Disobedience

P 2890 Further to yesterday.

/ DVH

Hubby and I occasionally talk about what I’ve written in my daily blog. During our discussion today we talked about various adverse scenarios. Did you know that any of us can lose the MAIN battle – which is fighting the good fight for the Lord – simply because we are trying to make a point? Making a point is a distraction. That point will quite quickly be lost in time!

Here’s a question:  is it really more important that we are understood by someone else – or does Jesus totally deserve the reward of His suffering? ← That’s the real battle! Our needs will be supplied by Him – but we can’t see the good stuff when we are snarking around growling at other-people-who-don’t-suit-us. And the reward of His suffering is to see everyone saved. We can’t con God. He is not impressed with who is right, or who thinks they are innocent, and who is not. We have been given the revelation of His Grace, in the book, that alone makes us responsible to spread it around.

There is a much greater, constant war going on over the souls of those men and women living all around us. The other guy can waste our God-given time fighting with our spouse, our kids, our parents, the pastor … whoever!! But there are people who do not know what Christ has done for us. They are dying without being told about His Love for them. An ambassador exists to represent, publicise and extoll the virtues of his home country.

What does it matter lady, if your husband leaves his dead socks on the floor? It’s those little foxes that spoil the vineyard of your love and obedience to the Lord! Maybe your house-mate won’t take out the garbage? So what? And what does it matter so much that your wife’s idea of tidy, is to drop whatever it is where she stands? You have hands, and your wife is not your mother. Work on your own responses to them, not the other person’s actions.

We can easily waste the life God gave us going on and on over things that have happened in the past — things nobody can change unless they have a time machine!! Do the schmuck who hurt you a favour, will you? That person who wrecked your life when you were little — let ’em off the hook! The only person captive is YOU. You are stuck somewhere, like a record, going round and round what happened in your mind. Repent, forgive, and …move on. Have you ever done or said something so terrible but you couldn’t take it back? I have! 

Our enemy clouds the very real issues surrounding us. he makes the daily stuff about being understood, or making a point, seem to be incredibly important in that moment.“Seek ye FIRST the Kingdom of God…” Is what is important. We are wasting our time hoping that the other person will hear us, understand and change. The point is not for the other person to change – it’s for US to change. Lemme put that another way, when we stand before the great white throne do you think Jesus is going to ask you why you didn’t change your spouse?!! He’s looking for us to love impossible people, by spreading around His Grace, that’s what HE did!

These little every day skirmishes we try to dodge, or even indulge ourselves in when we feel rejected, dismissed, or looked down on – can actually prepare us for the REAL wars when they suddenly hit us! Have you noticed that people don’t announce wars? They are instigated by stealth movements, done that way to surprise the people who are to be conquered. The element of surprise throws the other guy off. 

Think about this for a minute: our enemy suddenly throws an accident in our path, or someone gets dreadfully ill, or a job is lost. Terrible things happen to people every single day. Just ask the people in the countries currently at war, they can give you a billion reasons why they can’t forgive the other guy! We need to practise forgiveness daily, or we have nothing to give the guy who utterly shatters our lives! Learning to fight those daily battles for His kingdom in us IS our boot camp — these things prepare us for the things we may not know about, that will turn up unannounced.

I do not want to be negative but I think the positive thoughts movement grew out of disobedience to His word. We made up a god who would always understand us, always be on OUR side. How on earth can that work? Plus He is supposed to give us precisely whatever we want! Where does the bible say that? Joshua asked the Israelites this question:“Who is on the Lord’s side?”That’s the only side that matters, by the way … not yours, hers, his, theirs – God’s side! And if we are on His side then we need His help to act like Jesus would. Maybe instead of constantly collecting promises, we can look at what He says as instructions!

It is not up to us to sort other people out. We are here to preach the word, in season and out of season. We are to live out what He said, in front of the very people who deny He is Who He says He is. Every single time we choose to forgive and release people from our expectations, etc. we release the power of God’s grace into their lives. Why waste your energy fighting? Time is short and a larger life awaits us. The bigger battle is raging all around us. Let’s us our faith and grow. May God bless you as you serve Him, bye.👋

“If a ruler loses his temper against you, don’t panic;  A calm disposition quiets intemperate rage.” Ecclesiastes 10:4.

P 2884 The life of God in us.

