Gold

P 2311 The bible is not for proving ME right!

/ DVH

“Beloved friends, what should be our proper response to God’s marvellous mercies? To surrender yourselves to God to be His sacred, living sacrifices. And live in holiness, experiencing all that delights His heart. For this becomes your genuine expression of worship.” Romans 12:1 TPT

Sadly what happens when we look at verses like this one — is we often go from – what it says …  straight into – how I think it should be done. And we start merrily defining holiness – what we should do, and what we shouldn’t. What is allowed … and WHAT IS NOT.  What we can get away with … and what we can’t! Did I say that out loud??  😶 

Now, I am not saying that we can’t use the bible to gather relevant info …BUT … the ‘me,’ or ‘my opinion-centred way’ of thinking, still leaves US in charge and we end up with what we think this or that verse means as the criteria. Let’s  look closely at this scenario for a second. You might think that having a beer or a glass of wine, for instance, is OK. But I, on the other hand, may not.

So the I-like-a-beer-etc.-people find 54 verses for ‘JESUS DRANK WINE …’ etc etc. and paint them on banners. And my hypothetical group of abstainers find 48 verses that say ‘don’t drink, don’t be a drunkard.’ So we picket the opposition group (big clue in that name!) and handing out fliers saying “people who drink alcohol go straight to hell.” 😱

Who decides WHO wins? Well, actually sadly, nobody wins! In reality, 54 people leave our church of 102 people … who ALL say they love Jesus. And these God-loving people toddle off and form ‘the Church of people who love a good beer…’ and 48 are left behind who have suddenly become prideful because they didn’t fall for the devil’s trap! They in turn form a new church called ‘purity means abstinence.’ Everybody loses! Especially the Lord and His purposes. And we all go round and round – achieving nothing.

Here’s a BIG THOUGHT. The Holy Spirit isn’t called the HOLY SPIRIT for nothing. We can end up in these sad little eddies because we ignore the One Person Who actually knows ALL the answers! Now off we go making more rules and regs to prove our POV is right and theirs is wrong. Sadly our time is no longer taken up seeking Him, for His will to be done in our lives. Instead we read the bible to prove a point, not to know Him, and learn about ourselves. 

2 Timothy 2:15“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” We can use this verse, and that theology to prove we are right, but the Answer is simple. Ask yourself, ‘is what I am doing LOVE. Or am I just trying to prove my point?’  We can’t do both! We must ask ourselves “what spirit are we in?”

Surrender! Romans 12:1: is our primary response. Otherwise we can end up trying to fight ‘God’s battles” … and …He can fight His own. After surrendering we are on the Lord’s side, and His great goodness is now our inspiration. We need to ask Him what HE wants. This verse says He wants yielded vessels, people who put aside what they want or need for His sake. Holiness flows from THIS – relationship. Let’s not waste His time and ours galloping about deciding who is right and who is wrong. WE are all WRONG. Read the book!

Unity flows out of this kind of surrender, simply because we yield to Him and leave our POVs behind. When we clear away our self-centred debris, suddenly we begin to see the little things He does, that only mean something to us because HE IS SO PERSONALLY engaged with us. He doesn’t just  want to give us platitudes or verses that generically bless everyone – The Holy Spirit wants to give us things that have great meaning to us in our current situations. 

So the person who likes a beer or a glass of wine is given the verse 1 Corinthians 6:12 by the Holy Spirit.  “Everything is permissible for me”–but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”–but I will not be mastered by anything.” And the purity through abstinence people are reminded that: “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” James 2:12-13. Sadly, today I think the church is more interested in the appearance of good, rather than letting the Holy Spirit complete His work of redemption in us.

The Holy Spirit’s words are apples of gold in settings of silver. Always be careful to have the setting as well as the apples! 👋🏻

P 2206 Use the sword to set yourself free.

/ DVH

People sometimes ask me – ‘what’s wrong with trying hard to do the right thing?’ …They almost never like my answer. God’s REST is not about striving, trying, or working at it. If we are working at it, or trying harder, then we have left His rest far, far behind. He is our glorious God, and He knows the way through all of our difficulties, dangers, and personal snares. He does not want any of us to have secondhand faith – He wants us to have the sort of faith that stands when everything around appears to be falling and failing … including us! Please don’t ever second guess yourself, or rehash what has happened because you think you got it wrong. Every story in the bible proves our God can get mankind out of anything.

