Do something

P3460 Trying is out, doing is in.

/ DVH

Following Christ is not about trying hard to find the will to do what He said … it is about doing it. I hear so many sincere people telling me that they are trying to please the Lord but it’s too hard. Trying means you are simply attempting to do something — in other words — trying includes the possibility of failure. To DO something means you launch yourself out into the action hoping God Himself will catch you. Don’t try — DO.  Don’t try for instance, not to gossip, or criticise others, close your mouth! Let’s not let any immediate feelings of impossibility or failure discount your ability to do what He said.

So we don’t try not to watch movies that create anger, or access sensuality in us – turn them off.  It’s dumb to allow the wrong kind of thoughts to sit in your head. Those things are leading you down an inevitable pathway, to all kinds of stuff that will steal your peace and make you hate yourself for failing. We can’t fail – Jesus did all the work for us! He conquered sin and death. That’s love. Let’s remind ourselves daily, how much the Lord loves us. Did you wake up today? 🤪 That means God believes in you. You have another opportunity to choose to change – some people didn’t wake up. Make the time to sit with Him and let His endless unconditional love minister to you, then go out and do what He tells you to do.

Let’s look at Matthew 14, and what happened to Peter, as he learnt that God can and will make a way! Verses 18-30:  “As soon as the meal was finished, He insisted that the disciples get in the boat and go on ahead to the other side while He dismissed the people. With the crowd dispersed, He climbed the mountain so he could be by himself and pray. He stayed there alone, late into the night. Meanwhile, the boat was far out to sea when the wind came up against them and they were battered by the waves. At about four o’clock in the morning, Jesus came toward them walking on the water. They were scared to death. “A ghost!” they said, crying out in terror. But Jesus was quick to comfort them. “Courage, it’s Me. Don’t be afraid.” Peter, suddenly bold, said, “Master, if it’s really You, call me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come ahead.” 

Peter didn’t just ASK for help … you and I can’t just stand there waiting for Jesus to come and fix things – there’s no active faith in that! Faith has substance, in other words you can see it. Instead, Peter acted on what the Lord said! Jesus said, “Come,” and Peter actually had to climb over the edge of a perfectly good boat, and start walking on the water. That’s faith! That’s what it looks like. Faith is obedience in action. Peter kept his eyes on Jesus and kept right on walking. He only failed when he took his eyes off the Lord. Keep your eyes on Jesus! … BTW, failure is not the end of the world because Jesus took that to Calvary too.

Here’s my advice: find out what the Lord says about that thing that you are struggling with, and act on it! Do something. We are only failing in some areas because we are leaving the things we need to do ourselves, to Him. We are not puppets, He will not make us. He will show us the way and help us, but we will have to decide to act differently, and then do something about it, using our faith. If you have trouble with swearing, stop. Seriously. Don’t believe that voice in your head that tells you, you can’t. YOU … “can do all things through Christ Who strengthens YOU.” So when you feel weak, ask Him for strength, and … whack your hand over your mouth!

I’ve learnt to do stuff like that all the time. If the Holy Spirit tells me to do something, then I start moving – despite the fact that I know I can’t do most things easily – it has now become an automatic response. Especially when I get grumpy. We all get angry sometimes, but the thing is … don’t stay there, ask the Lord to help you. Our faith is meant to be operating all the time. It is not just an emergency stop button on a runaway train. It’s the way we live now. ”For in Him we live and move and have our being.’  As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’” Acts 17:28. 

We are wrestling with our own will when we feel like we can’t do this or that. Jesus died so we don’t have to do anything anymore. Now we have the freedom to choose. Just because we don’t like some choice or other, that does not invalidate the fact that we actually have one! Let’s turn that around, when we want to do something we know is bad for us, other people can’t stop us. That’s what our will looks like in operation. We simply can’t live a life of faith, and indulge ourselves at the same time. Nor can we say to the Lord: “Thy will be done …” in our prayers, when we know full well that we only do what He wants, when and if, we feel like it! … Did you notice that word ‘feel?’ 