/ DVH

In Luke 11:46 it says:”Jesus replied, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”Well this one is a doozy that nobody talks about! We cannot afford to preach what we don’t practice – we may not be perfected yet, but the starting place is having enough humility to tell God we can’t do it. We need His help, and we need to admit our lack to others.

Sometimes, at church, there may be helpful people who love to explain to others how they too can be healed, fixed, etc., because this verse says blah blah blah, so if you just do blah blah blah you’ll be right! If that isn’t enough weight to kill a sick donkey, I dunno what is! The Lord wants us to minister whatever we minister with mercy in our hearts, not law! And there is not one way to do anything. The more we know Him the more ways the Holy Spirit will help us find! Meanwhile if you ever find a pastor who will help you carry your load – treasure him!

Luke 11:42:“Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone.”BTW, Jesus is not making a point about tithing, instead He is saying that there is a lot more to following God than just being definitively particular about it!

Tithing cannot make up for disobedience in other areas. In this passage He is explaining to the people around Him, that we can’t pick and choose what we will obey! Unfortunately, a kind of self-righteousness will show up in people who value law more than life. Our aim is to value and cherish HIS LIFE IN US. We cannot afford to neglect being just, and sharing the love of God toward others, because those things are a hallmark of His Presence.

I want to be perfectly clear about this next remark… the way we treat our enemies — EG:  the people we don’t like;  or people who are annoying;  or family members who irritate the living daylights out of us;  or the people who deliberately and maliciously hurt us — those attitudes show us, and others, how much we love HIM! And like Jesus is saying here, we cannot pay lip-service to these things so we are going to need His help.

Many is the time, I’ve been sobbing away before the Lord explaining that I had tried to be nice to people who have hurt me, but I was totally poverty-stricken because I could not do it from my heart. That’s what “blessed are the poor in spirit...”is all about. Jesus Christ set the bar too high for any of us to reach it … without His help!

He also identified Himself with all of mankind when He said: “When you do this and that for other people, you are doing it for Me!” Our obedience is incredibly important to the Lord. Read the book. We need to understand that Father God is not interested in all talk and no action! God is looking for us to have enduring FAITH. Hebrews 12 says He is the Author of faith, so when we have faith, the life of God is in us. 

Micah 6:8 says:“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”Mercy is now our middle name, and it is a sign of the life of God within us. Making sure that we treat others lovingly is not some old-fashioned nicey-nice concept – it is sorely needed grace in today’s self-centred world. We are to live by Christ’s brand of justice now – it is called unilateral forgiveness! Forgiveness is not optional and it is actually still justice. It is simply justice covered in MERCY! His ways aren’t ours!!

The reason the Lord was repeatedly angry with the Israelites, was because they would not obey Him – they ticked some of His boxes, but most of the time they went their own way. Father God knows how to get us through ANYTHING. He is our loving Father who created us and knows the very best way we should go. So in order to have His life, right here right now, we need to give our life away for His will, and …  … usually someone else’s benefit! That stuff makes very little sense to a legally-based mind, it will probably just make them angry. 

The Lord is not fooled by our efforts to impress other people with how spiritual we are, His kids are to carry His Presence and His abounding Life within them wherever they go. The same way David’s men carried the Ark into Jerusalem – walking and leaping and praising God! The life of God in us will lead us through anything.

Bye 👋

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 2764 Don’t be afraid to fail.

/ DVH

“A person may have many ideas concerning God’s plan for his life, but only the designs of God’s purpose will succeed in the end.”Proverbs 19:21 TPT. In other words, we don’t have to plan our lives – we can simply let the Lord do it for us! Our society is really big on personal success stories – but when we live a life of faith, it can be easy to become afraid that we might have missed God. So we wander off, despondent, out into the wilderness. Feeling ashamed of our fear. Maybe, we even feel protective over the Lord and His good Name, because if we make a big mistake we could bring dishonour to Him, and His Ways.  

First of all, God is not scared of the wilderness – Jesus went there on purpose! Secondly, He can protect His Own Name. Our job is to use His Name with reverence. The Lord has sent many a great person into a wilderness to test them. My advice? Stop! Climb under the shadow that is cast by the Cross and …breathe. Quiet your soul.  Make yourself a cup of something you like, and just sit. The busyness of your mind won’t help you. The third thing is this, remind yourself that He can look after His own Name, and remember to repent for being faithless. Then ask the Holy Spirit to stretch your faith in Who He is, and how big He is,  and go and do whatever He told you to do. Feelings are the antithesis of faith.

