Dying to self

P 3486 Jesus is the gift that keeps on giving.

/ DVH

One of the biggest mistakes we can make today, is to allow our own thinking to justify us … instead we need to ask the Lord to help us to see our situations with His kind of clarity. As I see it, Christians seem to vacillate between: “Oh, I am such a bad person” … OR … “I’m trying, I’m doing my best!” That last one sounds like a great answer… but the truth is –  why would we try and try to do our best, when Jesus’ best is available to us? That’s just nuts! 

But as we walk with Him, listening to Him, on purpose — we will discover a whole other way to live. Let’s acknowledge that we might make mistakes— but we should never plan to misuse His Grace. Walking with Him is the entire focus of walking on the narrow way – He is the narrow way. We enter into His kingdom … the one we are told to enter into first! Meanwhile, repentance hasn’t fallen out of the book, it is still there, Jesus Himself taught about it. So is repairing any damage we may do to others. Denial is also a foolish way to try to live a life built on GRACE. It’s the truth that sets us free.

Otherwise we can end up spiritually, living like we have to clean our house in order to get ready for professional cleaners! Boy is that a waste of time, angst and energy. Why try to do the job yourself when it has already been done and paid for? This shows a distinct lack of faith in what Jesus has already done. Let’s get this straight once and forever OK? We are all sinful people. There is no worse sinful, or mostly good sinful people, who occasionally do the wrong thing. There’s just sinful! The people who captured the Lord’s attention were the ones who were prepared to go after Him, and admit their faults, then humble themselves. 

That woman who crawled into a dinner party to wash Jesus’ feet with her tears etc. most likely crawled past the men who had used her in the past! And the woman at the well ran back into the town that could easily have housed her previous four husbands in it! These women did not care what others said, they had found something worth more than position, or ego. Real life. Those Pharisees who turned up their noses and got legalistic with Jesus, had the personification of their rules right in front of them. Yet they yelled at Him for showing mercy because He healed the sick on the Sabbath.

However, the sinner on the cross next to the Lord, saw an opportunity and he took it. This opportunity is always ours to take. Life is short – live for Jesus right now, and keep on doing it day by day. This is an odd thing – the worst sinners often know how to repent better than we do. I sincerely exhort you, please don’t let your pride keep you from bonding with the One Who died to save you. Humbling ourselves helps us with true perspective. It hones our focus. It helps us take His … “…yoke upon us and learn from Him, for He is gentle (meek) and humble (lowly) in heart, and we will find rest (relief and ease and refreshment and recreation and blessed quiet) for our souls.” Matthew 11:29. (Alterations mine.) 

Did you get that? Rest comes from being yoked with Jesus. Walking with Him at the same pace He is going, following His leadership. It doesn’t come from looking inside, it comes from looking at Him, and making adjustments with His help, wherever necessary. Looking inside only muddies the water. We can end up blaming others for our behaviour or endlessly berating ourselves. Neither of those things are profitable. However, the Word of God on the inside is designed to guide our daily thoughts. That’s what renewing our minds means. We exchange our POV for His POV!

The Lord made His participation in that process clear in John 12:49: “For I did not speak on My own, but the Father who sent Me commanded Me to say all that I have spoken …” And in John 5:19,20 we see that He had guidance in everything He heard and did. “Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by Himself; He can do only what He sees His Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him all he does. Yes, and He will show Him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed.”

The church is living below the standard Christ Himself set and MET. He has already empowered each one of us to meet that standard. We simply need to totally depend upon the Holy Spirit to lead us. Press in, and remember, that our Lord is not a vending machine. Up until now, we’ve been following rules – not a Person! Now we follow Him, just like the disciples did.

He LIMITED HIMSELF so we can follow Him. Living and dying to self, like Jesus did, is possible. Many people have followed the Lord down that same pathway of dying to self and being resurrected into a new life — while they were still here on earth. Their testimonies to His Grace in action in their earthly lives, are filling up the praises of angels and saints in heaven. 

That’s what happens when you seek His kingdom first. He adds a whole lot of things to us as part of the package. He’s the glorious gift from God that keeps on giving and giving and giving. Hallelujah! Bye. 🙌.

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. 👋.

P3386 Unusual style of fighting.        

/ DVH

When Jesus’ disciple Peter’s anger flared up at some soldiers who had come armed to the teeth to take the Lord away — the Lord Himself said: “put your sword back in its place … for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” Matthew 26:52. Hatred can so easily explode into actions, and then we hurt others, and ourselves, in the process. We hurt our own hearts when we hate. We can’t afford to live any other way except for living in love. In love with God, and the people who drive us crazy.

