, he thought,“I will escape as I did before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the LORD had departed from him.“The ‘she’ in this story BTW, is Delilah, who would not stop until she rendered him helpless! …To return to the most important line in the whole story … SAMSON DID NOT KNOW THAT THE LORD HAD DEPARTED FROM HIM. Pause and think on that! 

Sincere repentance is great, do it! But making allowances for our pet sin(s) is not! We are treating the Holy Spirit badly when we act like that…He will leave AND WE WILL NOT KNOW IT – Samson didn’t. The Holy Spirit is not like a plane or a train! He does not announce His departure … He just quietly … leaves. This BTW explains the people you know who claim they are definitely Christians but they stay the same day after day, year after year. There are people who pay lip-service to God but they are not fooling Him. Transformation is always our own personal choice, and our responsibility – it is our response to Christ’s sacrifice. He will ALWAYS help us if we will just take a step of faith. 

Friendship with the Holy Spirit is to be desired and sought after. Those people who like to appear righteous, however, are living in presumption. All we ever need to do is ask for His help. Um… you and I cannot be independent and walk with the Holy Spirit, all at the same time. HE. WILL. LEAVE. The very purpose of being saved includes actively relying upon Him. Here’s another news flash … the Lord’s silence does not mean that He agrees with us.

Almighty God is always looking for us to use our faith. Ask for His mercy and grace, and then stop doing whatever it is that you know you should not be doing. Leave the room. Stop thinking someone else is going to make the difference and use your own faith. Nobody is making anyone do that stuff, and SomeOne, oh so precious, is right there, wanting to help you overcome.

We are saved to walk by faith and serve Him, and that always includes our transformation. When we tell Him “I can’t” –  our unbelief in His power to SAVE us from ourselves, will be our downfall. Tell Him, “I can’t, but I want to, please help me!” – and then do something differently. The Holy Spirit will show us the way through any trouble, one step at a time. Otherwise we are parking our lives in the middle of satan’s freeway. Change is hard but necessary – God has work for each one of us to do.

However simply praying God will change us, and then walking away and still acting like our mean old sorry self is not the way to be changed. Nobody else is going to put their hand over anyone’s mouth to shut them up when they’ve wandered off into giving people a piece of their mind. Our choice to disobey is our choice. Faith steps are not optional they are essential. Bye.👋🏻

P 2383 Love is not the same as … ‘Like’.

/ DVH

And love doesn’t look like tolerating others, either. Yeah, I don’t like those two sentences much myself.  But Jesus gave us clear directives about love… 1 John 3:16  “By this we know what love is: Jesus laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”  

Matthew 5:44-47 ““You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the supple moves of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives His best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the loveable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.”

John 15:12, KJV. “This is My commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” – Love is a great subject to study because it will definitely give everyone plenty to pray over and act on. It is like most things in the bible if you apply them into your life you will know about it!! Jesus said, ‘love your brothers, love your friends, and love your enemies,’ and none of that is easy. Especially when we take into account that the people who can hurt us the most are probably not our enemies! 

Here’s some stuff that has helped me to cope with dealing with people who are a black hole where love is concerned. First of all I remind myself that I don’t have to feel like it, to do it. Love is a verb not a noun – it’s something I do, not something I feel.  I deliberately bring to my mind that … ‘I can do all things through Christ because He strengthens me!’  So I ask for His strength, then I do whatever He says in the book. Take emotions out of your effort and obey instead.

In my experience feelings always come later. Sometimes MUCH later. I have people in my life that I have been loving for years, I wish I could say that living this way changed them —- but it hasn’t – not so far. Instead it is changing me. I simply need to learn to fight disappointment and resentment and as I did that, I learnt about self-control. This became another way to invest my life in the kingdom of God. And it also showed me stuff I did not know I had – until the resentment etc. bubbled up!

When you make a big effort in your own strength toward people and they flick it off like it is nothing, it takes real dedication to continue to love them. I discovered I didn’t want to make that kind of effort for careless people, because I quite quickly ran out of dedication … But when I did it for Jesus — my expectations and motivations changed. So now I do whatever I do, for HIM. I do this to obey Him. I stopped putting hope in someone else to get it right. Because Jesus is my hope, my anchor and my source of strength – I’ve learnt to put my hope in Him, not others.

This means I’ve learnt to love others literally ‘under orders,‘ and now I do whatever He tells me to do. Often a bible verse pops into my head. Previously, I had become used to being motivated by need, or human affection, or some other feeling, but there were also times that Lord asked me to do something sweet for someone else at a time when I had no desire to do it. Choosing to love in the face of lack or need is powerful. When the people you love don’t love you sacrificially, you can suddenly find a whole lot of anger you didn’t know you had!

