Heart

P 3100 I’m a door-man.

/ DVH

Have you ever longed for a ministry gift? Well, here’s one, it’s pretty neglected, and sadly there aren’t many people jumping into this pool! “And God has made all things new, and reconciled us to Himself, and given US the ministry of reconciling others to God. In other words, it was through the Anointed One that God was shepherding the world, not even keeping records of their transgressions, and He has entrusted to us the ministry of opening the door of reconciliation to God. We are ambassadors of the Anointed One who carry the message of Christ to the world, as though God were tenderly pleading with them directly through our lips. So we tenderly plead with you on Christ’s behalf, “Turn back to God and be reconciled to Him.”” 2 Corinthians 5:18-20.

The Lord trusts us to represent Him with a loving attitude toward everyone we meet every day. So whenever I meet someone – I always figure HE sent them! I don’t much like to wallop others over the head with the bible, it is not at all friendly! Instead I treat other people like they are special, because HE loves them. Like Ruth with Naomi, I’m going wherever Jesus goes. And His people are my people, despite denominational boundaries! I like the bible suggestion … ‘if they are thirsty, give them a drink … if they are hungry, feed them.’ That’s a great system. 

So. I listen, then I do what He tells me to do. This means I don’t give every street person I meet a couple of sandwiches, I wait for the Lord. Then He says: “Give this one some food.” The Holy Spirit has been known to speak very loudly to me if I become distracted, and gone off somewhere irrelevant inside my mind. My dear hubby has had to run down the street after someone to finish what I was supposed to do! Meanwhile street people don’t have a lot to do with their time so we often give them spirit food as well. A book, or a gospel. 

Our main objective is to tell other people God is not mad at them. That’s what reconciliation means! This is something that we have in common with everyone else in this world. We all need to be reconciled to God – but most people-who-don’t-know-Him-yet – don’t know how. Just because someone told me about Jesus and what He did for me — and I said ‘yes please!’ That doesn’t make me special – it just makes me HIS. I’m not much of a fancy-schmancy person. so when I speak to someone else I like to use ordinary words because my aim is to be understood, not just show off my personal knowledge. Nothing will close a door to someone’s heart faster than if we think we are better than the people we meet. Judgment of any kind is deadly!

Meanwhile, we aren’t the door – we are simply the doorman! HE IS THE DOOR. All we do is we open the door for anyone who wants to know more about Him. It’s a heart thing – we open our heart to their hearts so He can speak to them. It is a great relief to me that I don’t have to be the door, because the pressure to perform would probably nag at me, and I’d focus on all the wrong things. As it is, I daily struggle with saying things in a simple way that will facilitate the hearer’s understanding.

I am all about action – I think believing and doing nothing is just like chasing the wind. I’ve met a few windy-gassy people in my life, all talk, lots of hot air, and no action. That’s when I decided that I’d rather be like Jesus Who always ushers in LIFE. I just listen to what He wants and then I obey Him. Over the years I’ve watched the Lord open up someone’s heart right in front of me. It just blows my mind every single time. To speak to someone else, on His behalf, when they are extremely vulnerable is a huge privilege. The Holy Spirit speaks to me through the bible most of the time. He very kindly brings verses to my mind.. 

I’m getting older, and a bit forgetful, and sometimes I forget what I am going to say next. Meanwhile, if someone interrupts my train of thought then …I’d better wave goodbye to that thought because it’s gone! But in spite of my age, my knowledge of the bible is always there. That is a wonder! I have no idea how it can possibly happen, but the bible feels just like my blood running about, unseen, inside me. 

It is squarely fixed in my heart, and even when my head is in a muddle, I can still speak from my heart! I didn’t even set out to memorise every word, I think I was too lazy to do that. I just read and reread His book daily, heaps and heaps of times over the years, and quite a bit of it sunk in! And then the precious Holy Spirit utterly  blows my mind — He hands me exactly what I need … just like someone would hand me a cup of tea! A verse pops into my head and away ‘we’ go.