Now if what we want to do is sheer, wilful disobedience – then we need to humble ourselves immediately, repent and remember to resist the devil. Our Heavenly Father is the Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things ON the earth and in the sky – He can get us out of any dumb place we walk into. Keep your focus on Him and use your energy to block your ears to satan’s lies. Then start bringing into your mind the many people in the bible who got it wrong — just don’t use that info to continue on into further disobedience! Loads of people missed God’s will and it is recorded in His book. The Lord rescued them simply because He is a good God and He loves His kids. We need to believe in His goodness! 

Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t want God anymore, will not give a flying fig whether He wants them, or not. Simply bear in mind that we are exhorted not to test Him. That’s called honouring and reverencing Who He is! Remain humble, and let Him work those disobedient things you chose to do, together for your good. And do what you can to make things right with the people you’ve hurt. Get down on your carpet, and stay there until you completely comprehend the mistake you’ve made. Some times disobedience comes from FEAR, we feel we must control things. Repentance is always good, but we need to be delivered from fear.

Here are some names of other wayward people, to help you with your search … try Gideon, David, Samson, Jonah, and Peter. Human beings make mistakes, we are famous for them! Sometimes they are huge, life changing ones. God is ALWAYS bigger than OUR mistakes. Listen:“For I am the Lord, I change not; …” Malachi 3:6a. His attitude of redemption will not change until Jesus finally rolls up the world. Our loving obedience is the sweetest gift we can bring to the Lord, but let’s remember that we are not perfect, we can be sincerely wrong – often! 

And … sometimes … even wilfully wrong! I’ve gone on both of those roads, and the Lord is so faithful, He still stayed with me, He does not give up on His kids. Otherwise, why do we pray so hard for our loved ones who have wandered off? We inherently already know that He is good! Remember the story of the lost lamb? The Shepherd valued that lamb so highly he left his other valuable sheep and went looking for the little lost one. He’s a good shepherd!

The Apostle Paul was a murderer – God used that man’s crimes against His kids, the Jewish nation, to show Paul how big GRACE is, and how comprehensive Christ’s death was! God’s Goodness can do amazing things. We underestimate its value at our own peril. It is nothing to do with us or whether we are appealing or not – it’s HIS Grace. It’s the goodness of God that put an angel with a flaming sword, at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. I believe that angel was put there so Adam and Eve could not get back in again, and eat from the tree of eternal life. Mankind would have been eternally lost if we had eaten from that tree.  

Sometimes our confidence can be in our own ability to perform whatever God has asked us to do. Forget that idea. Remember, our God knows what is coming next! Jesus reminded His terrified disciples in the boat in the middle of a storm, that He had already told them they were going over to the other side. And … they did go to the other side – eventually! He didn’t tell them there would be a storm in the middle, because His purpose was to go to the other side. Besides, a bunch of them were fishermen they knew how dodgy that lake was. That’s the time faith grows.

We must put our confidence in GOD ALONE. Anything else we can come up with, is just wood, hay and stubble. One day that stuff will be gone. Our ability to perform – or not! Simply doesn’t come into it. God has used a donkey on other occasions. It is not good to be so proud of who you are, and what you can do spiritually, that you stop seeking His wisdom, His Ways. Let’s continually live to seek to know Him better. We cannot even afford to rest on our spiritual gifts …  instead we rest on WHO He is.

We are in the process of learning to live this life, the only one we have, to learn His ways and follow our leader, Jesus. The Holy Spirit is using everything to get us ready for heaven. so don’t be afraid of failing… some of the very best humans fail … failing can make you a kinder, nicer, more compassionate, tolerant human being. Bye. 👋

“Before you do anything, put your trust totally in God and not in yourself. Then every plan you make will succeed.” Proverbs 16:3 TPT

P 2711 Faith is not just agreement.

/ DVH

I’ve met plenty of people who agree that God is real, yet they have no visible faith! Some of them have what I call, fashionable faith. However what they say has no substance in their lives. God clearly values OBEDIENCE- read the book! Disobedience is not a viable alternative. So if we truly want our faith to grow, then we need to cultivate an attitude that is consistently, actively obedient. Faith has evidence. Our faith brings unseen things into the realm of things we can see.