We are the people who fight on our knees! Unfortunately, many of us cannot be trusted with a gun, because most of the time, we don’t know what spirit we are in! Jesus had already fought and won the above battle, in the garden of Gethsemane, on His knees — while His disciples were sleeping. Peter’s sword was just going to hurt someone, and it did! Meanwhile, what is Peter – the fisherman – doing with a sword? … Moving on …

We are not fighting the same kind of war that many other people fight, although what we have to say, is equally as explosive. Our war is spiritual. Because “the weapons of our warfare are not CARNAL but they are mighty because they pull down strongholds.” 2 Corinthians 10:4. We can’t win if we continue to fight with the weapons from this world, because Jesus has already given us our appointed task. All we will do is kill off more people that our Lord loves. We are clearly told, by the Lord Jesus Himself, to “pray for our enemies” and “do good to those who despitefully use us.” 

Open hands in prayer, are far more effective than the clenched fist of war. If we are tempted to hate, then we must choose to bow our knee. And then we start praying for the people who are hurting, persecuting and despitefully using us. Pray for them like they are your own family!! Sometimes those people hurting you ARE your own family!

Pray for their salvation. Pray for redemption from sin. PRAY and then pray some more. We are not fighting that person in front of us, we are fighting the devil on his back. Those people who hate us believe in what they are doing because they’ve carefully been taught to hate. They don’t know what real love is. When an honest man meets Jesus, his first response is to bend his knee and say: ‘I didn’t know love like this existed.’ 

You and I have been appointed by Him to bring His love with us wherever we go. That happens when we choose to put down this world’s plans and ideas, and pick up the life Jesus has chosen for us. LOVE is the only antidote for hate, and love is the way to win. Even if we die … WE still WIN! Paul said that in Philippians 1:21. “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” That is our banner. 

Oh, let’s be real here for a minute. How can we possibly say that being dead is better than living, when we have a mortgage, kids, extended family and obligations to others? Because we have been practising dying to self for years. That’s how. Now we live our lives making daily hard choices to die to our own desires – and then, at the moment of deep impact, we will have enough freedom to choose to follow the Holy Spirit, wherever He goes.

Let’s use the right weapons to fight. The bible says: Love conquers everything. Meanwhile, we can’t fight a spiritual war with tolerance  … because tolerance wears thin – and eventually it wears off – we need God’s supernatural love. Press in, beloved of God, and don’t stop until you get it! The people we think are our problem, are the ones God calls us to.

When we put on the whole armour of God we are not doing it to go to WAR, we are doing it to protect the faith that is in us. These weapons , these protections – this armour – has been given to us to protect us. It will stop us from being taken out of the fight. Our Father needs every single one of His kids standing in their place doing what He put us here to do – loving Him first, then others. In His eyes ALL of mankind is irreplaceable. 

We see a multitude of people – but Father God sees Amar, George, Hina, Amanda, Lev,  Malosi, Mary, Rufus, Jai, Vasilisa, Jessica, Patrick, Joachim, Freya, Zyar, Ikem and Leah! Our Heavenly Father is such an incredibly good, good Father. He sees each one of us as if we were the only one. We’ve been told to “put on the whole armour of God.” It will protect us from the fiery darts of the enemy so we can stand in the middle of the war raging all around us. Just like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, stood in a fiery furnace and Jesus joined them there. He’ll join us in prayer for our enemy’s souls too.

Jesus came here to show people just like you and I, that there is another way to live this life, one day at a time, one step at a time. He did not pick a fight with anyone. These battles need to be stopped in our prayer closets. Then we can see our TRUE purpose, because we’ve chosen to put aside this world’s ideas of what a perfect life should look like.  

In the meantime, we can have utter confidence, because we know how this fight ends. We win! So we will continue to participate in unusual fighting with interesting weapons. Prayer, grace, kindness, forgiveness, love, joy, peace etc., these things are our weapons. We choose to turn the other cheek, and walk the extra mile, and we give some demanding guy our tunic when he asks for our coat! Bye, 👋. 

P 3228 Let’s not miss our highest calling.

/ DVH

Instead of blaming another human being for our behaviour, and holding our own desire to change hostage to someone else’s desire to change – why don’t we pull up our grown up pants and deal with ourselves at the source of our own anger and need? We cannot afford to let anybody but the Lord Himself to be in charge of our feelings, because He’s the only Person we can truly trust. Our highest calling is to believe He is good, when everything around us and attacking us, is bad! It’s time we realised complaining, or boo-hooing doesn’t work.

The Israelites got into all kinds of trouble when they accused the Lord of treating them badly. They said He wasn’t doing things the way they thought a god should. BTW, that happened right after the Lord had just walked them all safely through the bottom of an ocean, killed all their enemies, brought water out of a rock, fed them angel food, plus nobody got sick, and their clothes didn’t wear out!! It’s a bad move to be an ungrateful, critical child of God. It shows a distinct lack of knowledge of Who He is, and it is incredibly important for us to know and trust Who He is.

