Glory of God

P 2780 Sin has no power over us.

/ DVH

We need to change the way we look at sin. Sin is not just what we do, or don’t do – it is giving into how we feel. Our feelings will lie to us. The reality is in the bible! Jesus Christ conquered sin – He killed it and its consequences, stone dead. Did you get that? Our inheritance here and now, is life, life and more life!  Of course none of us deserves that. We never will, obedience and gratitude are the only response. Meanwhile we can’t possibly live this life, here and now, without His guidance and help, and Father God thought of that too – we have the same Holy Spirit Jesus had to help us. The good news is – Jesus became a man and He knows the way through the mire around us.

Instead of looking at our difficulties as mountains to climb, lift your view higher – look at the One Who did everything for us. Can you trust Jesus? Is He a Man of His Word? He has climbed all the mountains we will ever face, before we were born. We simply need to walk with Him day by day, and keep our eyes on Him. Then we follow Him up the mountain of our own fear, doubt and unbelief conquering it …step by step. As we walk with Him, we learn to rely upon Him. Sadly, our unrealistic fear of failure can keep us from doing anything lasting in this life.

Ask yourself, if everything depends on our performance, in order qualify to for such a love, then WHY would Jesus have to die? Why would our Loving Heavenly Father put His ONLY Son through all that! The work for our total restoration has already been done. We must simply learn to fight, day by day, all the things that our flesh has learnt to value above Him! Then we can hear and see Him at work, in our lives, and in the lives of others.

We need to stop wasting our energy, thinking that being a Christian means we have to get everything right, all the time … and put on a good show. Now, today, we have a wonderful Helper Who has come to help us and prepare us for our wedding. Jesus Christ came to each one of us to woo and court us — now we are engaged, promised to Him. We are a part of His Bride. Christ loves His Bride – she’s everything He ever wanted, and more. He loves her so much He wants to be with her, every single minute of every single day.

Has the Holy Spirit ever nudged you and said: “Don’t watch that TV program or play that video game?” And then maybe, you rationalised what He said away and watched it anyway. Afterward you felt terrible! However, the answer is dead simple. Don’t do it! Obedience in these little things is like training your body in the natural – that spiritual exercise helps our spiritual fitness. Look, if you obey and it wasn’t the Lord, what have you lost? A dumb TV show or video game? H-e-l-l-o!!  Isn’t His life within you worth more than entertainment?

Like I said yesterday, we don’t need to have faith in our faith, our faith is IN HIM. Who Jesus is! Is He Who He says He is, or not? Is He kind, loving, generous, faithful, gracious, forgiving? … Does Christ love us so much He died to be with us forever ….or not? Tell me something He can’t do!  Even being dead didn’t stop Jesus. How can we go on, day after day, turning a blind eye to personal sin, when sin is like a blindfold. The result is we can’t see or hear Him clearly anymore. In the bible what pleases God is obedience. Read the book! The Israelites failed to obey Him. So- let’s learn something from that … sh-all we?

The Lord has promised to be with us. We can eliminate ourselves from the flow of the Holy Spirit’s river in our lives, when we dance around, pouting like a child refusing to surrender its favourite toy. Love watches over us and His love is our prize.  It’s His choice to be with us. Jesus longs to see His Father, and our Father, glorified in all our lives! So, let’s stop getting on with our lives day after day, dumb as rocks – with our hands over our eyes. Distraction wastes a precious thing we have to give Him – our time! So does living this life believing we can’t help it. That’s why we have the book, to diagnose sin, and we have the Helper to guide us around it.

Christ’s death took all the power sin had and killed it. DEAD. We do not have to sin anymore. We can look that rubbish in the face and choose to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Him. When people are in love …the relationship comes first.  Don’t let this temporary life with its temporary pleasures blind you to what He has for you. Sin has no power over us anymore. Bye. 💕

Romans 6: 6-11.“We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also live with Him. We are sure of this because Christ was raised from the dead, and He will never die again. Death no longer has any power over Him. When He died, He died once to break the power of sin. But now that He lives, He lives for the glory of God. So you also should consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus.”Amen.

