P 3288 Life attracts more life.

Here’s a dumb but logical thought:  dead things don’t move. The life that was in them, has been extinguished. You and I, will pass through death. However, it’s a doorway not a brick wall. We simply move on… to somewhere SO MUCH better! God’s Love for mankind is written down in BIG impactful words in John 3:16;  Romans 5:8: 1 John 4:16;  Romans 8:37-39. The thing about the Lord is this – what He says He means!

While we are on this earth, here and now, for some of us waking up alive is a faith statement we make every morning! And some bits of me are harder to wake up now. When I was younger I didn’t even think about moving my body — I just did it. Now I approach any kind of moving with a modicum of caution, and a boat-load of human history. However I am not about to wail on about how getting older means getting creakier! Instead, today, I want to talk about spiritually moving and how essential that is in our living faith. His life in us encourages others to believe. We were reborn spiritually, when the Holy Spirit first breathed His life into us.

So, right now, we have life in us the way this world understands it … and His new life in us … but many other people don’t understand the difference … yetThis world should be able to see that kind of life too! Here’s James, who talks at length about the way we are to live this new life we have been given. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.”  James 1:23-25. One of the best ways I know to keep our faith a living faith, is to share it with someone else!

James is teaching us that this new life we now have must be expressed. It needs to be seen, and be conspicuous. This might be a good time to repent of getting angry at those people in your church who would preach salvation to a donkey, if God said to do it!  We might get angry with them because we are convicted by their actions! But then we feel guilty because we feel like we can’t do what they do. We may not be called to preach to people, but you and I were called to exhibit faith by our works, as well as our words. “Faith without works is dead!” (Also in James.) That’s dead dead – all dead, no sign of life – DEAD!

I have one of those nasty questions nobody likes to answer. If you or I were taken into a court of law could we be convicted, with clear evidence – of knowing and loving Jesus with all our heart, soul, mind and strength? Stephen was. (The book of Acts) His reward for his boldness was that he was able to see into heaven just before he got there!  The Lord does not ask us all to be Stephen. You get to be you, and I get to be me. But whoever we are, we can, and must both obey what the bible says: 

“We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the One Who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work.” John 9:4. “For this reason He says, “Awake, sleeper, And arise from the dead, And Christ will shine [as dawn] upon you and give you light.” Ephesians 5:14. Here’s a song to ponder on, from a man who lived what he believed. His life was short, but fruitful, and his legacy continues to this day. Click here for some of Keith Green’s lyrics they will blow the dust and fluff out!  https://genius.com/Keith-green-asleep-in-the-light-lyrics

In the book of Matthew, chapter 25, the parable of the ten virgins shows us clearly that we need to be prepared for any eventuality. We can’t just slough off our responsibilities. We are His kids, so we can’t afford to do nothing. Jesus weeps over the millions of people who are falling off the cliff of this life into the next, and they don’t know about Him and what He did for us. Please don’t fool yourself with the idea that this kind of work is for someone else. Complete strangers ask me how I cope with illness in my life? I tell them I can’t, I have to lean on Jesus all the time!  I don’t have to have a clever answer to trick them into wanting to follow Him – I HAVE A TRUTHFUL ONE. They also ask hubby why we give away things to the poor, and he tells them that Jesus sent him!

We don’t have to convert or convince others, that’s the Holy Spirit’s job, our job is to speak, or act, or do something that shows them that our faith is not a theory!  ‘What if I get it wrong?’ Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go again. Absolutely nothing enlivens our faith more than using it! Faith made those five  virgins provide more oil than it seemed like they needed at that time. Everybody fell asleep that night, but the ones that used their faith had provision for the delay. Moving is a sign of life, otherwise the church appears to be deader than a dodo. Who wants to go to a dead church? But His life in us attracts more life. Bye. 👋

P 3079 Stuck!

“Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,” Philippians 3:14.

“Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. James 1:23-24.                                                        

“I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.“ Philippians 3:14. 

