Elephant

P 3254 It ain’t rocket science.

/ DVH

Hubby and I are blessed to attend a ‘missionary church.’ Our pastor is a missionary to this country, and his aim is to raise up missionaries for other countries, as well as right here … to go and preach the gospel. He is not concerned about numbers – our numbers can sometimes be few – but his aim is to get the gospel out there and encourage others to take it seriously and start living for Jesus. I think every church should have this aim. My question is today — where are our missionaries from the world-wide church?

I have a few observations to make about this subject. Most denominational, Pentecostal, and Charismatic churches have traditionally sent out missionaries to other countries. However, each group has their own individual slant on the bible. Who cares? As long as they preach the gospel – hallelujah! However, it is so easy to judge a missionary’s prowess by evident spiritual gifts as well as numbers, and a well-formed character comes second. My question is:  how will these people in strange environments respond to difficulties?

Meanwhile, people in the Western world leave their churches all the time and many start a new church to validate their version of doctrine. UM!! We weren’t saved to validate God’s doctrine! He can take care of it by Himself, thank you very much. We’ve been commanded/told to preach Jesus! I’m not trying to be critical because I know the aim is to make our churches grow – because each church wants to see people saved.Their purpose may well be pure, but they seem to think bigger, means better…  and I don’t! Bigger can mean more passengers, not participants.

It is tremendously sad for the world-wide church to be divided over individual interpretations of the bible. God’s wisdom is many-sided or faceted, it says that in Ephesians 3:10 AMP:“[The purpose is] that through the church the complicated, many-sided wisdom of God in all its infinite variety and innumerable aspects might now be made known to the angelic rulers and authorities (principalities and powers) in the heavenly sphere.”  What we see depends on where we are standing. Our finite brains can’t contain ALL His truth, we simply get little revealing glimpses of it.

Here’s an odd example of how misinformation works. A few blind men, found an elephant by accident. They didn’t know what it was. One man found the tail, so he thought an elephant was like moving rope. Another felt the skin, he thought the elephant was like wrinkled paper, etc. My point is this, when it comes to the precepts of God we are all still blind and sometimes, sadly, arrogant with it! I am not more right than you and you are not more right than me. Only Jesus Himself is Truth. But we both have gleaned little snippets of His wisdom along the way. However, we are here to make HIS name great and I’m not sure that can happen easily, when we decide we are here to push our doctrines and agendas. 

Whenever I write this blog, my dearest hope is that the reader will fall in love with His Word and go and look things up in the bible for themselves. My words can only have power in them IF the Holy Spirit kisses them for your ears. Otherwise I am bonging away, doing my best ‘gong’ imitations, hoping someone can hear me. In other words — please don’t follow me, follow Jesus. Here is another version of the above scripture in Ephesians 3 MSG bible, the Apostle Paul is speaking: 

“This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God’s way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities.                                     

And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, Who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along. Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels.” 

Paul was a missionary. He and the other disciples set out to follow Jesus’ instructions, and make disciples, not converts. Simon the sorcerer was a convert! This is what real commitment looks like: hundreds of years ago, the 18th century Moravian church sent out missionaries to preach the gospel to leper colonies. These men knew they were never coming back, they would die there. They left behind their own little families, their homes, their churches, and sailed away never to return to their homeland. Such was their devotion to the gospel. At the last glimpse of them they were standing on the deck of the ships that would take them away forever, and cried out until they could no longer be heard: “May the Lamb receive the reward of His suffering!”  Personally, I find that very challenging. That’s character!!

Missionaries are sent into this world to preach the gospel into places where it is not preached. They need to be mature in their faith. Enthusiasm is great, but nothing beats a changed character. We don’t go out to grow our churches or push our doctrines, we go to preach Jesus and what He did for mankind. Doctrine confuses people,and the Lord Jesus died to unite us. As His disciples/missionaries we are instructed to tell everyone we know the good news — that Jesus Christ loved them so much, He came here to save them! It ain’t rocket science.🚀 Bye. 👋

P 2882 Footprints in the butter.

/ DVH

In Luke 11:2-4 Jesus says … “…When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be Your Name, Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’” We’ve all read the Lord’s prayer many times, and part of it says: “Give us each day our daily bread…” BTW, you know I’ve found that temptation sometimes means — ignore what I’ve read, make excuses, and beg off. 

However, lately, I have been captured by those words “each day.” We will get whatever we need from Him to face the day ahead of us, from whatever we’ve read from His Word … today. That’s what active faith looks like, it presses in every single day, until we find His wisdom for us … for that day. And sometimes He even brings us stuff out of storage!!

This daily bread is our time spent with the Trinity, in the secret place, praying, reading Their book – the four of us together. Doing this turns our hearts toward the things and plans of God. We must never forget the precious Holy Spirit is the Administrator of every single thing we have inherited. He constantly stands by, waiting to help and deliver us, whenever we cry out for help. He hears our hearts whenever our mouths or thoughts have no words.

My daily bread for today, was the realisation that the Trinity has carried me through so many things that I probably haven’t even seen!  Lately my knees have not been very friendly, and I had almost convinced myself that I did not have to go and visit someone who lives quite far away from us, simply because my knees were sore. In spite of my feelings, I prayed over it, left it with the Lord, and when I woke up today this phrase bubbled up from inside my heart. “I was in prison and you visited Me …”It seems I have my answer!! 