Meanwhile, even the devil believes there is a God! (James 2:19) The only way we can showcase our faith is to use it – and not just when the sky is falling. Our evidence is always seeable. People ask both of us why we go on the road a number of times during a year? Because the Lord asked us to do it. Actually, He asks all His kids to follow His Son into a life of voluntary, loving service …it’s in the book! So why is it so hard to obey? Dying is hard! Everybody wants the benefits, but very few people want to be changed and transformed. FYI the older you get the harder transformation becomes.

We meet all kinds of difficulties when we are on the road. Hubby has to do everything. He does all the driving, then he has to pack and unpack the car … all by himself. Then he needs to set up our overnight stay. When we get to the destination, he can’t rest … he has to look after me. Showers, cooking, setting up the bed! If we travel every single day, then he does this every single day. He packs up in the morning, and then he sets up again that night. He only gets a rest from this kind of intense work when we stay more than two nights in one place. However, there is nothing special about this – he is just being obedient. Obedience costs us comfort and ease.

Jesus says this about a servant who works all day for His Master …I’ve put this scripture here because we need to pay attention to it as well as others like it. It always reminds me of my dear husband. Luke 17:7-10 “Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Won’t he rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do?  So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

I have found that many ministers ignore verses like these these, because those verses aren’t what I call, popular theology. Most people like the kind of verses that support them – their personal lives as individuals. Jesus didn’t come to earth and do all He did for us to give us a happy life down here – He came to get us to HEAVEN. And when we pray for others – when we tell them what Jesus did for them – we are using our faith for good. Yesterday my hubby shared the gospel with a mainland Chinese gentleman who had never heard it before. What a privilege! Our God is our HOME. He’s the place where we put down roots. Of course, He loves to help us, He loves His kids — but He is not an elderly benevolent ga-ga Grandpa either!! 

When we simply mentally agree with what the bible says, that is not faith. Faith has substance and substance can be seen! Jesus bought and paid for the right to ask us to live that way. Living for Him will involve sacrifices too. We will end up living differently than the world around us. Sometimes Christians are like starry-eyed people who fall in love… they only want the romance, and they never really settle into the marriage. Marriage involves love and romance;  and also sacrifice and hardship. Deep relationships do not come cheap! 

Here are some other less popular verses: John 12:26:“If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there will My servant be also. If anyone serves Me, the Father will honour him.” Ask yourself, would Jesus prioritise leisure time or reaching-out-to-others-time? Galatians 5:13: “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” There’s a lot of them if you want to do the research.

Salvation is not only about you and I going to heaven – we were saved to bring other people with us. That won’t happen if we do not practice obedience. There are enough instructions in those four gospels, to keep us busy for the rest of our lives!! We don’t have to wait upon Him to find special things to do – we have a book full of things we can do. We need to put aside the practice of simply memorising verses that promise US some sort of a special advantage over someone else, and start living by all those verses, so we can demonstrate them to other people. Real faith is not about just agreeing with the truth, it is about living by it. Every single day. 👋

P 2690 Insight.

/ DVH

The reason I talk so much about the bible being a bigger book than we understand, is because of this subject. Receiving insight personally from the Lord grows our faith. For some people, their only biblical understanding comes through their pastor, or more mature brothers and sisters at church, or a tele-pastor or a blogger etc. There is nothing wrong with doing that, but sadly, that food is second-hand. It is not fresh manna coming down out of heaven daily, feeding you what He wants you to know for that day. 

We need to take in the fact that this is Almighty God we are dealing with, and if we truly want to get to know Him and His ways, we will need to sit and read and spend time with Him. We want to show Him that we are committed to waiting for Him to speak to us. The joy of this kind of dedication is that we can always hear Him speak through His word. The more we act on what He tells us, the more we will hear Him when we need to. (Do you feel inclined to talk to people who don’t listen to you?) In our daily lives we are very used to instant everything, not seeking.

Yes, I know the whole ‘speaking to me’ is a big thing for some people. Like I’ve said before, I don’t hear an external  voice. He speaks to me in my thinking processes. But stuff floats across my brain that I know are not my thoughts. EG: somebody is quite deliberately and maliciously mean to me and the thought, “forgive them they don’t understand what they are doing”- floats through my mind. That thought is not just there to comfort me, or even correct my attitude or response … it is God giving me insight to the way HE thinks. Yay, I just learnt something about Him!  At the same time, maybe I suddenly remember that those words are the words that Christ Himself spoke from the cross. Now I have confirmation that my thought is biblical. We will miss what He is saying if we push the thought away and we don’t give it any attention.