It’s not the falling over that gets you – it’s all the effort it takes to get up again! But these verses offer us some great comforting advice and we should take it. Our lives have been redesigned so that now we can both live forgetting the past and pressing in toward our future in Christ. This means that if I want my past left behind, then I should leave your past offences toward me behind too. I guess that is why the writer used the word STRAINING! 

Choosing to become forgetful of the past is one of the biggest assignments of our faith. My problem can be a lie the devil chucks at me … It feels like, if I forget what you did to me then I am letting you off the hook. You can go and do the same thing, or even worse, to me next time! At the bottom of our lack of forgetfulness toward people who have really hurt us, is a lack of trust. I don’t trust you because I think you have given me good reasons not to trust you. I probably don’t even trust the Lord to deal with you – and ps I actually think He should take you off to the woodshed and give you a good whopping!

Let’s look at the situation this way: The above verses are part of a process, they are not the end game. The end game is …press on!  But to do that, we will need to be actively engaged in forgetting what is past. At the same time I will need to remember and face what I actually look like, because I can get so used to highlighting your faults that most of the time, I can’t see mine! In my mind your faults make mine look tiny. That kind of blindness is part of a defence system.

The reality is that I want to stay mad at you, because you did something so terrible I can’t let you be close to me again because I cannot bear the hurt again. That hurt may manifest itself in anger, like I said yesterday, because someone has punctured my little smiley-face balloon persona, and now I’ve found out that I am not the nice person I thought I was.  My real sin is not just unforgiveness, it is that my flesh is in charge, not my spirit, and this other person has forced me to face myself. 

I can kid myself that I am a nice person, especially if everyone around me plays fair, and no-one pokes the bear inside me. But when someone pokes that bear, suddenly I know that I truly need saving. Yet I still have a place I can hide in, because I can tell myself that I am not that bad. YOU made me look that bad because you did thus and thus and made life difficult for me.

Because of this almost unconscious process, I can exonerate myself from my own personal responsibility and I pass all the responsibility for my actions over to you. That is just so dumb on so many levels! One of them is that I already don’t like you, and yet I’m putting you in charge of my behaviour. The bible clearly tells me what I look like at that moment, because my focus is on you, it clouds my view of myself in His mirror, and I then I walk away SMUG. Sadly, I can also dirty up the mirror of God’s word with religion and good works.

But spiritually I am stuck. This following story is an illustration of what stuck can look like. I have been to Anne Hathaway’s house in England. ‘Shakespeare country.’ In the houses back then, there were solid beams going from the roof to the floor, and the floor consisted of stone paving. At the bottom of one such beam I noticed a deep groove. I asked the guide what it was, and they told me it was a post-middle ages’ method of keeping a tiny tot safe. 

The parent would strap the child into a leather harness and the kid walked round and round the beam. The beam was not all that big, so the kid must have been bored out of its gourd going round and round! These things were commonly used in those times. It’s a wonder kids didn’t turn out to be a little doolally … temporarily deranged and/or feeble minded! They were totally stuck there – all in the name of safety!

Let’s take a look at how to move forward from being stuck. I need to actively choose to forget the old and press forward toward the new. There is a new place for you and I to occupy together, it is a place where hopefully, both of us let go of the past, and begin to look toward a new and different relationship. We have given up trying to make the old one that we had work, because it didn’t.  It is foolish to keep repeating old behaviour patterns, when they just lead us into the same old holes. And so now we choose to start again to rebuild trust between us.

We can use the Word of God as our guide, instead of our past experiences, or even our personal needs. As we look into His Word, we will discover that both of us have faults that have affected our ability to relate to each other in a Godly fashion. Instead we have chosen to look into His Word deliberately, to find places we both need transformation! That’s what pressing on looks like. We move beyond being stuck in our fleshly desires and wants, and press forward into doing what He wants. Bye. 👋

P 2992 Jesus is the ultimate poetry.