Meanwhile, I figure if Almighty God Himself doesn’t hold our transgressions against us, then I have no right at all to choose to hold a grudge – no matter what my reason says to me. So my default position is to put down my own defensiveness, and head back toward love asap. Especially when I get grumpy or disappointed with my circumstances, or someone else. There are days when that can take me a while. But Jesus’ blood covered everyone’s sin, not just mine.

It’s simply my job to open His door so He can introduce Himself to others, and they can walk in and get to know Him. Day by day, I deliberately count on the fact that Jesus knows how to reach every one of them. I’d rather be  a doorman in His house, than do anything else. (Psalm 86:10) Bye 👋

P 3099 Make room – clear away the debris!

/ DVH

Today I want to look at a few verses in Isaiah. “Thunder in the desert! “Prepare for God’s arrival! Make the road straight and smooth, a highway fit for our God. Fill in the valleys, level off the hills, Smooth out the ruts, clear out the rocks. Then God’s bright glory will shine and everyone will see it. Yes. Just as God has said.” Isaiah 40:3-5. Does this sound like action to you? It does to me! I truly don’t think that prayer is the only activity required when you are working with Him to build a highway in your heart for Him to walk on. Part of our job description is to clear away any debris, as well as let the Holy Spirit guide us into making the roads in our lives clear for Him – we must personally choose to engage and …participate.

Hubby and I have had the opportunity to learn a little bit about highway repairs etc. It is a careful, clearing away of what has been left that does not belong there, then the old road itself can be removed, or repaired. Like the scripture says highways work better when they are obstacle free and smooth! My hubby loves these unexpected stops — he happily talks to the workers. We’ve even given away lemonade on hot days. It seems that road building is hot, boring, and repetitive but necessary work – like the work we need to do in our own lives so the King can use OUR LIVES as His highway! We are not demolition crews, we are restorers of the breach. We build streets for others to live in!

I think this world is standing, on tippy-toes at the very edge of something that is so important, so necessary to what comes next, we cannot imagine it. Almighty God is about to do something extraordinary … but I believe He is waiting for US to voluntarily engage with Him. He’s a good good Father, He won’t make us participate but He needs us to be battle-ready. Sadly, it seems to me that many of us look more like couch-potatoes, while others are so engaged with their own business, they haven’t got any time for His. The Lord has His own timing, and it is an error to think OUR timing takes priority over His. However, if we happen to be spiritually sleeping it is so much easier for the enemy to take us out. We need to be ever-ready, standing with our armour on, ready to ‘GO’ when He says ‘GO!’ 

How can we personally participate in what comes next, if we rely on other people to hear Him and wait for them to tell us what to do? All our enemy has to do then, is to take the leaders out. We must engage in the road building process — individually and corporately. It is time for the Body of Christ to realise we are not on some jolly little outing Sunday by Sunday — we live in a spiritual war zone. War zones need road repairs, so help can get to those who need it. At this point in time other people are being killed off all over the place, while we merrily just go about our own personal daily business. My bible says — HIS business IS my business.

Bear with me please, I am not actually changing the subject  – I simply want to further illustrate my point. Our dog is a labradoodle. She’s a totally loveable, good-natured, over-excitable, 13 year old air-head who wouldn’t bite a soul. She still thinks she’s a puppy! She doesn’t walk, she bounces. If you wave her favourite toy about she will jump up and down to play. Her tail constantly goes like a helicopter blade.

Our pooch just burst into the room where I am typing and she was doing her usual morning routine … with the brain … without the brain. Galloping about trying to jump up and down to get hubby’s attention. Hubby quietly put his hand on her head and then he said one word: “Heel!” She jumped up in the air nearly did a somersault, switched sides and sat down looking up at him. What happened? HER MASTER SPOKE. 