The real struggle is against our own flesh. Our will has survived thus far because we gratify it through the stuff we’ve done that we ought not to have done – so stopping it is bound to be a wrestling match. Let me put that another way — neither of us will probably want to participate in this wrestling match. It is so-oo much easier to just give in to our feelings. Plus this sort of scenario is usually accompanied by loads of angst and temptation. After all, we don’t live in a blameless holy society! Someone else will have done something to set us off. The point is … Jesus is bigger than anything we face, so we put Him in charge, and step out onto the water of change even though it seems like it will not be pleasant and we don’t feel like it.

BTW, this does not mean we are not supposed to have any feelings, it just means our feelings are not supposed to be in charge of us anymore — Jesus is now. How do you think the Lord endured the cross? “Saying, Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but [always] Yours be done.” Luke 22:42. Faith is not faith if we only believe things in our heads. Faith is faith when we let it change our behaviour. That will mean some wrestling matches. The upside is we will stop blaming other people for what we do, and start to take responsibility for our own choices. We don’t want to be the bad people, we want other people to be in that role. The truth is we are ALL bad, and … “It’s by Grace we have been saved, not because of works lest any man should boast.” 

The glory of Jesus and what He did for us, is that He gave us the Holy Spirit Who wants to help us to obey. Obedience is a wonderful smell to God, it is better than a sacrifice. Along with the Holy Spirit – Who gave us the power to obey our Father – we also have in writing, what the Lord likes and what He doesn’t. Feelings don’t come into it. I never feel like saying sorry when I am angry and I know I am wrong – how about you? Let’s ignore how we feel, and obey what He said. Nobody is making you or I choose to indulge ourselves — those feelings of helplessness and powerlessness are simply not true. The bars on the jail you have painted yourself into are not there anymore. Take a step of faith – you will walk right through them.

What I think I know about myself is not all there is to know, there’s more. Father God made me, and He knows me, and what I can do, I can choose to trust Him over my feelings. We will fail to use our faith when we don’t believe what He said, instead of what we think about ourselves. Trying is out, doing is in. Bye. 👋.

P 3358 More of Jesus.    

/ DVH

Colossians 1:3-8.“Our prayers for you are always spilling over into thanksgivings. We can’t quit thanking God our Father and Jesus our Messiah for you! We keep getting reports on your steady faith in Christ, our Jesus, and the love you continuously extend to all Christians. The lines of purpose in your lives never grow slack, tightly tied as they are to your future in heaven, kept taut by hope. The Message is as true among you today as when you first heard it. It doesn’t diminish or weaken over time. It’s the same all over the world. The Message bears fruit and gets larger and stronger, just as it has in you. From the very first day you heard and recognized the truth of what God is doing, you’ve been hungry for more.”

Have you eaten too much of something you like, but you kind of still kept on going? Yeah me too. Maybe you’ve binge-watched something on Streaming? Yeah me too. Well today have I got news for you! I found something you can indulge yourself in that isn’t fattening or mind numbing – the quest for more of Jesus! 

People say this all the time, and we might easily feel like an inferior Christian, because that thought never even crossed our minds. My question today is: what does it actually mean?  We can say a whole lot of Christian-ese words sometimes, without any bible verses or experiences to back them up. So what does wanting more of Him look like? 

I can remember being so in love with my hubby that I would go long distances to spend five minutes in his company. Hmm. I would still do that, but I might need some personal assistance nowadays! He’s still the nicest person I know …  well, most of the time. I think more of Jesus means, at the very least, that I will want to spend more time with Him getting to know Him. I actively ask and look for the Lord in my day. When I see Him, I thank Him!