“Don’t just listen to the Word of Truth and not respond to it, for that is the essence of self-deception. So always let His Word become like poetry written and fulfilled by your life!” James 1:22 TPT. This verse diagnoses one of the saddest things in the list of dumb stuff we can do. There are worse things, but this is the one thing that can shoot anyone in the foot quicker than a wall-eyed cowboy. Self-deception is a bad idea… heading down. In fact we are officially going the wrong way, on a down-a-later rapidly circling toward the drain. To get out of that intense slip-stream we will have to apply ourselves to repent and paddle our way back. 

Paul explains that kind of stupidity like this: “We do not have the audacity to put ourselves in the same class or compare ourselves with some who [supply testimonials to] commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they lack wisdom and behave like fools. 2 Corinthians 10:12.  First of all, it is of no value to measure myself against you – we aren’t the same! Paul is telling the Corinthian people that self-important opinions lack wisdom. The result is they are audacious and proud. Self deception always lets the perpetrator off easily — “Other people don’t think that verse means that, so I don’t have to take it seriously either“It’s too hard for me, I just can’t do it.” “I’ve prayed about it sincerely, and God hasn’t answered my prayer yet.”Like that one works!!

This is my version of what this verse means to me: if you read the bible and don’t apply what it says into your life, then deception steps in and helps you feel like you are OK. That’s because ‘there’s no need to fuss about making sure we obey the bibleactually, sincerely agreeing with it is just as good.’ In a pig’s eye! That’s a one way ticket to talking ourselves into anything but the truth. It’s like opening the door and telling deception ‘to come on in.’ Doing what the bible says— even if it hurts, because we’ve become adapted to living differently —  paves the way for His truth to transform us. We have to address our behaviour with our whole being, not just our minds.

So what does that look like? It looks like shutting your mouth when you want to give someone a serve. Or blessing and praying for the people who deliberately hurt you. I actually like to physically do something for a person who has hurt me  — as well as praying about it – it reinforces my purpose and makes it concrete.  But I want to finish by saying it is always  essential that we know what the Lord says in the book, so the Holy Spirit can bring it back into our memory. 

The part I really want to get to is at the end of that scripture. “…always let His Word become like poetry written and fulfilled by your life”  This part shows us the weight we need to put on what He says. You and I are writing His poetry over our own live sby the way we live. Sometimes I think because of all the head-knowledge we have tucked away, some of us will be lucky if we manage to create a nursery rhyme out of a whole life! Or maybe we might be on the ball enough to get a Hai ku! 

This poem we are writing is not meant to be our politely-framed eulogy;  it’s a lifetime commitment! The verse says so. Our lives and the way we live, speak out our commitment to Him as we go out into the community. It is seeable. It is so seeable Paul commented on it when he noticed people who used knowledge to puff themselves up! It is never enough for the Lord that we simply know it, we must live it out

That means we end up with visible changes. Things that other people can see. And Paul could see the error in the way some people in that church were acting. The bible says elsewhere: “taste and see that the Lord is good.” So when somebody ‘bites’ us with a nasty attitude or act, they are meant to come up with a mouthful of love, not reprisal, or even silence. Like the verse at the top of my blog page says: “I ain’t there yet, but it’s where I’m aiming!’

It is not enough to fake change, and make nicey nicey  noises. Our goal, with the Holy Spirit’s help, is to become a brand new person, redesigned by God Himself for His purposes. I think this is summed up so eloquently by John 1:14, by the way, he is talking about Jesus: And the Word (Christ) became flesh, and lived among us; and we [actually] saw His glory, glory as belongs to the [One and] only begotten Son of the Father, [the Son who is truly unique, the only One of His kind, who is] full of grace and truth (absolutely free of deception).” 

Our glorious and gracious Father became three-dimensional because Jesus took the Word of the God off the page and somehow beyond my understanding, became it. It is meant to be three-dimensional in us. He was a living breathing example of God Himself. Almighty God stopped being a series of conceptual behaviour that ruled Jewish lives, and became a Person Whose life was devoted to His Father’s will. Jesus chose to become a human being others could talk to, see, touch, smell and enjoy and walk with. Now there is something to sink our teeth into. 

Jesus became God’s ultimate poem. Let us always remember that:“… we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”Ephesians 2:10. Bye 👋

P 2728 God’s surgery.