Oh the unknown, often unrecorded and unrecognised Grace, that continually pours out on you and I, every second, of every minute of every single day! Even when we try to run away from what the Lord wants, GRACE COMES AFTER US. There’s a good place to stop and praise Him! 🙌

Sometimes the things the Lord is doing in our lives can get lost in the ongoing, everyday argy-bargy world we live in. That’s when we need to remind ourselves that He has lovingly provided a store-house of His input every day, as we read His Word and digest it – making it a part of who we are. His word is our spiritual life-line, His blood, transfusing and filling everything else we will do that day. 

How do we know God is acting in our behalf? We notice His footprints! We live aware of Who He is in the middle of what is going on around us. Then when we faithfully study His Word and set our hearts to be obedient to it, His Word will guide us, comfort us, and it can even change our direction. We can let this world’s troubles and trials take over what we see, or we can ask Him to help us recognise His faithfulness.

The Lord’s often unrecognised footprints in our lives can give us direction, or correction or enlightenment. Imagine this scene. Instead of being rude or uncaring toward someone who has annoyed me, I find I have His grace to be kind, as I follow His leading. I call that following His footprints.

Here’s a final example: I suddenly realise that I have made it through something I thought was going to be tremendously hard. The idea of this difficult thing happening was constantly looming at me from the horizon, always coming toward me … and now, quite suddenly, it is in my rear-view mirror, and I have no idea how it happened!  But I survived!! And I suddenly begin to see His footprints in my life, again.

Dumb joke: How do we know there’s been an elephant in our refrigerator? … Footprints in the butter. Bye 👋

P 2601 One way to find out where the holes are …

/ DVH

… is to go on the road for Jesus. We seem to have found every single pothole between here and Cobar, all the way to the Blue Mountains. The worst bit is you don’t see the potholes until you hit them! Yikes. All that rain they have had in NSW has made the countryside very green — but it ruined the tarmac! Nyngan and Cobar, however, were dry before the rain, and, they still are! 

We went through a plague of locusts to get to those two places. Locusts make this icky noise when they hit the car or windscreen. EW! The front of our car looks like somebody peppered it with dead bodies. Yeah, I know, charming right?? Lest you think today’s blog is going to be about damaged bitumen, and dead bugs, right about now I need to clarify what I am really on about … and it ain’t potholes! 

Coming out here to demonstrate the Lord Jesus’ love to others, means that you can often find out exactly where you are ‘not nice.’ As well as learning about how quickly you can judge other people … without knowing their back story. It is unfortunately much too easy to take people’s speech or actions as an example of who they really are!

Here’s a story about us. We arrived at our destination for the night, it was in the middle of nowhere, and hubby went to check in. The lady gave us a list of unheard of rules that must be obeyed to stay at this motel, which included paying bond money. While hubby was talking to her, the Lord said to me firmly: “This is the person you made that bookmark with the elephant on it, give it to her now!” So we did and she was thrilled —- but she would take nothing else. Nothing for her kids, no bibles for the motel. Just a flat refusal. She apologised but said ‘no.’

So we left it at that, smiled and took their large list of things we must not do, and trundled off to our room. Hubby tried several times during our stay, to talk to the man of the house but the guy seemed to be very unapproachable! So he prayed for him and God said: “Keep blessing him, keep being generous.” Meanwhile we delivered more blankets 120 kms down the road, and two days later when we were in the middle of packing up our stuff to leave, when the manager appeared at our door. 

Like I said before, we don’t actually know people’s stories, so when he came to speak to us, he was so happy and nice, I actually wondered who hubby was talking to? Without being asked, he started to explain why he had so many rules — in his mind they were reasonable. Meanwhile this family had been rejected by the whole town. Nobody there liked any of them, or understood the way the accommodation was run. Somebody in the town had been incredibly mean to them and put up rude comments on facebook, all out of context. This other person put up a photo of their family as well. The manager was desolate and bewildered about this betrayal. In our host’s mind he was simply being responsible and doing his job. 

He was hurt and the result had been a huge mistrust of other people. So hubby stood in the motel doorway and talked to him ever-so-gently about Jesus and how much the Lord loved him and his family. Then the Lord Himself turned up and touched all of them. Their kids got happy, and mum and dad were openly weeping … and we had church in the doorway of a motel! Hubby preached the gospel to them all, and showed them one of his pictures of Jesus helping the disciples when they were caught in a huge storm. They strongly identified with that story. When my dear hubby stopped speaking our host kept laughing and crying and asking him to please continue – “keep going, we can hear you,” he said. It was like he was a different man – it all reminded me of the story of Zacchaeus.

Hubby tried again to give the man the picture he had painted, to remind him that Jesus was always with them – but he said no, again. Then he explained that they were leaving in 20 days and everything was already packed up ready to go and …that’s why they didn’t want bibles or more stuff! So the Lord said: “Tell him to take a picture of the painting on his phone!” This dear man, was suddenly our new best friend! …he was utterly delighted with that answer. 

We had a lovely time, hugged all round and eventually we headed off to our next destination. At the same time I personally learnt another huge valuable lesson. Everyone has a story, and people have what they think are valid reasons for the way they behave. They don’t always see themselves the way they present outwardly to others. We can see the way they are behaving, and interpret those things through our own internal thought processes, but that might have nothing whatsoever to do with what is actually going on! 

Like I said, one way to find out where the holes are in our own behaviour … is to put our ideas under pressure. 👋