I’m just going to let that sit there while we both think about it. That’s because spending more time with Him means we need less time for us to do the things we have cultivated in our lives to relieve stress, and fear, and help us to cope. Yeah. I’m just going to leave that one there too …

I think more of Jesus is like falling in love. Ad when life gets difficult, we approach those things with Him as our Saviour, Lord and Friend. Then we choose to appropriate what He said He has given us, using our faith. That means WE DO SOMETHING. It’s an exercise of our will, and we accept whatever comes at us, because the bible tells us He filters that stuff.  If I need something, He will provide it – if we don’t, then He won’t. We live to make love our aim, because Love is His language, and that means we are looking at life through His eyes.

More of Jesus also means our value systems will become  like His, and our hearts will break for the things that break His heart. Because Jesus lived to please His Father, and we like being around Him, so we will choose to live that way too. Our needs and wants become secondary; we pray, ask, then we leave it with Him. He’s God He can do anything. If someone provokes us or pokes us in the ego – what will come out of us automatically is a help prayer.

All of those things are great aims!! But like the Psalmist says: “Such knowledge is too lofty for me to attain…” Psalm139:6. My translation to that bit of this Psalm is — we can’t possibly do this stuff and not exercise our faith. We need His help, because change happens one step at a time, but we begin with the firm knowledge that what Jesus did is already complete.

We no longer have to live like other people, the Lord has given us His word that He won’t leave us. He will also provide us with a way to get out of whatever dumb thing we’ve gotten into. Our minds and emotions, become secondary to His Word, because they can fool us into thinking that reacting the same way we always did, means we have not been changed. It’s a lie. Jesus did everything that ever needed doing on the cross. So we choose to use our faith to apply what He did, once and for all, into our own lives, now. 

There are times we can get stuck because our convenience wins over what Jesus said, but we know that repentance restores our relationship with Him. There can also be times we haven’t done the things we know He asked us to do. How can we learn to trust in Jesus, and want Him and His ways more, when we choose to be a slave to convenience and time?

This is the real point of today’s blog. I think we fail because we live in a fast-paced society where time is a thing to be used … … not savoured. So let’s look briefly at the consequences of not using our time well. We will probably stay in the same place spiritually, going up and down, always waiting for God to make the difference, when He already did! We allow His truth to be merely a reminder, instead of a prompt for change.

According to Colossians Chapter one, more of Him also contains a whole lot of thanksgiving! Actually, the bible says we shouldn’t stop giving thanks, no matter how we feel. So we need to practice thanking Him that He is in charge, even when it looks like He’s not! Now there’s something to go on with. Remember that’s not lying, it is lining ourselves up with His Word, instead of being led around by circumstances.

Paul thanks God for the growth of the faith of the Church in Colossae. He can see it because it is seeable. We go on and on about answered prayer, but what about Jesus’ prayers?? Paul himself has heard about the things that are happening in that church. God’s Word grows spiritual fruits, and that fruit is visible, not a euphemism. Wanting more of Jesus means we recognise the difference between what God says, and what is seeable and actually true in our lives. Visible fruit is proof of more of Jesus in our lives.

The believers in Colossae used their faith that what Jesus said He did, He did. They staked their lives on it. We need a whole lot less of ‘spooky filter’ Christianity and more fruit! More of Jesus signifies that we choose to obey what He asked us to do, and we get to see the results and so do other people. Bye.  👋

P 3195 Respond.

/ DVH

“Faith, then, is birthed in a heart that responds to God’s anointed utterance of the Anointed One.” Romans 10:17 TPT. 

The important word in the above scripture is respond. This is how we grow our faith, by actively responding to what Jesus says. The meaning of respond is — “do something as a reaction to someone or something.” Hebrews 11:1 says:“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  The thing is we want evidence to help us believe, but the lack of evidence is the very thing that stimulates and grows faith. So if our faith lacks substance it means we are not doing anything about what we believe!