Meanwhile, because of His love for His Father and humanity, Jesus deliberately ‘put skin on’ and came here and made Himself vulnerable to us. He had human needs, yet He ended up with a bunch of disciples who also totally missed the point of why He was sent here in the first place! Nobody else understood His mission. A wicked king beheaded the only person who understood living His kind of life. Things were so bad for Jesus that when Peter said: “Truly, You are the Son of the Living God,” the Lord knew that it had to be the Holy Spirit speaking through Peter, because Peter was just plain clueless.

Jesus had to rely upon His Father guiding Him internally, just like we do. Everyone else around Him was too busy with their own needs and wants. Why do you think — at the end of an already-busy-filled-with-people-grabbing-at-Him day – Jesus then went out and climbed up a mountain? Maybe He simply wanted to worship God, and have some real spiritual input and company … and we think we are lonely! Imagine being absolute purity and innocence, and having to deal with all kinds of people by choosing to live in never-ending Grace. The Lord did not spend one second in His Father’s Presence complaining about anything. Let’s thank Him for His self-control and patience.

.Here’s another dumb thing we can sometimes do. We dash about with hurt squirting out in every direction like a ruptured aorta, but at the same time we start recruiting other people to agree with us that our troubles are not right, and we shouldn’t have to put up with it! We grab at man’s sympathy over God’s love. There’s another bad idea! The Israelites did a whole of of mumbling and complaining … look where it got them. It is better to go to your Heavenly Father, and ask Him for the Grace to bear with whatever it is going on in you, or around you. Doing this stuff on our own is sheer lunacy. Human beings are not equipped to “love their enemies and do good to those who despitefully use us…” we will always need His HELP.

It seems to me when we were in Christian nursery school  learning the truths of God, we skipped right by, ‘please help me” into … “ME DO IT!” His Grace is our spiritual air, just like thankfulness is part of our worship. Here’s a prayer that I pray often, “Lord please help me because that person is driving me crazy! I desperately need your Mercy and Grace.” Amen. There is no shame in asking! God has provided, and we praise Him for His Grace!  If we need food or water or somewhere to live, we ask Him for that. We also need a constant flow of His Grace and Mercy to survive in a time like ours. There are a million self-help books to prove to us that we are in the right, but only the Lord’s Good Book to convict us of our own sin!

In my opinion this is why so many Christians are living mediocre lives. They try so hard to be faithful to God, but what they have been taught does not line up with their own personal experiences and failure gets to them. They don’t love Him any less – that’s still faith! In the middle of some of the worst trials any of us will ever see, they dearly love Jesus, and they do their best to do what He says. Amazing! But why work at it when the work has already been done! Let’s all make sure that we put our faith in His goodness, not in happy results. That’s where the Israelites missed it.

The truth is we don’t always need Him to change our circumstances, but we do need Him to change us. When our theology doesn’t match up with His Word, then our theology needs to change. Without our passionate devotion to obedience, we are doomed to live in disappointment when that lands on us. Following Him includes dying to self, and putting our own personal comfort behind us. Let’s shake off all the snares that so easily entangle us and move on past the first floor. He has work for all of us to do. Trusting Him despite the circumstances is our highest calling. Bye. 👋 

“Carefully consider all that I’ve taught you, and may our Lord inspire you with wisdom and revelation in everything you say and do. But make Jesus, the Anointed One, your focus in life and ministry. For He came to earth as the descendant of David and rose from the dead, according to the revelation of the gospel that God has given me.” 2 Timothy 2:7-8 TPT 

P 3226 It’s plain to see …

/ DVH

…that if something is this important, we had better pay attention to it. Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 13:1-4 MSG: ”If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”

Then Paul goes on to say what love looks like, how it sounds, how it’s supposed to be prioritised in our every day lives. When I read this I was curious to find out how you get this kind of love, the kind that means we are bankrupt without it.  I like to find something I can do, not just know … and right down in Verse 13, I found something we can all do. Of course the minute I read it I knew this wasn’t going to be easy peasy. I will need to treat dying to self, as the important part of living by faith. Jesus clearly taught us to really live for His sake, we will have to choose to die to what we want. 

Now here’s how we move toward living a life of love – verse 13:  “But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to DO to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.” Well that sounds like some pretty tough homework to me. Let’s start by loving our enemies, doing that is our greatest diagnostic tool. The Lord Himself told us to “…love our enemies and do good to those who despitefully use us.”

People who irritate us fall into this category too. Whatever words or actions we use – this is to be our primary aim in all our interactions with others! We don’t have to plan or allow for failure because we have the Holy Spirit as our Helper and Counsellor! Now, in a pinch, most of us can pretend to be nice to their enemies. but that’s where those qualities listed in Chapter 13, verse 4 – 8 draw a distinct line. Those verses totally eliminate that kind of self-deceiving response.