I also learnt the wisdom of Colossians 3:23 … “…whatever you do, do it with all your heart as though you were doing it for the Lord and not for people.”. That phrase ‘and not for people’ really resonated with me. The Lord explained to me that when I did things for others, hoping they would appreciate my efforts, I was doomed to fail because I can’t ever control other people’s responses. But when I do whatever HE asks me to do, I learn obedience… plus I ‘die’ to self in the process. I am renewing my mind. 

Obedience always brings us closer to Him. The Lord Jesus was obedient.  Loving by choice is not easy, but it sure beats the heartache of ‘trying hard’ with people who have no idea how much they are hurting you! Love is not the same as human emotion – whether it is ‘like’ or ‘tolerating’ – it’s an investment in someone else as the Holy Spirit Himself leads you. 👋🏻

P 2360 Look at what Almighty God can do with obedience!

/ DVH

Exodus 40:16“Moses did everything just as the Lord commanded him.”                                                       

Exodus 40:19b “… as the Lord commanded him.”    

Exodus 40:21b “… as the Lord commanded him.”       

Exodus 40:23b “… as the Lord commanded him.”     

Exodus 40:25b “… as the Lord commanded him.”    

Exodus 40:27b “… as the Lord commanded him.”    

Exodus 40:29b“… as the Lord commanded him.”     

Exodus 40:32b “ …as the Lord commanded Moses.”

Exodus 40:33b “…and so Moses finished the work.’

Exodus 40:35 “Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” I just want to mention that Moses was familiar with God’s Presence – he’d been in it a bunch of times. Yet this time Moses couldn’t get into the tent! The Lord’s Presence is not measurable – it is without measure. 

Eight times God specifically gave Moses instructions about how He wanted this place of sacrifice and worship assembled. And then God kissed the work of men’s hands with His Presence, because of their obedience and attention to detail. As Christians we cannot afford to diminish or dismiss our call to obedience. That is the cornerstone of our relationship with the Lord Himself. Jesus obeyed God unto death.Why on earth would we think it is OK to skate right on over whatever He has told us to do, in the book?! 

The whole of that glorious tabernacle was assembled under the Lord’s oversight. It was designed by God, downloaded by the Holy Spirit to Moses and his team, and carefully worked into a cohesive whole by Him as well. And God approved every single stage of the tabernacle’s assembly so much that He did not just make suggestions, HE GAVE DIRECTIVES. Ya might want to think about that for a month or TEN. 🧐

At the end of Moses’ life, after he had led this group of difficult and demanding people around for 40 years, and watched all his peers die off;  He hit a rock twice, instead of once, and missed out on seeing the point of that whole journey! However, lest you think our God holds grudges, it has been said of Moses – that God Himself buried the man when He died. Wow. Nobody else but the Lord knows where Moses is buried. How He loved that man!!

Back to us today, and that option-out button we all like to use when God tells us to do something or other, and we don’t like it, or we aren’t sure if it is Him speaking or not! The devil likes to cloud our minds and throw doubt into the mix of what the Lord tells us to do. I’ve learnt to obey anyway. Sometimes I stand there and look like a goose, and sometimes He does something incredible, and that would be me, standing there again, this time with my mouth open like a cod-fish – astonished. If it doesn’t surprise you, it wasn’t GOD! The only Person destined to look good when we serve Him is Him. The glory is always His when He speaks.

He’s an amazing God, so He does amazing things.  We simply have not learnt that the way to partake of such things always involves our obedience. He once put me into my car to go across town to meet someone I didn’t know, to talk to them – and I didn’t even know what I was supposed to say when I got there! When I met this person, in my whole life I never met someone who seemed so together. They had been a Christian for years and years, and ran some wonderful thing or other for the Lord. I was intimidated to the max. On the way there … … did you get that??? ON THE WAY THERE !!! … the Holy Spirit gave me three scriptures for this person.  

I read them out to this person and they melted like snow, right in front of my eyes and wept profusely. All I can tell you is this, all of us have secret buttons, other people may not know where they are, but boy, GOD KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE! I have never seen this person since, but I do know their life changed in those moments. And all I had to do was to be willing to obey, even though I felt like a lunatic, temporarily. 

If you want to see miracles, and watch Him work in astonishing ways – trust Him, take a risk and learn to obey. Start by obeying what it says in the book, and go on to do the things He asks you to do. Treat His book seriously and do what He talks about. Be the kind of person who forgives and repents, and learn to change your behaviour, with His help – even if you think you aren’t wrong! Let God Himself be the One to excuse you, instead of doing it yourself – or taking a personal census to try to excuse yourself! 

BTW that tabernacle Moses built was destined to be an illustration of something much bigger … SomeOne far greater Who was to come.  I’ve said it so many times – Jesus is all over the Old Testament and the New. When you and I obey, we release His Grace into this world. His GRACE is unstoppable. Obedience is not optional, it really is mandatory. You never know what God will do with your faith!👋🏻