Right now, I am not sure the Body of Christ could hear the Lord if He thundered at us – we are so distracted by the cares and worries of this life. If we wait for all those things to disappear first, then the next sound we will hear will be a trumpet from heaven! I know what it is like to be incapacitated, and weak – however, I’d rather focus on what Jesus wants from me, today. It’s about our focus, not the tasks. We can still get ordinary things done and get to know and trust Him … all at the same time. We simply need to make everything Jesus’ business! He wants to build highways through the desert and wildernesses in us, and around us.

Don’t worry about qualifying, the Lord doesn’t need expertise, He has heavenly armies that stand ready at any given moment. Instead He needs our willingness to engage. We all need to choose to be activated. If Jesus needed human expertise I could name heaps of people who qualify for that kind of work because they are smarter than me. Nowadays practically everyone I know is smarter than me! We must turn to the Lord automatically, like my pooch. Let.Him.Lead.You.

Father God will always have our back. And even if we have to do a somersault in mid-air to come down on the Lord’s side – we both know that is the right place! With our eyes lifted UP waiting for His next command. Let us choose to obey Him, and let the Holy Spirit build a highway for the King in our hearts. He will clear away any debris. Once before, long ago, there was no room for Jesus – He ended up in an outdoor building. Let’s not do that again! Bye.👋

P 3093 Think bigger.

/ DVH

“This is love: He loved us long before we loved Him. It was His love, not ours. He proved it by sending His Son to be the pleasing sacrificial offering to take away our sins. Delightfully loved ones, if He loved us with such tremendous love, then “loving one another” should be our way of life!” 1 John 4:10-11 TPT.

Does anyone remember that old joke? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I think I know that answer! The chicken! God would never leave a little helpless baby chick to raise itself! So what has that got to do with anything? God’s love and His loving provision came first, that’s what. We don’t have to prove ourselves worthy, because, quite simply, we ain’t worthy and without the blood of Jesus over our lives, we never will be! Our Almighty, Omniscient, Ever-present Father loved us first. 

Here is a verse in Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew  you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Our God isn’t just talking to Jeremiah — He is talking to each one of us. He’s saying to us all: “You were in My heart before you were in this world. I always had a plan for your life.”  None of us are an accident. Every single human being is precious to God and we all have a destiny – a place in His kingdom. There are no ‘big’ guys or ‘little’ guys – there’s only Jesus!! He not only knows our names, where we live, what He has for us, He is thinking about us daily, all of the time. Every single one of us was born into this world with a loving Father watching over us – whether we had an earthly father or not … Father God was there.

He is the Author and Finisher of our intimate development inside our mothers. Let’s look at Psalm 139:13-18 for a minute, it says: “For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are Your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand—when I awake, I am still with You.”

Only Father God Himself loved humanity enough to take a record of every single child ever born – He knows each baby’s name. This was my conclusion – you were a great idea God had! He was there when each of us struggled to take our first breath. See Ezekiel 16:6: “And when I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood ‘LIVE!…”

We started this life with God pronouncing life into us, and Jesus Himself told us in John 10:10: “…I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”‘Life, life and MORE LIFE.’ Please don’t ever use your life experiences, the good or the bad or the mediocre ones, as a yardstick for how the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit feel about you. They are incredibly passionate about you. The bible itself clearly tells us we are destined to be filled with LIFE. His life. That kind of life is called Zoe. ‘Zoe’ life refers to the uncreated, eternal life of God, the divine life uniquely possessed by God Himself, and He shares that life with us.

We were designed to live our lives, here and now, filled with that life. This is blessing, this gift, is part of the Holy Spirit’s ministry to each one of us. We don’t just yield our lives to Him so we can be guided by His Will, His Way. When we actively live His Will, His Way we are partaking of Father God’s ‘Zoe’ life. Jesus lived on this earth like that. He was so full of life it was almost like sparks flew off Him everywhere He went. 