The truth is, if someone we dislike pokes the bear on the inside of us, we could easily find that bear ain’t dead yet! The bible says that we are to love our enemies, so something has to change and the Lord picked ME!  Now the best question to ask is what’s in MY way? I personally discovered that I have loads of bad attitudes hidden in corners of my heart, and I tippy-toe around those infected areas so I can look like everyone else. However if we look for perfection, we will disappoint ourselves. He’s the perfect one. That’s WHY we need HIS help!

Adults/mature Christians choose to make their choices based on someone else’s good. Jesus did it, and we are following Him, so that means we live like that too. We can pray in tongues until we are a hundred, the real point of the Holy Spirit’s Presence, is a changed heart. However, that does not always mean we give in to other people, Jesus spoke the truth in love. There are times when I am speaking the truth because I know what the truth is, yet I know that I have no love. There I am bonging away, ignoring the greatest opportunity I can have but choosing to hide from reality. 

It’s no wonder the other person can’t hear me, the best line of connection I have is LOVE. When I obey what the Lord says, I am choosing to kill off any childish attitudes that want revenge, recognition or vindication etc. I am actively, powerfully, choosing to LOVE. This means I am prepared to stand by, if I need to, silently. Not withholding love, but extending Grace. There is no cause for self praise if I do what I am supposed to do. 

Instead I am deliberately choosing to love that other person, by not returning anger for anger – punishment for punishment. And I do this because I love the Lord more than I give two hoots about what I want. Obedience is God’s love language, and I want to speak His language. If we can’t speak the same language then how can we be intimate? So I won’t take revenge in gossip, or avoidance. Instead I will rely upon the Lord to give me those things I need, using my faith, because, those things are in His domain. Otherwise I will probably go back to the nasty things I can do all by myself in a heartbeat. 

Let’s move on to Colossians 3: 12-14 and get a good clear look at our wardrobe. “So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.”  

The most important asset for being chosen to be God’s own precious people, is this wardrobe.  We must let Him choose our responses, our ‘garments’ in any given situation. We simply need to indicate that we want Him to help us appropriate what we need, using our faith that He will tell us. The Holy Spirit is always available, andHe will pick out our moment by moment ‘clothes’ for us. He’s brilliant at it. Love is important to God, it is Who He is. He is love personified.

It is essential that we learn to love the way He loved us, otherwise we will not mature. Immature Christians can do a great deal of damage, as well as loads of dumb stuff! And if you think that you are the exception because your life has been hard and you’ve been damaged by it, I want to encourage everyone to go back into the mirror of His Word and look harder. It is plain to see, that love is THE priority, nothing else is worth a bean without it! Bye. 👋

Let the Holy Spirit choose your spiritual clothes.

P 3205 A Clear Focus.

/ DVH

“We look away from the natural realm and we focus our attention and expectation onto Jesus Who birthed faith within us and Who leads us forward into faith’s perfection. His example is this: Because His heart was focused on the joy of knowing that you would be His, He endured the agony of the cross and conquered its humiliation, and now sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God!” Hebrews 12:2 TPT.

If that scripture doesn’t move our hearts toward total surrender then I don’t know what will! The idea and actuality of  “…knowing you would be His …” is something none of us have earned or deserved. Even our desire to follow Jesus, wholeheartedly, or not … comes from the One Who birthed our faith on a cross, as He hung there dying. The thing is, I’ve noticed many Christians act like dying to self is an optional extra. It isn’t. 

Because we have been born again. and made the choice to participate in the obedient act of baptism — all that is a declaration of our intent to die to self. Now, day by day we live out that intention by monitoring and adapting our own choices, with His help. It may be a choice, but if we choose not to die, we won’t produce fruit. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies …”  Many Christians live in this nether world. They feel like failures because they can’t produce the stuff, and yet they long to please their Lord with all their hearts. Because they don’t know what comes AFTER baptism.

It is only when we choose to focus on dying to self daily, that we will find the new life Jesus talked about all the time. Every time we say ‘no’ to self and ‘yes’ to Him, we are choosing to die, and His spiritual fruit of self-control begins to build and grow inside us. It takes a while for a nub on an apple tree to grow a fully mature apple. But the thing is – that apple doesn’t leap on and off the tree during the process! It clings to the tree because the apple tree provides the nutrients for it to grow. Jesus said in John 15:4: “Remain in Me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me.”  Let’s choose to know what Jesus said, thought, and did — because that is now the source of His life in us. We live as He lived, through our own freely-made choices, because we trust Him.

Clinging to Jesus is the only way we can grow. What He did at Calvary and in His death, has out-of-this-world  power to overcome, in it. “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.” Matthew 28:16. In this particular scripture, the Lord had already conquered death, defeated the devil and his minions, and now He is returning to hand over the reins to His disciples. We don’t participate in the power of God by simply claiming it, we operate in the power of God by believing what He said and acting on it. Our decisive death to self opens the door to living differently. We will not misuse Christ’s power when we learn about the cost, personally! 