Does rest mean that we do nothing? No, now we begin to rejoice in our inadequacies, prejudices, and infirmities, and tell Him – “I feel like I am getting nowhere BUT: – “nevertheless it is not I who lives – it is YOU living in me.” …And YOU can do anything! Now suddenly here we are, in the heat of our own personal battle with a sword in our hand, and a purpose. Now we get to use our faith that He will never leave us alone because His Word, the bible – says so.

I start by telling the Lord that I want and need Him to be much bigger in my life – bigger than my failures and supposed inability to change. Sometimes we make God small by default. We ignore Who He is and what He can do. When we start to feel that this or that is impossible, that is the time to get happy. Jesus did not let any storm overwhelm HIM! He knew where His help came from. Jesus never put His sword down – He lived by it. We have a God of wonder – He is not small! He is bigger than we can ever imagine – and He loves us!

If handing stuff to Him, and leaving it there so we can rest in what He has already done, is too hard for us then we need to pray and ask Him to reveal more of Himself to us. Start with honesty, read the bible, and use that opportunity to take the lid off what we think, or how we feel about Him … or even ourselves. “Faith comes by hearing … (and hearing – personal fresh revelation) – comes by the Word of God.” This verse is our sword – we need to pick it up and use it against our feelings. He will reveal Himself to us in a new way from His book. He knows we are frail and sometimes faithless, but it is essential that we do not stop stretching our view of the Lord Jesus and what His did. Our spirit of stupid is not bigger than His GRACE. The disciples walked around with Jesus in full time ministry, they knew Him —- and yet one day the Lord took three of them up a mountain, and blew their minds! 

After we have acknowledged and prayed about the problem (difficulty or fault) – and repented … and stopped punishing ourselves with self-abuse …then we move on. This is when we build ourselves up in our faith, by reminding ourselves that our precious Father God is working on our behalf. He is stretching us, as well as doing things we can’t see yet. He is transforming the things we can’t do for ourselves. 

The Lord allows difficult scenarios to come into our lives, to give us an opportunity to turn them, and our responses to them, over to Him. Now we actively wait and watch to see what He is doing. Over the years, in the past, you and I might have chosen to panic, rather than rest – to react rather than extending love. But now we recognise trouble for what it is: it is not the end of our world … trouble is a chance to stretch our faith in His goodness and make it bigger. 

We need to deliberately choose His way of love, which may mean we say nothing rather than respond roughly to an angry person, or resort to self-abuse for not getting it right. Or allow ourselves to drown in our feelings of anxiety and fear, or beat ourselves up, and start trying harder. Give up! Let HIM take you through. At this point, remember: ‘He knows my frame and He’s turning my faith into gold.’ Job 23:10. This does not mean that we stop asking Him to send us help and deliver us, but this type of prayer is filled with faith in His character not resignation or frustration with ourselves or the situation. “God has got me and He has got this.” We remind ourselves that we are learning to “walk by faith not by sight.” 

The Lord is not satisfied with us merely agreeing with Him – He is aiming at increasing our actual trust in Him. Self doubt, or difficult problems are God-allowed opportunities for change. Do things differently. In those times I am learning to refuse to accept my own assessment or worry. I haven’t dropped it or pushed it aside – I gave whatever it is to Him and I am leaving it there. People are often tossed about by their emotions but God’s Warriors stand still and wait to see what their Commander says and does next. Maturing in our faith is a process, not an instant solution. The Lord does turn things around in a heartbeat sometimes, but often He wants us to stretch our faith and follow Him through the hard bits.

At this moment in time we are living among still-to-be-redeemed humanity. They are stuck within mankind’s limitations. But we are the people: “who can do all things through Christ because He strengthens us.” Transformation and healing are processes, they take time, but our God is always on time, He is never late. However, the time to lean on Him is always now. “In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make straight your paths.” We acknowledge Him and He makes things straight. Even if the road ahead of you appears to be filled with pot-holes and you seem ill-equipped to deal with it – put your confidence in WHO HE IS instead. Remember we are in a war – true peace is not a cessation of hostilities – it is the Presence of Jesus. God be with you. 👋🏻

P 2125 The Lord’s wisdom is pure gold.