Unlike an ordinary doctor’s surgery – in the Lord’s surgery there is no pile of dusty, over-used magazines and books, reporting on useless supercilious things from ages ago. There is just one book and if it happens to be dusty… then we are all in big trouble. 

Christians can become quite used to thinking that our lives are separate – and that each life is only joined together on church occasions, like worship or a sermon! Maybe we’ve temporarily forgotten our destiny. The Lord describes us as a Body. That may seem just like a metaphor, but it is actually a reality! The Lord Jesus is not going to marry a metaphor! The Bride of Christ is described quite thoroughly across the scriptures. ps – it’s US! …you and me – we are His Bride. Pause and think on that one! 

When I was thinking and praying over today’s blog, a phrase from yesterday’s effort kept floating through my heart. ‘One of …our tasks is to personally prove that scripture is active and effective!’ So how do we do that? We let it surgically cut away and remove any stuff we are convicted and convinced isn’t a part of His plan for our lives. Heaps of that kind of surgical stuff is written down in His book. It’s not just the ‘don’t do this bits,’ BTW, it is also the ‘please do that’ ones! The Lord Jesus Himself, gives us lists of the ways we are to live. (Check out Matthew 5) 

So let’s look at some other scriptures. The first is from 2 Timothy 3:16. “All Scripture is God-breathed [given by divine inspiration] and is profitable for instruction, for conviction [of sin], for correction [of error and restoration to obedience], for training in righteousness [learning to live in conformity to God’s will, both publicly and privately—behaving honourably with personal integrity and moral courage]; …”And Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

The thing I want to make absolutely clear is that the bible is formulated to do more than just inform us. The bible is a book of instructions. Each instruction has a purpose. EG: it says don’t carry cares, so we must not carry cares! It says give all those cares to Jesus – so we give our cares to Jesus and we don’t take them back!

This book is our boot camp. Boot camp, BTW, is the place we send soldiers to, to learn how to discipline themselves and protect themselves, as well as fight! The bible we read daily, is for that purpose. Soldiers also go to boot camp to learn how to look after their equipment and find their place in the army. It’s a very physical place, it’s not cerebral. It is not just a library, although the armed forces have libraries – it’s a place where knowledge is learnt, and applied.

Hold onto your hat – it just might blow off… We dare not pick and choose which bible verses we like, and eliminate the ones we don’t. We have just come through a time in the history of the church where we were cherry-picking verses to suit the current theology. Not a good plan. All of God’s word is good for building up, instructing, tearing down, cutting off and getting rid of stuff. If we cherry-pick things we are in great danger of mishandling our sword. You can cut yourself really badly if you mishandle a sword!

Ya might want to pause and think on that as well! My best advice is to tell the Lord you are not confident you can carry out what He says and then ask for the Holy Spirit’s help. He’s our Helper, and He wrote the book- so He knows how to get us where He wants us. The Word of God comes from the Breath of God ...and … so do WE! Read Genesis. The bible is a fitting vehicle to build up, give us courage, challenge, change and correct us. It displays God’s Love perfectly, in every single book and chapter. Rightly used, it will remove stuff from our lives that can make us fall away, stumble, or be led off into lah lah land. It is not just a book with pretty sayings, it is a living book that lays out the way we need to live. 

It is used to give us confidence, and to build up Jesus’ Bride so she is worthy of His Love. He voluntarily gave His life for us, so it seems fitting to me that we will also voluntarily give up this world’s idea of what our lives will look like, for HIM! Because the bible is about far more than just information, we cannot afford to treat it like we would the dusty magazines in a doctor’s office. We must pay attention and allow it to work on us by applying it into our lives. It is designed to refresh and renew our minds so we will think like Jesus does.

We need to let the sword of God strengthen our arm and cut away any excess stuff that will hinder us from walking with Him. The bible is not given to us for us to agree with it – it is given to us so we will DO WHAT IT SAYS. God’s book leads us into His kind of surgery, so my advice is to read it like He is talking to YOU, because HE IS! 👋

P 2588 Can you tell me how I can hear God?