What I want to make clear today is that this personal insight belongs to all of us. The secret is to go after it, and going after it means sitting still and prayerfully rereading at the page or even a line that we don’t understand. Now we INSIST and ask for the Holy Spirit to please enlighten the eyes of our hearts! Insight helps us understand His ways and see and hear Him better. When we decide to honour Him with our time, He will speak to us. We are showing Him our devotion to what He says. Remember to ask questions. 

How do I know that He will answer me? Hmmm. Hard question … NOT! There’s a line of people stretching round the block for miles in the Old Testament. They heard God’s voice and what He said changed everything. Meanwhile where do we think the New Testament came from? It didn’t float down from the clouds! God spoke to these men, taught them personally, and they wrote things down, as they progressively got to know Him and practiced what He said.

We can miss Him speaking because we are scared we will make some sort of weird mistake, and so we hide our own disobedience from ourselves. Unfortunately, dying to self makes a great theory – and most of the time we would rather preserve our public image, than die to self and do what He said. I am not talking about running about doing weird stuff and saying: “God told me to do to, act like I’ve lost my mind!” I am talking about getting to know the inner voice of the Holy Spirit by reading the bible and asking Him what this verse is supposed to mean to you. What He says to you is insight into Who He is — His Ways. Meanwhile it is good to remember nobody is stopping you from doing this – just you!

Our God is true to His Word, so if we are in doubt then we can ask the pastor, or an elder etc. and ask them to pray for us. However, the more we act on the ordinary things we’ve already read, the more our inner ears and eyes will be enlightened. So making things like giving to the poor, tithing, repenting, as well doing good to others normal, not elective things. These things are instructions. Go and seek out that person you are mad at, all this is obedience to His Word. Remember we are stewards. If He sees that we want to be good stewards using what we already know, HE WILL GIVE US MORE. As we press in, we are making Him our priority – in return He will show us what is on His heart.

“The Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise steward [of the estate], whom his master will put in charge over his household, to give his servants their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed (happy, prosperous, to be admired) is that servant whom his master finds so doing when he arrives.” Luke 12:42-43.

To get our own personal spiritual food we must be prepared to prioritise reading the book, and take the time to wait for the Holy Spirit’s insight. Then simply do whatever it says – unless you happen to be reading Numbers or Chronicles, then good luck with that! Joking BTW, but they can be a bit daunting! Ask your pastor instead!! 🤣 Bye 👋

P 2676 Judgment makes us blind and deaf –

/ DVH

… to God and to each other! In the beginning Adam and Eve chose to do what seemed right in their own eyes. What entered into them when they ate from that tree, was the knowledge of good and evil. That meant that they left the wisdom of God behind. Sadly, this was also when humanity lost the privilege of His Presence and suspicion arrived on the scene. After that, influenced by satan, we opted for our own thinking and rationale. The miracle was Almighty God did not utterly reject all of us, because He is never caught unaware – He always had a bigger plan. Over time, human beings walked further and further away from Him. And the further away we walked, the more we left HIS wisdom, His dear Presence, behind. In that garden, living in the Spirit came naturally. Our disobedience changed that.

I think the ongoing result of this action is that we have all lost the ability to see Him, clearly. We’ve become deaf and blind toward His Ways, and we can’t see each other, either! However the clearer we can see Him, the clearer and closer we will get to each other. In our current world we have chosen to live by our own judgment and this means most of us have rejected Him. This attitude is devastating in its overall consequences. Look at it like this – broken people come to their own conclusions. Often because of our own battered sinful past, we unconsciously analyse others, then we reject, avoid or persecute them. Eventually we make those conclusions into life actions and give those actions some sort of great sounding purpose that makes sense to us!

If someone in my life was cruel to me, inside my heart I may have carefully laid some early warning signals that mean if anybody even remotely sounds or looks like that person who hurt me — I will avoid or punish them. In effect, I am passing judgment on that other person without even thinking about it. It is as if I see others through a screening system that filters out the people I consider to be my enemies. I do not look for GOOD in others, instead now I am looking for DANGER. We can end up judging our brother by a standard that came from fear and the ever-present need for revenge.