One time God lifted the curtain between Jesus and His disciples and 3 of them saw what that life in Him looked like – it made them almost speechless. Matthew 17:1-2:“After six days Jesus took with Him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.” It is time to think bigger than just the same old same old life that we plod through day after day. Life is so much more than the mundanities we’ve accepted. Jesus took ordinary fishermen and made them disciples, and those guys turned the known world upside down!

Our Father has so much more in His heart when He made each one of us. I have had this phrase running around in my Spirit for months now. “BIGGER STILL!!” I think it is important to refuse to put a lid on what you think the Lord can do with your life. He’s God! He made a man from dirt, and a woman from a rib, then He breathed His Zoe life into both of them. Everything we can see around us, was once a creative idea that came from within Who He is… But there’s MORE!!…

Here is another way to think about the troubles you face daily:  “Father God is bigger than this thing that keeps coming at me. He can show me the way through everything that is going on around me, as well as the stuff going on inside my head and heart. I’m just going to lay back and let Him be God, and I’ll be a wholly yielded lover of Jesus, on this ride called, life.” Bye. 🕊️

P 3082 I AM your oasis.

/ DVH

“Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden? Come to Me. I will refresh your life, for I am your oasis.” Matthew 11:28 TPT.

When I read this verse today the thing that hit me right between the eyes was that Jesus said: ‘I AM your oasis.’He didn’t suggest going on a 4 week cruise, or going to some spa, or theme park or even a Christian conference of some sort – the Lord says HE(!!) is our oasis. We have been misled by our feelings to think that Jesus only goes to conferences or turns up for revivals – He’s IN US – we take Him with us wherever we go! Ya might want to sit and think about that for like a millennium – I know I did – OK so it was 60 seconds … you caught me. 

You know I think we can be really bad at comprehending what the Lord is saying, most of the time. We either overstate it to the point of fanaticism and make it into rules, or we ignore it and hope He won’t mind. We can be so lax with our obedience that we only participate in extending our faith for minor things – like finding a car spot when we need one – or asking God to help us with our day. He wants to BE our day!!

He’s not an add-on. Faith steps are about things we can’t easily do by ourselves — and maybe we kind of step really quickly around things like submission, which is also a faith step. It’s like we think these things are beyond us … so we hope the minimum participation will do …”After all, Jesus knows I am weak!” That’s why He wants you to call on Him to be your strength. We go through this life trying to avoid problems or pray them away, He wants us to confront them with Him!  He longs to be our oasis.

It seems we have yet to work out that His motivation is not just to bring relief, but to usher in permanent change. Transformation of our hearts. Maybe we are hoping the Lord won’t notice because we are embarrassed with our lack of engagement with the things that matter … well guess what?? He knows, because the same Heart that tenderly watches over you, pays attention to everything else. Some problems can be solved by simply changing the way we live. Please do not misunderstand me, He is not watching over us to catch us out in our sins or errors. Instead He patiently waits and watches for us to turn our heads, even just a little bit in His direction – because He knows a better way. 

There is an easier way to live this life we have inherited from Him. But we will have to humble ourselves and submit to Him in order to fully participate in it. Everything in our world’s current view of modern reality suggests submission is not a good thing. Children don’t have to submit to their parents, wives don’t have to submit to their husbands, and nobody has to submit to anybody else’s agendas — unless they pay them well! Submission seems to be a bad word — but that word actually means we have a primary mission which takes priority over other things. Seeking His kingdom is primary – then other things get added on!

It is no wonder that we have left God’s Kingdom behind, it’s because His kingdom is a theocracy, not a democracy. Let’s daily remind ourselves that Jesus Himself submitted to His Father’s will. Sadly it seems that unless human beings can see that it BENEFITS them, they don’t give those ‘other things’ He wants to add into our lives very much attention. So many Christians have cleverly found and featured all the me-first benefits … because the bible tells us“to forget not all His benefits…” I am not sure this response is all He had in mind! 