His power has been given to us, and is available to us, to appropriate. So now we can leave being selfish, self-centred, and our uncaring self, behind – and grow into lovers of Jesus, who would gladly die for Him and others! Now we choose to daily walk as He walked, in humility, with His love for His Father guiding His every step. Jesus treasured His fellowship with His Heavenly Father. So He made hard decisions, against Himself, and His preferences, in order to walk with His Father, and bring heaven down here to earth.

Every step of faith we take, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance frees us from the chains, distractions and tyrannies of this world. Don’t let the words, death, dying, unselfish etc. put you off. We don’t do any of this in our own  strength, our obedience flows as we choose His ways. We grow there, one choice at a time. I read the bible, and I can see what God wants for me, so I just do what He says! This process may be progressive, but it was never designed to be static. Progressive, forward movement is part of the deal. We participate in growing fruit by clinging to the vine, that is Christ, and through that we learn how to live a life of Love.

“For we reach the goal of fulfilling all the commandments when we love others deeply with a pure heart, a clean conscience, and sincere faith.” 1 Timothy 1:5. It’s the way we love, that affects our hearts. The pure heart, clean conscience and sincere faith comes AS we learn to walk with the Holy Spirit. In the beginning, it seems like trial and error, but as we keep choosing Him and keep walking with Him, we discover that loving others starts to flow. Whenever we say or do something dumb, now we will want to immediately repent. WHY? Because we are walking with LOVE Himself and He is a joy to walk with.

The more you walk with Him, the more you want to walk with Him. Our focus changes from ‘me and what I want’to seeking ‘His kingdom and what He wants.’  I no longer have to make myself witness it begins to leak out of me. The other day I grabbed a lady’s hand and just started praying for her – and I didn’t even ask her permission! I was half-way through praying when I realised, I may have committed some sort of human faux pas! In those moments He’s just as real to other people as He is to you. Let us steadfastly, devotedly, and clearly focus our attention on the things that last.  Bye. 👋

P 3151 Good fruit.

/ DVH

The Lord wants me to talk about this particular subject one more time… so here we go …it seems to me that all those things I have been talking about in the past few days, are actually tied together. So IF we find we are reluctant to forgive someone else, it definitely means something, and we need to look at that particular situation very carefully. To begin with it means Jesus just slipped out of our focus!

We need to understand that the people who love Jesus know when they are wrong, because the Holy Spirit whispers to them! Plus the scriptures jump out at us and convict us. At the same time, any one of us can feel beaten up by negative circumstances. I think it is about vulnerability — we don’t want to make ourselves vulnerable to anyone we feel we can’t trust. 

That, BTW, is why it is a good plan to give difficult people to the Lord and leave them with Him. We can be so incredibly disappointed or hurt by someone else’s actions, that it seems like we can’t let things go. Especially when the other person has not acknowledged our pain, or asked for forgiveness. Or they keep on doing the thing that started the mess in the first place! That’s when our decisions need to kick in.

This kind of negative reaction shows the importance of redemptive power in all our lives. If you can get stuck on how you feel about what someone else did — then imagine how stuck they are in your mind, when we constantly see them through the filter of their past deeds/misdeeds! Here is something I use to check on my forgiveness metre. If someone’s name causes me to grind my teeth, either inwardly or outwardly, this means I have something that I need to get alone with the Lord to fix.

Seeing anyone through that kind filter can lead to a highly volatile situation — where our bad history with a person outweighs anything good, and everything they say and do has another meaning to us! The result is we are distracted and we don’t have to look at that list we are silently compiling against them. At the same time holding on to that list can be oh, so useful to prove our point about how mean they are!

All of us can easily find reasons, or excuses for our behaviour… whilst analysing someone else’s attitudes or what they have said. Meanwhile, our enemy is delighted to drag all kinds of stuff out periodically, to ?help? us remember when that other person does something we don’t like again. 

This is why forgiveness needs to be based on choice. We need to make a quality permanent decision that following Jesus is the way we have chosen to live, and then we must choose to protect that decision! In a nutshell becoming a Christian means we have given up the right to make lists! If we end up avoiding people, then we probably have a list somewhere – tucked away in our psyche. It took me a long time to realise that keeping a list of other people’s sins is not true protection. It’s a trap!

The worst thing about keeping lists, is that this trait can start in childhood, as a result of imperfect parenting. Childish assessments are not accurate, because they come from a brain that is not completely developed or matured! When we hold something against someone from our past — I’ve noticed that anybody else who even remotely sounds like the people we are offended with — ends up thrown into the same pile. Pretty soon that pile gets so high, we can’t see or hear God over it. 