Because I am human, and my human wisdom is faulty, in order to protect myself, I can easily learn to apply judgment to oversee whatever I think. Sadly when I do that, I am allowing the people who hurt me, or caused me to be afraid, or misled me, to continue have power over me – whether they are present or not! At the same time I have been blinded to my own sinful attitudes by fear and judgment. I can no longer see others the way God sees them, because my own judgment is exalting itself over His wisdom. Over time I will use my logic, and incidental observations to prove to myself that my judgments are right, and that those other people really are dangerous to my own well-being and they should be avoided. 

Hebrews 4:12 says: “For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Only God Himself knows our intentions –only He can rightly divide them using His Word.  I think the answer to this particular interpersonal difficulty is to ask the Lord to help us see other people the way HE sees them. Otherwise we are in constant danger of living in judgment, and that judgment will cloud our view over everything else. And at the same time it neutralises our understanding of His wisdom. That other person may have no clue that the way they behave is ‘pushing your buttons.’ Their own brokenness and faulty judgment causes them to act this way without them being aware of it.

Sometimes we can attribute motivation to other people’s behaviour, but it isn’t true discernment or a clear view of their actions, it’s a fear response. And at other times people may even employ demonic strategies because they feel a lack of personal control in their lives will be catastrophic. It goes without saying that demonic strategies are not only unnecessary, they are definitely likely to lead us into all sorts of temptations! Like …  Adam and Eve … or Cain and Abel. After all the Lord warned Cain he was in danger of crossing a line. Instead, we need to remember that we have a Redeemer, Who runs to our aid. He cherishes us all and He will always impart the wisdom from above. In order to see and hear His Ways – now we must put away personal judgment, and let the word of God change us. 

1 Corinthians 2:6-9: “Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.”  👋

P 2664 On seeking God’s will.

/ DVH

Romans 12:1-2: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

So did ya get that? Changing our minds to think like the Lord does, by reading and obeying what He says — opens the door to discern what He wants. Meanwhile it is not just about thinking differently, it is about letting that different thinking affect our actions and reactions. Presenting our bodies to Him means WE are no longer in charge of what happens. We can always pray and ask Him for a different outcome, but the way to truly worship God is to give Him our bodies … and let HIM decide! Um, do you need a cuppa tea and a biscuit to cheer you up yet? There are a whole lotta people who won’t like that previous thought.

When we live this way, at the same time, the Lord will use our circumstances to reveal our own hearts to us. We test His will out, daily by the way we are choosing to live now. If what we are doing falls on it’s head — then it wasn’t God! BUT! … If bears good fruit it was! Meanwhile if we keep getting the same bad result over and over again, then there is no doubt about it … not. dead. yet! It’s no good blaming other people, or whatever – a transformed mind doesn’t look for things to its own advantage – it looks for God to get all the glory, and it continually chases love.

James, one of my favourite authors, helps us in Chapter 1:5-8: “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. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.”  All we need to to do, is to ask for His wisdom and believe He wants to help us through whatever is going on.

There can be times when we will mess up our ability to receive from the Lord – through our own disobedience, cemented attitudes, or insistence that we are not at fault, somebody else is!  Remember, James is talking about receiving Almighty God’s wisdom. You and I can easily short circuit receiving the very thing God wants us to have by the way we respond to it. We are no longer like the rest of the world … independently minded. We are not meant to be a people whose made-up god puts a big tick on all our ideas. We serve the ever-living, always present Almighty God – He runs this show! 

Human beings love systems. BUT, when we look at the Ways of God, He’s not like that! In the bible we can clearly see that every single situation needs a fresh revelation. For example, King David did not fight every one of his battles the same way, because God sent him out with different instructions each time. This man knew how to seek God to find out what came next. He was not interested in strategies that he could repeat at will whenever he went into battle. Sometimes the Lord gave him a strategy before the battle, and sometimes God said: ‘Go! I will be with you!” In other words although a rock killed Goliath, the next time David needed a different plan, he sought the Lord to get it.