Off-loading our burdens onto Jesus seems to be a gigantic benefit to me – but we will have to relinquish our anxiety, worry and fear at the same time. Personally, I can’t think of anything better than handing my awful pile of nasty impossible stuff to Him. However, what does He mean by – I am your oasis? An oasis is a place of water in a desert, or a place of refuge in a crisis — or even a place of refreshing. When you view that word this way it begins to make sense. The Lord is not talking about using His Presence like we would drop off our dry-cleaning and return to find everything neatly pressed and clean …He means in this life His Presence is our dwelling place.That’s an AIM – not a suggestion.

I like Ephesians 3:16-19. These 3 verses are great to meditate on because they show us what we are aiming at. 

“I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Being filled to all the fullness of God is another AIM. We need to remember ..these verses are a prayer … the Apostle Paul prayed it for the church at Ephesus. But the Holy Spirit Himself not only inspired it – He preserved that prayer in the bible for our benefit. Paul is praying for US too – every time you read it say Amen! And please –  read it a lot. Now we need to use our faith to believe that Christ actively dwells in our hearts, and we need His power to understand what we have been given! It is not enough to say ‘yes’ — we have to DO yes!

Then our roots go down, so deeply into His love we cannot be moved. This is how and why the saints of old gave up their lives and were martyred. They didn’t do it for an ideology, they did it because they had been internally changed, forever!! His Presence in our lives is our OASIS. Bye. 🥳

P 3080 Spring cleaning time!

/ DVH

Spiritually speaking, God’s people need a good spring clean out, regularly. This means we deliberately choose to get rid of any stuff the Lord doesn’t like, and let His love clean and shine up any dirty windows on the inside of us. We can even accumulate things around us that we have been tolerating. This prayer is invaluable:“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:  And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Psalm 139:23-24. 

Here’s an interesting scripture from the book of Acts 19:19-20.“A number who had practiced sorcery brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly. When they calculated the value of the scrolls, the total came to fifty thousand drachmas. In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.“ 

The Word of God increased in power as the Lord’s people made it their business to get rid of anything that they had in their homes that elevated or attracted satan. I too, believe we can be spiritually hindered, unless we deliberately take our love for Jesus seriously, and we cherish His presence over anything else. When we make Him King over everything, His power increases in us and around us. Here’s another interesting story from Acts to think on.

“About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of artemis, brought in a lot of business for the craftsmen there. He called them together, along with the workers in related trades, and said: “You know, my friends, that we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.” Acts 19:23-27. 

Further on in this story, a riot starts and nobody can stop it!. What I wanted to mentioned here is that God always has someone waiting in the wings. This time it was a man of wisdom. He was a man most people would overlook — a city clerk! But he stands up and speaks his piece and the riots stop and everyone goes home. You must never ever ever think your job is minor. God has people in all kinds of places, people we may not even recognise, but they are pivotal to His plan – He is Wisdom personified, and He does not advertise what He is going to do next.

The verses above show us how our enemy’s traps work. Some ‘iffy’ or doubtful things can become established in people’s lives when they are careless. Greed reared its ugly head too! Demetrius the unofficial leader, pitched a fit because his profit margin was going to go down!  There are times when accommodating stuff the Lord does not like, will interfere with our walk with the Lord. It becomes too easy to rationalise away the effects of compromise. I think it is good to occasionally go right through our houses and pray over what we have.

Every single time I have done this I have had a personal breakthrough, it is like spring cleaning my heart. We all know that the devil is not worth bothering about, but his agendas can cloud our walk with Jesus. We belong to Him so everything we have is His. So if the Lord doesn’t like something, then it is good to spiritually spring clean and get rid of it. That includes books, DVDs, Cds, video games – any doubtful items given to us by someone else that we have kept so we won’t hurt their feelings. Or stuff we thought – that will be OK, God won’t mind – but we didn’t ask Him.