Our response is always optional because Jesus won’t make us do anything! However, it is imperative and essential that our faith produces something more substantial than words. Let’s look at this a bit more deeply. In Isaiah 29:13 the Lord has been angry with Israel and He talks about His anger, because His people say one thing, but do another. He calls that lip service, and that is not a good look for His people. “And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honour Me with their lips, while their hearts are far from Me, and their fear of Me is a commandment taught by men,…”  

In the New Testament in 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…” These  scriptures are not just for our information. They are written to teach us how to live. Training in righteousness is about acceptance, repetition and practice, it is not just about learning the language so we can fit in or have an opinion. Training implies effort, and that effort is to help us take what we hear, and act on it. We are to do more than just agree with the sentiment or the language. Our task is to make the faith He has given us real in our everyday lives. 

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to Me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your Name, and cast out demons in Your Name, and do many mighty works in Your Name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness.’ Matthew 7:21-23. 

Chunky stuff eh? Not to be trifled with, and yet it seems so harsh. It is amazing that Jesus would say something so direct and severe. It seems to me that there are two kinds of Lordship, the one that it is in name only, and someone who chooses to live like Jesus would – if He were here with us today, in Person. Whether we are at home, alone, at school, or in the middle of our work environment. Lordship is not something to be trifled with. It is clear Jesus takes it extremely seriously! So we need to take it seriously too. 

The next issue is how? How do we live in His Lordship, day after day and night after night? The only way I know  is to choose to make quality decisions, minute by minute, and stick by them. Well meaning, sincere declarations at an altar made in a moment of time, don’t always work! They must be followed up by training.  Eventually we will begin to exchange the habits of a lifetime through prayer and practice. I’ve found some habits, some ways of thinking, are harder to shift than others. I think the secret is in what David did. He took his reference point for using his faith, from his experiences of God’s Grace in the past. 

Living in and giving away Grace is essential to the Lord’s kind of inward transformation. We cannot maintain grudges etc. and keep moving. Think of your internal heartache as mountains that will not stand a chance, because Jesus is on the scene. Remind yourself and the enemy, that the Lord Jesus once cursed a tree and it was dead as a dodo the next day! Everything in the bible has a practical application. We will just have to look for, and seek those applications out for ourselves and then live them out.

Second-hand information can seem to profit our emotions temporarily, and even stir us – but it is our commitment to find out for ourselves that causes transformation. Daily the Lord says: ‘Will you walk with Me today?’ That’s when we will have to file all our past failures and disappointments away into His hands — under: “things I will understand one day in the future.’ Or …’maybe I won’t understand but I won’t give a darn by then.’

Job’s response to all kinds of pressure was this: “Even though He kills me, I’ll continue to hope in Him. At least I’ll be able to argue my case to His face!” Job 13:15. Letting go is the only way forward that will lead us into living in His peace. Remember, it’s His peace, so we must do it His way! The bible is crystal clear that our God’s ways are not our ways, so our lack of mental or emotional understanding is irrelevant. Unfortunately, the person who needs to make this kind of decision is always ME – you can’t do it for me, I can’t do it for you. 

Our responses matter. We have entered into a time where our training often happens under duress. That stretching and buffeting could cause us to doubt He will help us, but the way to learn that the Lord is utterly good and reliable, is to live like He is utterly reliable! Talking about it doesn’t make it real – acting on what He has said makes it real and gives it substance.. Our responses count. Bye 👋

P 3159 He will inhabit our lives.

/ DVH

“My beloved ones, just like you’ve always listened to everything I’ve taught you in the past, I’m asking you now to keep following My instructions as though I were right there with you. Now you must continue to make this new life fully manifested as you live in the holy awe of God—which brings you trembling into His Presence. God will continually revitalise you, implanting within you the passion to do what pleases Him.” Philippians 2:12-13 TPT.

We cannot afford to postpone following His instructions, they are life and health to our bones! (Proverbs 3:7-8.) This is not just about our bones, BTW, it is about us living daily in His standing-up-in-the-middle-of-difficulties strength! It is our responsibility to allow His life to be fully manifested in us. Jesus did not save us so we could hide away in religious activities and tell ourselves: “that will do.” He saved us to be His ambassadors to this world. To start with, we need to redefine what real love looks like, the people around us think love looks like getting my own way!