It’s like the telephone or the internet. First you need a connection! Jesus talked about that in John chapter 3 – He told Nicodemus …“you must be born again.”  This is not necessarily a feeling – it isa spiritual transaction. To hear God all the time, you need to give your life to Him. BTW, this is not a try now and buy later system. When you jump in, and surrender to Jesus Christ, you are all in – you can’t just dangle your feet in and hope that will do! This place is a place of decision and complete surrender. That means I have given away my life, my hopes, my dreams to Him.

It is a serious place. This decision is not just about whether you will spend your life in heaven one day or not. It is about here and NOW, because when we’ve made this decision, we want to become God’s kids. Now, we bring heaven with us wherever we go.  This process is described in Galatians 2:20. NIV. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” 

The minute I gave my life to Christ, for Him to use for His purposes, I died. However, I am not a zombie, nor am I subject to mind-control! Instead, I have been given power to control my own mind because of what Jesus Christ did for me. Sadly I can still choose to do and say dumb things, but now I live my life knowing Christ has already forgiven me – He will not give up on me.

Because of my decision to follow Him, His life has flooded my heart, soul, mind, and body, and I found the real reason I am here… Which is to serve Him, and you!  An eternal seed was planted within me when I made that decision. It is up to me to water, fertilise and care for that seed, otherwise I am just going to stay a teeny tiny fragile little plant who expects everyone else to look after them. However, I was born into God’s kingdom to grow and mature. I can’t blame my pastor if I don’t talk to Jesus, or read the bible or obey what God has told me to do in His book. Like the mustard seed Jesus talked about in Matthew 13:31-32. I’ve been designed to grow into a spiritual tree, that gives other people spiritual food, shade and shelter, in this life. 

From the moment I was born again, I was given spiritual ears to hear Him and spiritual eyes to see Him at work in my life, and in the lives of others. However, He does not necessarily talk to me through a booming voice, or angel visitation, He talks to me in the place where I have always talked to myself. Some people call that my conscience, or my thoughts – others might say: “He speaks into my heart.” Because this new kingdom we have entered is spiritual, we can be deceived if we don’t read the bible. The bible is the manufacturer’s handbook, so it tells us what spiritual people are, and what they do. Jesus’ life and death is our visual aid. He shows us what living a life of love toward Him and others looks like.

Because … the devil has been talking to you and I from the moment we first understood language– we know that satan also talks to us in the place where we think. he’s been lying to us and telling us God does not want us or care about us, because we are not special enough!  It is up to me to read the bible so I know for myself, what God says — then I can hear when satan tells me a lie. satan is pushy, loud, and mean. he twists things and tries to make us feel stupid, small and inadequate, because he uses the place where we self-talk, to play on our feelings and bring up old circumstances. satan will even use our rational thought processes against us.

We have been absorbing knowledge one way or another all of our lives, However, what we’ve absorbed from that knowledge does not have to be accurate. It can be influenced by who taught us, or our past experiences., and by the dumb things we’ve chosen to do or read, or the people we’ve hung around with. Not every thought that pops into my head is God speaking, and sometimes those thoughts that sound like me are my enemy. satan sounds like me because I am used to his whispering. Nevertheless, I must always take whatever I hear/think, and hold it up against what God says in His book.

The best thing anyone can do to prevent deception is to know, for themselves, what the Holy Spirit has said in the bible. We need to keep reminding ourselves that we are now God’s house:“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, Who is in you, Whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honour God with your bodies.” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. 

We are meant to digest His book by reading it, and then we must obey — do what it says. That’s how the bible becomes part of us. It will change our minds and thinking. It will help us diagnose our own wrong thinking, as well revealing as satan’s whispers.We are in a war … we live in enemy territory.  Some of the worst wars often happen INSIDE our own heads! But sometimes we blame satan for stuff that is really us. Maybe we chose it, or we continued to participate in things that the bible says are not good for us. Everything we do in this life is about choices. As we start to mature, we will make better more informed choices. 