My motivation is to make people aware that satan is sneaky – he will infiltrate our houses with his rubbish. Seemingly harmless stuff that just feels a bit “off.” I can’t tell you what might offend the Lord at your house, I can only suggest you and He go through your home together and let Him lead you through this process. At the same time I do not mean we should all go on a witch hunt. We all accumulate junk, all I am saying is that it is valuable to check with Jesus about the things we have collected, accidentally or not. Obviously this is something that needs prayer. I personally have this policy, ‘when in doubt, chuck it out.”

As we walk with Him, day by day, our main aim is to do more than just give Him lip service. The bible clearly says that this was one reason why the Lord was angry with Israel. Their repentance did not go beyond their mouths and that lassez faire attitude was totally their choice. They said YES to God and then went away did NO! Father God wants our hearts to be wholly His, and this is why we live our lives undergoing transformation. His desire is for us to go from strength to strength and glory to glory. That won’t happen by itself. It happens as we value Him above everything else.

The place to begin is revealed by our responses to difficulties, when our attitude is wrong, it will colour our tolerance levels. Ask Him to search your heart and show you any wicked way within you, then repent and do something about it. We need to do some spring cleaning. Repentance without fruit is like that fig tree story – it holds lots of promise but there is nothing substantial on it.  Bye. 👋

P 3076 Road building.

/ DVH

“And how blessed all those in whom You live, whose lives become roads You travel; They wind through lonesome valleys, come upon brooks, discover cool springs and pools brimming with rain! God-traveled, these roads curve up the mountain, and at the last turn—Zion! God in full view!” Psalms 84:5-7 MSG. 

“One day spent in Your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats thousands spent on Greek island beaches. I’d rather scrub floors in the house of my God than be honoured as a guest in the palace of sin. All sunshine and sovereign is God, generous in gifts and glory. He doesn’t scrimp with His traveling companions. It’s smooth sailing all the way with God-of-the-Angel-Armies.” Psalms 84:10-12 MSG.

I’m a word person. I love the Word of God, but today I’m also talking about the way words are put together. For me, words paint pictures in my mind. They take ordinary things and endow them with the Holy Spirit’s thoughts and beauty. We’ve travelled along a lot of roads – bumpy ones, dusty ones, gliding highways and roads with beautiful scenery, as we take bibles all over Australia. So I feel like a little bit of an expert on roads.

In the first part of Psalm 84:5-7, the words take me into our car,  winding our way through beautiful scenery, watching for what will appear when we get around the next bend. I dearly love to go on roads I’ve never been on before. Occasionally as we’ve travelled along, we’ve taken a side road – just to see what was at the other end! The picture at the bottom of this blog show you what we found at the end of quite an ordinary road. It was surrounded by cane fields. (Lucinda,Qld.) 

However, the bit in this Psalm that captured my heart is the very first verse. “And how blessed all those in whom You live, whose lives become roads You travel.”I would love to be a road the Lord travels upon to reach out to others. The kind of road that takes people from living in the same old same old, into the bright fresh land of daily discovering Jesus. I pray that other people can see Him in me, and enjoy the view, and maybe they will want to know Him for themselves. We can often think about witnessing as speaking etc. but enjoying Who God is, in the middle of this crazy upside-down, often scary life, can be the greatest witness and worship of all!

This Psalmist values God’s Presence more than the supposedly fine things this world can offer us. I’ve sat on a Greek Island, and their beaches are very pretty.  The sea around those islands, is the most beautiful colour. But the writer tells us that they would rather be scrubbing God’s floor, than be in any place of this world’s natural beauty. Anywhere our God IS, is a far more beautiful place than this world can offer.

I love to sing and worship, but I also love to sit and listen to worship as well. Listening to worship lifts my heart and thoughts above this often cranky old world. We all need that refreshing, so we can keep God’s highway in our heart OPEN. Worship makes us bigger inside, and more open to whatever He wants to do next, and it also positions our hearts to hear Him. The thing is, I don’t just think of worship as singing, or playing an instrument. I see it as a life-laid down, together with the way we love others. Surrender, is worship to me. 