God Himself knows the best way for any of us to live our lives. We can think we know, but we cannot foresee the future –  it is outside our control. Even Christians rumble along, listening to this instruction the Lord has given us, and ignoring that one because it’s ‘too hard and God won’t mind.’ We cannot afford to cherry-pick the verses we want to obey and the ones we don’t. Jesus died for us, and we died with Him, and this new life we have now is His.

Jesus Himself knew the secret of being ‘in’ the world, but not ‘of’ the world. His FOCUS was always on His Father’s kingdom. He did not treat a KING any differently than a peasant! He simply spent His time ministering to  people, displaying His Father’s love to them, meeting their needs. The Lord Jesus lived to love others, and obey His Father in all things. He didn’t save His life – He spent it!

Jesus’ life and death shows us that living like He did can be done. But it is painfully obvious we will need help — our love is not as hot as it should be. When God is an add-on, or merely SomeOne we run to, to fix things, passion will not be a part of our love for Him. However, the Holy Spirit knows both passion and devotion. That’s why Jesus sent back Him back to us. The Spirit of God helps us see and live in God’s perspective about the things happening in our lives. Jesus does not have to prove He loves us by answering our prayers – His life, death and resurrection are all the proof we need.

And what’s more the Lord’s life shows us that there is a better life than we can ever imagine when we learn to walk with Him in His Ways!  We have been blessed, we can bring heaven here, right here, right now — when we live His Way for His purposes. Whether we can see or hear Him or not – we can live in joy, loving others the way He loved us. Obedience opens doors. Day after day I hear people talking about fulfilment in this life. Maybe they don’t feel fulfilled because they were made for a purpose, and believe it or not that purpose wasn’t just to live in comfort, or annoy the living daylights out of someone else! 

The Lord may be temporarily absent from us, but He is oh so close and present, in the bible. We can always find Him in His book. Jesus Himself is called the LIVING WORD! And I need a living word every single day. I am daily learning to put my feelings to one side. Now the only thing I care about is His peace in me. When I have His peace, I can do anything. Believe it or not I am as scared of other people as you are!  But …the Holy Spirit is so faithful. He can’t help Himself – it’s His nature.

“Let’s not get weary in the well doing…”  Galatians 6:9. Pressing in and on, can seem daunting. As you get older, like I have, you just want to sit down somewhere comfy, with a cup of tea, and watch the world go by. I like life in the slow-lane. But I love to see the faces of the people who have no idea how much they are loved by God Himself so much MORE than my own comfort. This life is a series of choices. It is not so much about making good or bad choices, as it is about making ‘A’ choice, any choice. It is very hard to move a stationary vehicle. 

My advice is to do something… anything. Be generous, share with others, mow someone’s lawn, talk to some elderly shut-in. And watch the Lord turn up and love on people just because you reached out to them. They will be attracted to Jesus-in-you. It’s not us – it’s never us! It’s because HE is altogether lovely!! We don’t have to market Him, advertise Him, or explain Him — we just turn up with Him … with the King in residence here → ❤️ in our hearts. He promised to never leave us or forsake us or give us up – so He’s with us, whether we feel Him or not. Why not just believe Him? 

The way to fill up your heart is in Matthew 7:7-8, and Jeremiah 29:13 – look it up. Choose to believe what He says and not your feelings.“Here’s what Yahweh says to you: “I know all about the marvellous destiny I have in store for you, a future planned out in detail. My intention is not to harm you but to surround you with peace and prosperity and to give you a beautiful future, glistening with hope.” Jeremiah 29:11 TPT. Jesus will inhabit our lives as we step out and use our faith that what He said, He meant. Bye. 👋

PS. Don’t wait for a sign! Do it anyway… faith ACTS.