This is why I have spent so much time writing about how to receive, hear and obey the Lord. Because there is no system that we can use to make our lives more comfortable… and still serve Him! The mandate is upon us to get to know God and His ways for ourselves. Our pastors can preach until they turn blue. If we do not follow up what the man of God says with our own prayers, and then look for ways to be obedient – all we will get is double-mindedness. That looks like a bit this: “Oh, I think what pastor said here was good but I don’t agree with this and that … I think this instead …”  

Good on you! Yay for you! But you just lined yourself up to be double-minded. Ask the Lord what He wants you to know and do, personally, from what was said. Here’s a good clue —-if whatever was said annoyed you then it’s a certainty that there is something there you need to learn, about yourself, others, and the Lord Himself!  Our personal responses are our personal diagnostic tools.  Anything less than learning more about loving Him, or how to love others – plus how to die daily, is pure advertising. Those are the sort of trimmings that make our lives look good from the outside. 

There is one attitude that will help us along our way … and that is this … we daily lay down our own right to choose our destiny and, simply follow Jesus. That’s what the disciples did, when they sought His will.. When He left them, they sat about and waited like He told them to ,,, because there was no alternative plan B! Bye 👋

P 2654 Give yourself a break!

/ DVH

Actually, I don’t mean take a holiday – I mean cut yourself some slack. It is too easy to become formulaic in our faith. We think things like: ‘if I do and say this, then He will do and say that.’ It seems like we think the Lord is a vending machine. We stand in front of it, stamping our foot – getting crosser by the minute because we did everything we were supposed to do … and …nothing happened … things stayed the same.  Then we rummage about trying to figure out what we’ve done wrong because God is always active on our behalf and where’s our answer? I dunno … I learnt years ago I am as dumb as the dirt I came from! 

But I do know this … Almighty God is not afraid of inactivity. Between Malachi and Christ’s birth 400 years went by. Here’s something to reflect on — in that time there would have been Godly men and women who died waiting for an answer. Nobody likes that thought! Yet Christ went through everything He did into His terrible death, and His grave and nothing stopped any of it. That shows us that God has greater purposes. We often have to wait for the greater purpose to manifest. Other things simply must be endured, and we will need to learn to do that with faith, grace, and love … However, sadly, those graces will not take endurance off the menu! 

I also know that as individuals we can hold up our own personal change by being disobedient. Maybe we simply refuse to look at things that need transformation, or we feel that change in my life is impossible. Perhaps we even trot out well-worn excuses,…”My family is like this… it’s just who I am … other people are so picky … “  What we are really saying is: “I don’t believe I need to change God… I expect You to change Your mind … OR …You could change THEM!”  We sing songs and read in the book that nothing is impossible with God, but that goes right out of the window when it touches our inner rebellion. We are afraid of change.  BTW, about the excuse:  “My family is like this…” you joined a new family remember? There’s that excuse done and dusted!!

Years ago, I had the dearest friend who used to tell me when she was praying about something really important that she thought God had gone skiing or something because there was no response. What she said was a joke … but, at the same time, it wasn’t a joke … she was referring to the fact that His silence scared her. Rightly so, sometimes silence means NO. The Lord holds the future, and maybe that idea we have won’t hold water in the future He has planned for our lives. 

Jeremiah teaches us that HE “… know(s) the plans He has for us, declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11.So what we think we need, or even want, may not be in the plans He has for us. At other times we simply need to live through our disappointment, and talk to Him about that. Either way, He’s always the Answer! The Lord simply isn’t sharing His thoughts with us at that time. That doesn’t  mean we have committed some dastardly sin – it could mean that we have an opportunity to keep banging on the door. Like the guy in the parable Jesus told. That guy needed bread for his visitors.

This is why I’ve learnt to leave things with Him. I ask Him for revelation, and then expect that when He is ready to share with me, something will pop up in my bible reading, or someone will say something, and my heart will recognise His voice, in their voice. And sometimes the circumstances have already changed, it just took me a while to notice it! I’m a bit slow that way …

My point today is, it is not good to beat yourself up and wonder what you did wrong after you have prayed about it and you still can’t hear Him, or you seem to have lost the path. If you know you did something stupid then fix it. Doing that side-steps a whole lot of angst. At the same time let Him be God and you be you. Mistakes are going to be made! He is perfectly capable of redirecting our paths. “…He will make straight our paths …”Sometimes our mistakes seem to be real clangers … I’ve made loads of them! 