Jesus travelled along a lot of dusty roads as He ministered, and distances never seemed to matter to Him. He sometimes went off the beaten track for just one person. He saw broken roads all around Him. His whole life was a highway into the Father’s heart, for mankind to travel on. Now that’s worth pausing and thinking about! 

In another version it says the first verse like this:“Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) is the man whose strength is in You, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.”It is our strength and belief in God’s goodness, when we are under the pressure of highway creation, that makes our road solid and straight. This highway is not just a theory, it can make our lives with Christ accessible – but like any highway, the road to Zion comes at a cost. This cost exists, because quite beautiful, even seemingly useful things – that do not seem to be harmful – have to be removed from our lives if we are to become His highway.

There are times that I can see the precious Holy Spirit with His front-end loader, bulldozers, excavators, and graders, asphalt makers and road rollers continually rumbling along through my life, under the Lord’s watchful eye! All that equipment working on us is represented in our lives as situations, or other people. We all have difficult people who become implements in His hands —they are used by Him to make our road straight and strong and available to God and others. Road making is intense! It requires co-operation with the Lord, and a vision for a better, more available, ME.

We all want the King of Kings to travel down our highways so that other people can come out of the roadblocks and broken highways they are living in. Road building is a worthy calling. Bye. 👋

P 3061 Please don’t waste His light.

/ DVH

Ephesians 1:18:“ I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people,..” What the heck does that mean? It means   that a spiritual person can see a glorious spiritual reality that a natural man cannot. We can place great value on the gifts of the Spirit, on the infilling of the Spirit, on receiving from the Spirit. We do this like those ‘experiences’ outweigh the reality of daily walking with Him! Walking with Him here on earth is our highest calling.

When you and I gave our lives to Christ, He came to live in us. The idea that Jesus would live in our hearts without the Holy Spirit makes no sense. Actually, God Himself as a revelatory, creative Being came to live inside us in the Person of the Holy Spirit. He knows the way ahead for each one of us. 

What we need to do is to acquaint ourselves with the ways of God, so that we treat Him like the priceless treasure He is! He’s right here, with each one of us every day. He wants to teach us, personally, as well as corporately. Whenever we live our lives choosing to do things according to our will – the Holy Spirit will quietly leave. But He does not leave us permanently – He strives with us to get our attention.

When I look at you through a slave’s eyes, what you do or don’t do, suddenly matters to me, because it affects me. When I am operating in the flesh, I can misunderstand your motivation, and become disgruntled or unhappy with you — if your behaviour is my yard-stick. But when Jesus is my yard-stick, I have been given the God-given grace to see YOU through His eyes. This means I can have mercy. I can give you grace, I can die for you daily, because I can see what He can see about you. 

Because I love Jesus, what He chooses to love, I love – now, your behaviour becomes inconsequential. And if we get snippy at each other we are reverting to the flesh. The flesh will not and cannot profit us, spiritually, These fleshly attitudes mean our God-given, Heaven designated Helper will leave, because I have chosen “my way” over “His way” and He will never take away our choices. He quietly waits for us to notice that He has left.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”Joshua 24:15. Day by day our choices matter. Christianity is not a part-time religion, it is an all or nothing one! Winning this war depends on our daily choices, our willingness to surrender everything that matters to us, to Him. When we live like that, we are demonstrating our faith that our God is a good God and He will not do us harm. Our eyes are enlightened to see beyond the here and now.

We dare not waste the daily light God sends us through His Word. I exhort you to take those things you read every day to heart, and act on them. They will be essential on the next step of your journey with Him. Bye. 👋

P 3045 This includes YOU.

/ DVH

Acts 5:32 “And we are witnesses of these things, and the Holy Spirit is also, Whom God has bestowed on those who obey Him.”Ask yourself this question — if you are passionate and you want to walk with the Holy Spirit … then, when was the last time you obeyed Him? We need to press through our feelings, and be guided by His Spirit and obey – Jesus did it and so now, we can too!