Let’s remind ourselves that our stated aim as followers of Jesus, is to be the people who forgive and release others on the spot .Otherwise that little niggle in the background of our thoughts quickly becomes a whirlpool. Then we have no idea why we are going round and round instead of moving forward. Our God is incredibly kind, He won’t let us move forward while we are dragging stuff behind us like the tail on a comet.

Let’s realise we cannot afford to relinquish our God-given right to be free from captivity – simply because we want to choose to be angry at someone else! Being mad at someone is still captivity! Almighty God is more than able to protect us, we don’t need to protect ourselves anymore. Let’s not fall into the trap of holding a grudge to keep ourselves supposedly safe. “My God is my protection and with Him I am safe.” Psalm 18:2.

Meanwhile there can be a gap between believing, and living that way – it’s time to close those gaps. There are times when we end up chasing healing, which is another subject altogether. Healing can be another little side eddy to get stuck in — it can become an excuse we use to hide from God and others. Our healing is in our proximity to Jesus, stay with Him and watch what He will do with you. To be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I look at people and think:“Aren’t you sick of going round and round yet?” Now I need to repent!!

The belief that Father God is always for us must stay at the forefront of our minds. Even when it seems that everything we hoped for and loved is facing extinction. That’s what dying to self is like. “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But IF it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24. Dying to self opens us up to the things we can’t see.

Our God is devoted to His harvest coming out of our lives. Namely – FRUIT.  And we can’t hang on to grudges and stuff and still produce good fruit. Instead we will bring forth diseased produce, in our own lives and in the lives of others. Bye 👋.

P 3120 Know what you believe.

/ DVH

“Christ’s resurrection is (y)OUR resurrection too. This is why we are to yearn for all that is above, for that’s where Christ sits enthroned at the place of all power, honour, and authority!” Colossians 3:1 TPT. My first question—do you often during your day, reflect on what Jesus did for YOU? Are your thoughts on His kingdom, or yours? I thank Him when blessings come, and pray ‘help,’ when stuff is difficult. Whatever we mull over and meditate on influences our daily walk of faith. Don’t beat yourself up if you forget or overlook His new way to live. Just remember, that  faith, and our awareness of His love for us, will simply melt away IF we lose focus;  or we choose to live in the dark and pasty, unhealthy light of this world’s rejection, ideas, schemes and plans.

Meanwhile, even though we may not actually say – ”I choose this” – we can end up choosing to stew on bad stuff by default. A lack of a positive God-breathed choice will leave a vacuum that satan would be delighted to fill! That guy will get us going round and round and round:  worrying about this, thinking about how to fix that, and concentrating on the lacks we all have … Until we have wasted away our precious time. Time is a gift. And we don’t have to live that way anymore. Just as surely as Peter, (who was in prison at the time), looked up and saw his jail door open – and walked out a free man!  Our jail door is also OPEN. Look up!! Revise your circumstances. We need to walk out of sin’s prison using our faith. 

At the same time we can concentrate all our thoughts and efforts on dying to self, but in the end that will just make us SIN conscious. We want to be Him-conscious, so I pray He will reveal Himself to me during my day. We need to add to our life with Him, by seeing Him at work in our lives, not just concentrate on getting rid of our sin or adverse circumstances. Jesus Christ has already done that for us! Because God’s unrelenting, always available, never-ending kingdom power was released at Calvary – we can NOW live in this world absolutely devoted to Him.  He has a much better plan for your life and mine than either of us can imagine!

“For we know that our old self WAS crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—…” Romans 6:6. Sin, regret, anxiety does not have to be in charge of our lives anymore! Our minds, our emotions will help us when they are fixed on Him;  to do that is not difficult, we meditate on His never-ending love.  We can’t afford to give up our precious time stewing over former things, turn your worry into prayers of thanksgiving for Who He is and what He did for you.

Worry is a habit – habits can be changed. When we gave our lives to Jesus, we put Him in charge. And His response 2000+years ago, was to take our sin with Him to the cross and nail it there in HIS OWN BODY. The urge, desire, and the will to sin has been dealt with, we are now free to choose.“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.” Galatians 2:20. 

That’s how we walk out our Promised land of becoming a new creation. I don’t ignore sin, or gloss it over, or pretend it didn’t happen, instead I acknowledge it on the spot, and repent and repair things. Why? There is incredible power in redemption! satan can’t make us do anything anymore because of what Jesus did for us. But unlike satan – the Lord will not coerce us or make us do anything. He loves our freely-made choices!!  We were not saved just so we can go to heaven and be with Him one day in the future… He saved us for here and now, today—from this world, the devil and ourselves —so we can live our earthly lives, like He would. 

It was a transaction. An exchange, His life, freely laid down, bought us a new way to live and the power to do it. It was the greatest LOVE GIFT EVER GIVEN. Our sin has been exchanged for His new life overflowing in us, we take on His obedience, His passionate desire to please His Father. It was not God’s plan just to kill off sin!… Instead, Christ defeated its power over mankind! Our Father’s plan was to give us back what Adam and Eve had in the garden … the greatest inheritance ever – Emmanuel, God-with-us. The freedom to choose what is good right and profitable, AND THE POWER TO DO IT.