P 2501 Keep in step with the Holy Spirit.

/ DVH

There is one sort-of-kind-of good thing about making mistakes – it is a great leveller. I can’t look down on you, you can’t look down on me, be-cau-se … we are actually in the same boat!  “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to ALL who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and ALL are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”Romans 3:22-24. I am utterly crazy about that word ‘ALL.’ 🥳 I don’t have to compare myself with you, I simply need to pour my love and energies into walking with the One Who saved me. What we have now, praise you Jesus … is the fellowship – the friendship of the Holy Spirit to help us. Don’t leave home without HIM!

Every single human being is included by that little word “all.” The idea is not to waste your energy over what you have done wrong – repent, and then repair – and then go on to focus on walking with Him, by staying in the light. When you wake up, ask Him to walk with you today. Ask Him to check you if you wander out of His light. Our God loves our obedience. Personally, I have observed He is so sweet and kind, He loves it even when we try – failure is not the issue – continuity is. Even when you are falling asleep at the end of the day – repent and repair, and then embrace Him.

I think the Christian life is hardest for perfectionists. When you give these dear people a list of stuff they could or should do or be, or even not be, they drive themselves batty trying to hit the mark every single time. And they beat themselves up when they don’t. I wanna grab them by the shoulders, and say: “Mate, where’s your faith? Just stay in the light. Confess your sin, let Him wash you and stay in the light of the Holy Spirit. He’s perfect – YOU ain’t …”  Striving produces either defeat or pride.

There are works that James mentions in chapter 2 of his book. These kinds of works begin and end in faith – not our own effort. So we ask ourselves, what we are focussing on right now? If the only thing we are focussing on is getting things right, then we’ve missed the point. Our focus is to be on following the Holy Spirit everywhere, prayerfully discerning what Jesus wants. Living this life with an unreachably high standard cannot eliminate us from God’s love – it will just make our lives appallingly hard – and then we will give up on ourselves, and walking with Him, too soon.

Surrendering to Him is the key. When I live this life surrendered to His will, I give up my will and place it under the direction of SomeOne else – Jesus Christ! He proved how much He loved me when He died in my place. At the same time I am believing, despite my circumstances, that the Person I have surrendered everything to – is trustworthy. That’s the daily battle we fight. DO WE TRUST HIM to do what He said He will do?“Without faith it is IMPOSSIBLE to please Him …” we need to stop hoping faith will fall on us, or God will give us a sign, and simply act on our faith. Faith will give what we do substance.

Because Jesus has already been punished for my sins I do not have to be afraid of being wrong. Our Lord is a Redeemer – He works miracles with very little!  He can take 5 fish and 2 little loaves of bread and feed thousands.   Instead I want the Holy Spirit to make His word personal to me, while I am reading it. That’s why I talk so much about reading the bible. We need to have the Word of God flowing in and out of our lives. To do that, it needs to be present in our minds and hearts. The Holy Spirit will use His word to check us when we move away from what He wants.

Finally, I want to remind you that this is what Father God says in the book about any flaws in us. ““You are altogether beautiful, my love;there is no flaw in you.“- Song of Solomon 4:7. That’s what we look like now, because of the blood of Jesus over our lives. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:8–9. Well there’s a hallelujah!

OH, if we would only let go of our preconceived, or even badly taught notions, that our God is limited by who we are and what we do, and use our energy to learn to walk with the Holy Spirit instead!  The bible says: “Ah Lord God! Behold, Thou hast made the heaven and the earth by Thy great power and outstretched arm; and there is nothing too hard for Thee.” Did you get that? Nothing!!  You and I are not too hard for God – He has already dealt with our sin. 

Meanwhile comparing ourselves with ourselves, and others, is a waste of time.  Let the Word of God live in you, by acting on it. And remember our destiny is to keep in step with the Holy Spirit! 👋🏻

P 2136 We are not powerless!