Yet, because He is our wonderful Father, the glorious Creator, the One Who sets us free – He can take our surrendered spirit of disobedience or stupid, and make something beautiful out of it. He made the world out of nothing. Taking our sometimes wilfully shattered lives, and making something incredible out of them, is what He does. Give yourself a break – He won’t give up on you, so don’t give up on yourself.

I’ve found that self-flagellation accomplishes very little, surrender accomplishes far more. It softens our spirits and helps us to remain humble. I pray all the time:  ‘Lord, I want what You want.’ Amen. And then I forgetaboudit until He brings it up. Bye. 👋

P 2635 Obedience is everything.

/ DVH

“Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.” 2 Kings 22:13b.

I’ve been reading through the bible, from the beginning again, and so far I am up to the book of 2 Kings. I gotta tell ya, some of these stories are kind of tedious to read. Stuff like:  this king didn’t do what God said — he didn’t get rid of most of the idols and accoutrements;  and that other one didn’t get rid of any at all — and another king with an unpronounceable name got rid of the weird sounding idols, but he left a few stragglers behind. These guys all flunked their obedience tests big time! The bible says that they left some of the idols in the ‘high places’— so maybe their kingly horses didn’t like mountain climbing. Perhaps they thought obedience was optional back then.

It all kind of reminds me of an illustration I heard once… What if I were to give you a nice clean glass of water and I put one teeny tiny drop of poison in it? Would you still drink It? Me neither!! But the one thing that these two books of Kings have taught me is that we all can tolerate a level of indifference to the things of God and what He wants, especially while we are doing other things we like better! Meanwhile, although nobody says it out loud, sadly, we are counting on the blood of Jesus to make the difference! It’s not deliberate disobedience, it’s careless disobedience.

I mean, I’m convicted just writing this blog this morning! Near enough definitely ain’t good enough. Whenever we read the bible, we need to pray over it and ask Him how to do whatever it says. The long winding road through those two books of Kings has taught me that, and Chronicles still lies ahead! There are lessons upon lessons in the bible.

Along the way, I picked up the clear idea that blaming the guys who went before us;  like our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents etc. etc. does not work! My disobedience is MY disobedience. We can’t wiggle out of obeying by trying to sneak back through a generational door!! This subject is too important. It is even disobedience if we know to do good – and don’t do it. One king ripped his clothes and threw dirt on his head when he discovered what the book of God said when he read it. People were so careless with it, it was found dumped like an old rag in a cupboard … I wonder where I left my bible again???

The bible says: “obedience is better than sacrifice”(1 Samuel 15:22) But what I have found is that obedience requires sacrifice. Those two things go together. One thing leads us to the other. At the same time, obedience is the best way I know to make friends with the Holy Spirit. That’s because I can’t do things without Him. If I try to, then half the time ‘I don’t want to’ catches me by the throat and I end up quitting before I start. I need help, all the time – and He is my all-the-time loving Helper, praise God. Through practising obedience I am learning to know and rely upon Him. 

I also try to do my best to pay very little attention to my own understanding, because my understanding is always looking for a back door to wiggle out of doing anything difficult!  Obedience is often about doing hard things BTW, but after a while, living to obey Him becomes a way of life. There are times when I think to myself, what does Jesus have to say about that? Trust me … He has a whole lot to say about many things!! 

The Lord is not really keen on people pretending to do the right thing, while they are slicing and dicing others up in their minds either. He calls that hypocrisy. But He loves the guy whose heart is set to please Him. The good thing about obeying is once you’ve done whatever He asked you to do, you can just walk away and leave the results to Him. I like that bit!! Obedience is just like honesty – don’t leave home without it. People may get a bit startled when you start to live this way, but the results are straight out of heaven. 

EG: in the past, I had to tell somebody in faith … somebody who actually drove me clear up a wall (!) — “I love you” for a very long time … before it made a difference. But over time, my decision to obey sunk into the mud of my well-established-disobedience and transformed me. That other person hasn’t changed much at all, but my own attitude has changed HEAPS. Now I can say “I love you” with agreement and conviction, because I really do love them. 

All the glory goes to Him!! He helped me stick at it. The Holy Spirit’s Ways are so much better than our own ideas of avoidance and pretend. I remind myself that He took chaos and darkness and made this world. Trust me — there is nothing He can’t transform into something beautiful. Obedience IS everything. 👋