Acts 1:8:“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”The Holy Spirit fell on mankind at Pentecost and HE DIDN’T LEAVE. He is still here, to help, counsel, transform, and motivate us into our new life in Christ. He didn’t give us  power just so we can raise the dead, heal the sick etc! Those blessings are a by-product of our redemption.We should all live like that. But that is not God’s primary AIM. 

The Holy Spirit came to help us, and live inside us, so we can live a victorious, overcoming life, in a world that is going to hell in a hand basket. The person I was 52 years ago, died the minute I asked Jesus to come into my life. That is also true for you. If you dearly love and want Him — He will be yours, forever. His love is so great He chose to die for the whole world, even those people who refuse to accept Him. Imagine that. We have been bought with an unbelievable price.

Daily, with His help, we identify and guerrilla fight all the stubborn stuff we’ve cultivated over the previous years before we met Him. Those things that keep pretending they have a hold over us. Now we can take God at His Word and believe Him. That’s how faith works. we refuse to listen to the so-called evidence that pops its ugly head up, and say to ourselves: “What does the Lord have to say about that? Is He REALLY like that?” satan can no longer use my history to define me – even if I did something extremely dumb yesterday! I have been redefined as alive in Christ. I urge you, take the time to know what you believe. Bye. 👋

P 3028 Yield.

/ DVH

“Let me emphasise this: As you yield to the dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life. When your self-life craves the things that offend the Holy Spirit you hinder Him from living free within you! And the Holy Spirit’s intense cravings hinder your self-life from dominating you! So then, the two incompatible and conflicting forces within you are your self-life of the flesh and the new creation life of the Spirit. But when you yield to the life of the Spirit, you will no longer be living under the law, but soaring above it!” Galatians 5:16-18 TPT.

Father God has a better way to live, instead of being driven around by what I think I need or want. When I follow Him, He takes care of all that stuff along the way. If He doesn’t, then I didn’t need whatever it was in the first place. Meanwhile, that statement comes under the heading of “easier said than done!” My flesh yells at me, “too hard – enough already!!” Being extremely spiritually sharp, that’s when I finally figured out: “Oh! He’s doing something else!” 🙄

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says this:‘Yield’ can mean “to stop trying to resist something” or “to stop trying to fight someone or something.”

Yielding to the Holy Spirit means denying myself – will I have that last word or not? When I yield to the Lord’s processes, that will definitely teach me how much flesh I still have. People have asked me how do you know when you’ve prayed enough and you need to let go of things, or even people? … My answer is this – let go the minute you realise you are holding on! Put the Lord in charge of everything in your life. That’s what Jesus’ blood bought and paid for. He paid to give us access to all His wisdom, His ability to love, be joyful, be patient etc. But we will need to let GO of what we want, or what we think is best, for us. 

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” 1 Corinthians 1:27. I’ve found that I simply need to listen, pay attention to the book and obey the One Who knows everything … and then you can look wa-ay smarter than you really are! “For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” 1 Corinthians 1:19. Clever people need to watch out, you may need a big dose of humility any minute. However, that is not an excuse to hide in ignorance either.

I am not talking about rejecting education, by the way. Get some – be that person, go for it! What I am talking about is that you cannot just ‘study out’ or manufacture a relationship with people, or the Lord! It has to be ‘lived out’ minute by minute, both the good bits and bad bits. Learning to trust that other person by being open and honest about who you are. Knowing any subject does not mean you know the writer!

The secret to dying to self is to love Jesus more than you love you! Then any sacrifices become part of the process. However having faith and dying to self does not mean you sell your house and possessions, and go and plonk yourself on the curb somewhere because a voice told you to do it. Check with more mature people and get them praying too, first.

Our flesh does not like to go without what it wants. In the West, we are quite addicted to comfort, safety and the opportunity to do what we want, whenever we want to. In other places in this world those things do not even enter someone’s agenda for a minute. Those dear people are too busy avoiding death, prison, disease, starvation, and active opposition, while they are trying to find somewhere to sleep! 

The most important word in the whole scripture I’ve chosen today is YIELD. We can hinder the Lord from doing what He wants simply by indulging ourselves. It is so easy to let the flesh tell us:“It’s too hard, God wouldn’t want me to do something hard, He loves me. Life has been terrible lately, surely He doesn’t want me to continue to suffer!” BTW, knowledge, or acknowledgement of our faults is not enough, action is always required.

Father God loves us so much that He willingly gave His only Son to die in our place … did you get that? Jesus died, and the Precious Trinity agreed that it was the only way to save YOU and ME!  Ya might want to stop and think about that. God has a much different value system than we do! 

