Endures forever

P 2981 I’ll never get this stuff right!

/ DVH

“Never doubt God’s mighty power to work in you and accomplish all this. He will achieve infinitely more than your greatest request, your most unbelievable dream, and exceed your wildest imagination! He will outdo them all, for His miraculous power constantly energises you. Now we offer up to God all the glorious praise that rises from every church in every generation through Jesus Christ—and all that will yet be manifest through time and eternity. Amen!” Ephesians 3:20-21 TPT.

What a fantastic bunch of promises in Ephesians we have today!!  We literally need to drag our eyes away from all the things that force their way into our lives, and focus on His bigness, not on our inadequacies. This is the best advice I’ve had all morning…I can’t—but He can!  Boy, I just can’t do some things anymore… it drives me nuts. I used to be able to do at least four things at once, now I have to ask hubby to repeat what he just said to me, when I am typing. 🙄

My mother is 97, very ill and fading. She used to be the most powerful person in every single room she ever walked into …and … that person is quite simply not there anymore. Instead she’s having trouble holding onto her thoughts and confuses the past with the present. But here we are today, reading that God Himself has said to every single one of us: “I will be your strong right arm. I will catch you when you fall. I can take the mess that you’ve made of your life and make a glorious garden out of it.”  Oh, Amen to all that!

There is a terrible tragedy in allowing our sin to be bigger than the Saviour. My mother has lived for years in the wilderness of not knowing whether God loved her or not. And yet she has always believed in Him, and tried to please Him. That’s a terribly scary place to live, especially when you are old and infirmed. It can totally desolate the soul. I think that kind of theology is one of the reasons I hate religion —I love the Lord!— but boy I hate religion! It puts a dreadful fear in the place of faith. 

So this week hubby and I sat next to her and read from one of the books I’ve made, and my dear mum glowed like a light bulb as she allowed herself to bask in the comfort and approval of God’s love. It is incredible how our precious Father’s loving acceptance can do the things we cannot do. Love is the best communicator in the world, and love is all over His bible.

I still have some pretty wild dreams, plus a far dollop of imagination – and yet Ephesians 3 says: ‘Almighty God’s power can do greater than my imagination, or dreams, or requests.’ Not to mention the whole energising thing thrown in for good measure. I can always do with energising – how about you? His love takes me places that I would never dare to venture. There is a different kind of freedom for all of us in His love.

And energising is a huge thing if you happen to have a toddler, or an infant at your house — or two or three, or… maybe four? God’s help is way bigger than them all screaming at once, and the dinner boiling over and the cell phone dancing across the kitchen bench!  I’ve prayed for myself  many times in the past: “please re-energise me Lord!” It’s when we feel like we are going under for the umpteenth time that we let go of Who He is and start to grab hold of who I am not! Grab hold of Him instead. What you think about you, doesn’t count – it’s who He says you are.

Beating yourself up is quite unfruitful. Instead reassure yourself that the God of all the Universe loves you so much He always has your back! He will take our ashes and make beautiful things out of them. Perhaps you have worked all day and then come home exhausted, and you are trying so hard to be the perfect parent. One of the things we need plenty of in this life is the knowledge that our hope is in Him— Who He is. Guilt must never drive us.

Ephesians offers us an incredibly realistic picture of Who God is. We are all still in transit, so let’s stop should-ing on ourselves all the time … “I should do this and I should be that and I should never lose my temper, and if the kids turn out to be wrecked it will be all my fault!’  Instead let’s choose to remember that God can indeed—‘work all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes…’  He’s already got our sin covered, now we need to let His love cover us in our vulnerability. 

Whether you too have a parent you love dearly, whose faith is wobbly, or your kids have sailed merrily off into the sunset and seemingly left the Lord behind… remind yourself that our hope is in His Character. Putting our hope into our circumstances or our own actions is foolish and heartbreaking.  

“Help” is a prayer.“The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, And His ears are toward their cry for help.”Psalm 34:15. “The Lord will perfect that which concerns me; Your mercy, O Lord, endures forever;  Do not forsake the works of Your hands.”  Psalm 138:8. You and I don’t have to always get this stuff right – we just need to remember that He’s a God Who always keeps His promises! Bye, 👋

P 2812 Contentment has great value.