/ DVH

Every time we individually read the bible, we need to read it with the thought in the back of our minds that we are looking for something fresh, even though perhaps we have already read what we are reading, many many times before. Reading like this means we are looking for personal, individual, fresh revelation. Pure gold from heaven. My best advice when you read the bible is to come to it with fresh eyes, each time, and … don’t rush the process. 

Meanwhile, the biggest danger in Christian teaching, is that we can choose one man’s interpretation, or one school of thought, as the way we want to think about this verse or that principle  … now and  forevermore Amen! That’s a dumb idea! 🙄 Development and change are vital – we cannot settle, we are pioneers, not settlers. Settling for reading this bible, without digging for gold, is the very thing that lost track of the Holy Spirit speaking to us, individually, in the first place. I know that human beings like routine, I know it personally! But succumbing to routine whilst reading the book, precludes the expansion of His life within us.

If we want to know what the Lord thinks, or what He wants to say to us, today, then we need to approach the bible with an open heart.  We simply must allow Him to renew and expand our meditations and thoughts in ways that show us more about HIM. Having one POV about any verse is limiting, and our God’s wisdom is many-sided. I would go so far as to say that His wisdom is limit-less and incomprehensible to us without the Holy Spirit’s help! We also cannot limit Him and His ways to our own experiences …  So, unless we continually allow our view to be enlarged, and stop thinking there is only one way for us to go, we will end up limiting His wisdom for our lives, and as a consequence, we will limit our spiritual growth.  

Over the years I’ve met many people who have quite literally stopped following the Lord Himself, and start following Brother ‘I’ve-got-proof-I-am-right’, or Sister ‘I’ll-just-get-the-food-ready-for-you-shall-I?’ 😳 And yes, I see the irony whilst I am writing a blog!  However, it is not good to continually eat pre-digested food all the time. Let me just say that when we have to hunt down food, by searching the bible, that is actually good for us. At the very least it exercises your faith and helps it stretch and grow. Plus it is ridiculous to expect one individual, apart from JESUS, to know everything. You can always talk to a mature Christian to see if what you thought you heard or read, was fresh from fantasy land!

The Lord, the God of heaven and earth, wants to talk to us, personally. He wants to counsel us, as individuals, with His eye upon us.(Psalm 32:8) We will gain so much from His personal attention.That’s when we stop just being a lemming, and start running our own race. At the same time our gifts will start to manifest themselves. Not to mention that the Lord wants to be that intimate with each one us!

One of the biggest truths about the modern church is that we do not know what we do not know. We just think we do! Maybe because we read somewhere in a Christian book that someone acted on what He said, and saw a miracle. Miracles are not stamps of approval – they are signs of the Lord’s Presence and His incredible loving generosity! The entire Universe shifts when we stop making ourselves, our opinions, our church, and our theology the centre of everything.  

We also need to start embracing collective wisdom – especially from those who have gone before us. There is an attitude today that says, everything that went before us was wrong! Now, apparently … God has has given this generation a greater revelation. Phooey! The Lord builds “layer upon layer, precept upon precept, and line upon line.’ (Isaiah 28:10) Maybe we have not asked Him to show us how Brother-I’ve-gone-home-to-be-with-the-Lord’s-revelation can benefit us! We will never get above the first floor if we keep yanking out what was already there when we arrived in His kingdom! 

Our God’s ways are so incredibly wiser and more powerful than we are letting Him be – He knows exactly what sort of revelation to release to us peanuts-for-brains down here, and when to do it! However, only the Holy Spirit Himself knows how to take those “apples of gold” God Himself gives us, and He knows how to put those apples into a “setting of silver.” (Proverbs 25:11) There is a verse in Isaiah (54:2) that talks about ‘enlarging the boundaries of our tents.’ I think that this verse needs to be taken more seriously. God is not talking about making our houses – temporary or not … bigger.  He is talking about the way we view this life. In our efforts to get things right, we have forgotten that Father God already has a MAN Who got everything right – JESUS CHRIST.

The Lord’s word is always multi faceted, and pure gold from heaven, but He has only one side. HIS! And if we want to survive this life with our faith intact, growing and expanding in the knowledge of His ways, we better start chasing what His side looks like. I’m starting to say: “I dunno” a lot more than I used to, nowadays. How about you? 👋🏻