Fear can be a huge hindrance, so can pride. But yielding to God is a great way to get rid of those things. Face the fear head on and do it anyway. Some of the time pride is just a ‘front’ we put on to hide fear of failure. 

But the most important thing we need to remember is in those above verses — whatever we yield to will dominate us! Remember, we have been reborn to live above earthly things, Now we have a brand new life waiting for us to claim it, using our faith, and we aim to walk with Jesus day by day. We simply need to practice doing things His Way and remember to yield. Bye👋.

P 3006 God always has a bigger plan!

/ DVH

John 18:10-11: “Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it and struck the high priest’s servant, cutting off his right ear. (The servant’s name was Malchus.) Jesus commanded Peter, “Put your sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given Me?”

There are times in our lives when we have a very painful  cup set before us, just like our Lord Jesus did. At those moments, it seems horrendous to even contemplate accepting that vessel  —- let alone drinking from it! Yet in this verse the Lord defended that cup to Peter. It was the one He knew His Father wanted Him to drink. In the light of the cross, we can clearly see the purpose that Almighty God always had on the other side of this awful ghastly time … mainly because we have the benefit of hindsight – and we have the book!. 

But in our everyday lives it is much harder to comprehend what has sometimes been set before us. Our natural instinct is to fight the idea that we are meant to eat and drink some of the things the Lord has allowed to impact our lives. I’ve heard people say: “God would never ask me to do such a thing!”“ I thought that you said God is good – why would He ask me to live through this?” My short answer is this: because He asked it of His Son, first. 

The reality is this, in order for us to be like Jesus, we need to choose to follow the Lord, step by step through the troubles and tribulations of this life, because at the same time we are learning to live resurrected lives. In the presence of death, a resurrected life shines so brightly. However, the bible also tells us we will have times of triumph when we tell trouble and strife to get out of our way! Sometimes we resist, and trouble flees, and sometimes we quite simply need to go through. 

Dying to self is painful, it is utterly impossible without the Holy Spirit’s Presence in our lives. And we cannot live in the fullness of the Christian life without Him. You can’t have a resurrected life without death first! There may be times we are simply asked to contemplate drinking the cup of suffering, and in those times, we learn to yield — but at other times we cannot escape, the only way forward is to walk into the valley of the shadow of death.

However that situation comes upon us  – we need to keep walking through it. He will walk with us, and He asks us to walk through any hardship, and even the kind of destruction that looms against us. HOWEVER – satan cannot design one thing that can bring forth life … But even death itself, under the Lord’s watchful, passionate eye, brings LIFE and more life in abundance. Sometimes the way to get more life is to die!

Acting like Peter did, when he sliced off that soldier’s ear, is the same as taking difficult matters into our own hands. When the Lord does not give us personal intimate instructions, we always have access to His book filled with the Way He wants us to respond. However, cutting off someone else’s ear for retribution and defence — is not the way forward. Anger breeds more anger, revenge breeds more revenge, and hatred and violence breed an even greater desire for the kind of hatred that can lead to murder! 

God always has a bigger plan than we do. Think about it. Do we think that the Lord has ever said: ‘Whoops, I missed that one!?’ We all know that His timing is perfect, even in the worst possible times. Now, hold onto your hat —- here’s a verse that nobody likes much: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.”  Psalm 116:15:  I’m pretty sure nobody has ever stitched verse that onto a sampler and hung it up on the wall.

However, if you have lost someone dear to you, then this verse is also not the kind of verse that will comfort you instantly. Instead remember and comfort yourself with the thought that Mary and Martha couldn’t not see the bigger reality when Lazarus had been dead 3 days. We can all falter under that kind of pressure. Their faith was in Jesus doing something about the situation before things got to that stage, but Jesus’ aim was to glorify God through what happened. We need to go past the immediate situation, remembering He is good.

Even in terrible things like death, our response is often about US — our loss, our feelings, our idea of what God should do. When these things happen we have an opportunity to transform our minds by remembering that: “He knows about everyone, everywhere. Everything about us is bare and wide open to the all-seeing eyes of our living God; nothing can be hidden from Him to whom we must explain all that we have done.” Hebrews 4:13.

Lazarus’ sisters, two women who both followed Jesus, could only see their terrible loss. Death takes us all by surprise, even if it is expected. However it can also be swallowed up in the kind of victory that expands our view of God Himself. Sometimes the hardest thing to remember in times of trouble and strife, is the fact that God  has a much bigger far-more-wonderful-than-we-can-ever-imagine, plan.

Especially when hardship does not disappear quickly. Our biggest challenge in those times is to remember that He’s a good God, and He will walk us through these things. Faith continues to grow when we trust Him in that dark valley. My prayer for all of us is that we can continue to walk, no matter how slowly, using our faith, and reminding ourselves that our Saviour is always right there with us … even when grief clouds our sight. Bye. 😢