When you and I hear, whispered quietly inside our own thoughts, “I love you” ….that’s God speaking! satan doesn’t love anything. I urge you to pray for eyes to see the Lord at work in your own life, plus ears to hear Him, then check out what you hear with what it says in the bible. The bible is one of God’s ways of manifesting His steadfastness. 👋

P 2361 What’s next?

“You can pass through His open gates with the password of praise. Come right into His Presence with thanksgiving. Come bring your thank offering to Him and affectionately bless His beautiful name!”Psalms 100:4 TPT.

I believe we need to take verses like this one literally, instead of simply reading it and nodding our heads in agreement …  we actually need to do what it says. We must get into the habit of seeing the bible as a book of instructions, and not just a book of nice thoughts, interesting stories and stuff that God said to other people! I use His own words to form my prayers as He reminds me of an appropriate verse for my current situation.

The verse above is filled with instruction. It is a road map into the throne room for a personal interview with our Father!  A bunch of people can participate together, or one person can apply it just for themselves … it doesn’t matter. This means we stop what we are doing and use the password! I never thank Him for the problem … instead I thank Him that He is going to get me out of it!  “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them ALL, …” Psalm 34:19… Man, how I love those little words!!! Learn to insist no matter how long it takes.

At the same time I truly believe our fantastic Father can use any verse in His book to bring somebody to Himself! Sadly, I think we have limited our own comprehension by making exceptions. “Oh, that’s just for the Jewish people. Oh that’s just for sinners. Oh that’s just for people who never met Him.” And we miss the blessing and the deeper knowledge of His ways. 

Praising God means we will get blessed too, it’s just an automatic flow-on effect. So when it says, bring your thank offering to Him, do it. And if you find it hard to think of something to be thankful for, ask the Holy Spirit for His help… and then thank Him! And thenrepent, because you obviously have not been paying attention to what God is doing in your life! No I am not joking. 

Almighty God uses His book to tell us how we can have fellowship with Him, so we’d better be more concerned about His thoughts than someone else’s! You might wonder: ‘will my fear of failing God ever go away?’ Here’s my answer –  does satan ever fall asleep? 😳 That war inside our heads is normal, it wouldn’t be FAITH if we didn’t get stretched in the process! 

“Whatever He says to you, do it. Mary said that to some servants at a wedding once. She had a right to ask them to do that – she knew Father God’s ways first hand! She put her body on the line. I’ve practiced doing that scripture for 50 years, ever since I first read it. Boy, I’ve done some monumentally stupid stuff, trust me – I’ve mentioned that on this site … but I’d rather try than excuse myself, and miss the blessing of seeing God do what He does best – He loves to surprise people!  Including me.

How can we affectionately bless His holy Name if we are standing way off in the distance, too scared to be seen??Maybe we are scared He will bring up something we hope He doesn’t know we’ve been doing, or something we have already done?! Get over yourself, and fix the things that need fixing. I know other people are difficult, I have a bunch of those people in my life. He knows how to handle them. We need to just follow the prompts and watch what He will do with our obedience.

Personally, I have a bunch of awkward messed-up things in my life that look like a cat got at my knitting! Stuff is tangled up so badly I have no confidence it can ever be untangled, unless He does it. But I know my God, and I’m not taking my faith back, because I know, that I know that – HE IS GOOD and His mercy endures forever. (That’s another Psalm BTW.) I learnt that stuff by using my faith – especially at times when things didn’t work out and I could see no solution. Our God loves the impossible. I loathe the impossible, I get so stretched by stuff I feel like I am going to break – but so far … He just keeps bailing me out. However, you probably won’t ever hear me say: ‘Oh goodie! Another terrible test for me to trust God with.’ 

But those moments are the time to enter His gates with thanksgiving and go right on into His courts with praise. Why? Well, first of all, praise and thanksgiving won’t change God’s mind –  He is always for us. Praise and thanksgiving changes ME! We all need to stop paying lip-service to what He says and act on it instead. The bible is a book filled with instructions, plus stories about other people who followed instructions! It ain’t rocket science. 👋🏻