/ DVH

“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”  John 14:12. If Jesus hadn’t left when He did, we’d still be stuck and powerless over our sins and enemies, personal and otherwise. But He left, it is in the book – so-oo-ooo – we are no longer powerless.

That means it is a mistake to think that our enemy has the upper-hand in any situation – personal or not! Jesus died for this world, and everybody who was ever born into it, our job is to tell them they can belong to Him too. HE WON. satan cannot ever win again, at all, unless he tricks us into believing that what he says is the truth. God gave us power, the same power Christ had! Power to live a godly life – power to do the things He sent us here to do.Meanwhile, satan’s idea of truth sounds a lot like our own feelings. God’s word IN US needs to be stronger than how we feel and that takes practice. 

When we gave our lives to Jesus, that means that God is in charge of us, and whatever happens to us. He does not cause trouble, but – He will work all the bad things together for our good according to HIS purposes. So when things do not look the way we would like them to look, then that’s the time to start speaking to our souls. The Psalms talk about speaking to our souls and telling them to pipe down and hope in God. That is great advice! This life that we are living now, we live by using our faith in what Christ did for us …because His death and resurrection gave us the power to see and live this life differently. 

We are here on this earth, right here, right now – to be salt and light. Salt and light add flavour and clarity. Those things give us, and the people around us, the opportunity to ‘taste and see that the Lord is good.’ This means that we are His people who speak His flavour and His clarity into situations around us. The Lord Himself did this: John 11:4: “When Jesus heard it, He said, “This sickness will not end in death but IS for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” That’s clarity! It wasn’t about the sick person it was about other people understanding WHO Christ is!

Here’s another example of Jesus speaking salt and light into a prejudged situation. John 9:2: “His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. As long as it is day, I must do the work of Him who sent Me.” That’s clarity again. Because He said that now we can see that something else is going on that is not obvious to the people involved. Did you get the fact that the Lord Jesus Himself said: “It wasn’t anything to do with any of them – there was another reason?” There is often w-a-y more in what Christ says than we comprehend. We don’t ever want to be a people who look but do not see, so pray for the eyes of your heart to be enlightened. (Ephesians 1:18) He often has a purpose we cannot see.

The Lord Jesus spent a lot of His ministry and preaching time on clarifying things that already existed in people’s minds – and sometimes He was very SALTY! Some of the things the Jews had been taught were not all of God’s truth – even though they were taught by rote by the religious experts of their day. The thing that often shoots our spiritual comprehension in the foot, is that we read the words, but we miss what they contain. It is not enough to just read the bible like you might read a newspaper, nor is it enough to like the story. We have to ask Him, like the disciples did, “What does that parable mean, Lord?” Sometimes I ask myself: “What is He NOT saying?” OR “How does that apply to me?” 

Years ago, practically everybody I knew that was a Christian were busy sticking out fleeces, here, there and everywhere,  to discern the will of God for their lives. It was almost like a ‘fashion.’ We all ended up playing hokey pokey with a fleece like Gideon did. But the bible itself gives loads of scriptures that talk about how to know the will of God. In the end I came to the conclusion that most people didn’t really want to know His will, they just wanted to find something that would put a big ✔️ on what they themselves, actually wanted. If we want to walk into the will of God and display His mighty works, we cannot follow spiritual fashions – we must follow the book and the book says we have received power from the Holy Spirit. It’s that simple.

There has been a false doctrine that says that everything that happens to us must always be good, because we belong to Jesus now. What a load of twaddle! Sometimes I think we treat being born again, like an arrival place. But becoming a Christian means we’ve started a journey that ends when we leave here. Perfection happens in heaven when we see Him face to face. Down here there is no arrival. Christianity is not a competition to try to be the best Christian ever either  – SomeBody already did that better than we could. HE saved US!  But failure or messing up does not disqualify us from rising from the ashes by His Grace, and going on to do some of those greater things. The power lies in His grace and humility. He will help us, because He dearly loves us. 👋🏻