/ DVH

Here’s a great source of contentment for us from the Bible: “His love endures forever” — that’s in Psalm 136, it is repeated 26 times. Now there’s something we can attach our contentment to! In this mixed up world we need firm anchors for our faith, and the fact that God’s love is never-ending is a great anchor! Jesus freely gave us His access to contentment.

Let’s look at one of the Lord’s servants and see how this grace worked out for Him. Paul teaches us that we can learn to be content In any circumstance. In the book of Philippians, he clearly tells us he lived that way himself. Yet this saint’s life was full of more ups and downs than a giant roller-coaster on steroids – with a death wish! I have always thought that any guy with a theory is completely disadvantaged by the man who has experience, and Paul had heaps of experience.

We will begin by reading Philippians 4:9-13 “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you. I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.”

You know I am constantly learning, often the hard way –  that when I am not content with what I have, and worse stuff happens, life quite quickly seems like the sky is falling. Ya might want to think on that one. We are now look at the Apostle Paul’s life very briefly — he was beaten three times with rods. Stoned once. Thrown in jail, and wait for it – shipwrecked three times! I mean can you imagine that? He tells us he was hungry, thirsty, cold and not clothed, dragged in front of governors etc. to ‘please explain!’ Plus he was once bitten by a poisonous snake! Meanwhile, in his spare time, he only wrote 23% of the entire Epistles!! That’d be funny if it was not so weird!

It can be easy to think that this was Paul, and he was specially gifted. But if we look at his life carefully we can see that he learnt to be content through … or even because of, his circumstances and suffering. You know, I’ve tried the popular system that says we are meant to claim this and speak out that – and I found that I was just going round and round, spiritually speaking. I didn’t actually grow! Instead, I kept fighting the same battles over and over again. The only sign of growth I had was grow in the wrong direction! I grew impatient with the Lord for not recognising all my efforts to follow Him! Boy, that’s not a good place to land! Self-effort promotes self … and …discontentment, and discontented people make allowances for repeated dumb responses!

Real growth started to happened when I chose to learn to be content no matter what was going on. Now let’s be clear, I would hate to think that you think, that I am saying: “Look at what I did all by myself.”  Hah! The thing that utterly changed my whole walk with Jesus was when I learnt to be obedient to His word, His way and started to rely upon Him to help me do it.  I stopped making excuses for myself because “my life is hard, blah blah blah, boring boring boring,’ and I chose to forgive others, put bad stuff behind me, I believed He could save me from all of it.

Father God grabbed me in my heart one day when I was merrily rehashing someone else’s faults and He asked me this question. “How do you think that they can make up for all they have done to you?”  I was stumped. None of us can redo yesterday! It’s gone. Plus these people had no clue about what they had done over long periods of time. But that was the very thing that had skewed off my thinking into ‘poor me.’ Actually the people thought they had done well and I was the difficult one. 

I learnt a couple of useful things that day – only God knows human hearts, plus He’s the only One Who can change them. To do that He needs co-operation, and that can’t happen when the person doesn’t think they are wrong in the first place! I am still regularly tested about forgiveness, but something amazing has happened that is worth noting. I have become far more generous toward others when they annoy me, as I continue to acknowledge my own humanity. Given their circumstances, I could easily have taken some of the same roads they did…if it weren’t for God’s enduring love and what Jesus did for me.  

Here’s a piece of trivia that may change the colour of your day – the word “let” is used in the bible 1,511 times. In order for change to come we must let/allow God to change our perspective. The Lord has never said what happened to me in my life so far was OK with Him – instead He reminded me that sin is common to man. So instead of exacting verbal, emotional, physical, and mental retribution from someone, I have learnt to pray over it and let things go. 

The secret of contentment is to remember God always loves us and His love is enduring, steadfast and eternal. I urge you to focus on that – not on someone else’s sins, deliberate or not. Their sins against you and I are as forgiven – just like ours are. But when I focus on what someone else did to me, my ability to remain content disappears. That’s how I discovered that contentment is a thing of great value.  Bye 👋