Yes, of course the Lord forgives us when we act like Peter, and betray Him by denying our knowledge of Who He is! Even when we are putting our own safety, or our public persona ahead of our desire to own our Saviour. But just because it is common, that does not make it the norm. Total honesty is the best way through difficult  situations. Honesty with yourself and the Lord. Don’t settle for pretending, that just muddies the water. Be real. Tell Him you don’t want to do whatever it is, take a deep breath and ask for His help … then do it anyway – using your faith that He will catch you if you fall.

Sometimes, it seems much easier to crawl along … instead of making the effort it takes to get back up again! However, in spite of the ungodly attitudes that I know I sometimes tolerate, all that falling down and getting up again, IS doing something. Even physically speaking, when I get up and down, I am strengthening my muscles. Meanwhile, that thought is a laugh-riot! I have trouble getting out of my chair, let alone getting up off the floor! Moving on … do squats for a bit. Your muscles will quite quickly explain to you that they don’t like being stretched like that. Our emotions and our own way of thinking won’t like being stretched either.

So let’s look at the bible, where the answers are. In the story below the apostles are under scrutiny by the usual suspects … the spiritual leaders! The council are talking amongst themselves, discussing what they can do about these men talking about Jesus all over the place. Shock, horror … now people are starting to follow the disciples!!  One of the leaders speaks up, his name is Gamaliel – he is very wise. 

Acts 5: 40-41: “So, convinced by him, (Gamaliel) they took his advice; and summoning the apostles, they flogged them and sternly forbade them to speak in or about the name of Jesus, and allowed them to go…V41…”So they went out from the presence of the council (Sanhedrin), rejoicing that they were being counted worthy [dignified by the indignity] to suffer shame and be exposed to disgrace for [the sake of] His Name.”

Did you get that? These men rejoiced that someone beat the daylights out of them because that meant they were worthy to bear the Name of Jesus. You might need a few minutes on that one! That flogging showed the world around them, that they belonged to Him, and what they were doing was working, so well people tried to beat that obedience out of them..I’m pretty sure flogging and maintaining a great attitude don’t always go together! (Hebrews 12:4) But the Holy Spirit gave them Grace for that situation. 

Our God is FOR US. He’s not upstairs somewhere sharpening His pencil writing down our misdeeds – He is so-oo-oo not like that! He loves us and He has made sure that every impediment that prevents our faith from growing –  is now gone. Now we repent and repair things, for our own sake, and because that other person needs His GRACE too! I do loads of stuff for Jesus that I probably wouldn’t do for anybody else. 

This scripture from Acts revealed to me the way I thought about trouble. In the past I saw trouble as punishment. However, at the bottom of it all, when I really prayerfully looked really hard – I discovered that I actually didn’t trust God enough to get me through hard things. The reason I took difficult things into my own hands and fiddled with them, trying to make them go away, was that I didn’t believe He always has my best interests in His heart! His love for us is described in Ephesians 3:18-19: “..that you may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

It takes His power to help me understand that He loves me! That was a brand new thought for me, and it started me down the road I’ve been travelling on for years. We’ve applied the bible as a rule book slavishly, but most of us were too scared to get to know Him and understand how, and why He does what He does. We cannot try to understand Him with our brains or emotions  – we need to use our hearts! The Holy Spirit was given to us to lead us into the promised land of fellowship with the Father, Son and Himself. He knows the Way – He brought the Way into this world through Mary! 

The power of God is not just about someone walking on water, or food being multiplied, or when someone receives a miracle. We need His power every single day to obey and understand HIM. How do you get it? Ask for it. I don’t just read the word – I ask Him to use His word to read me – my actions, attitudes, thoughts and feelings. That’s when the Holy Spirit showed me something amazing. Because Jesus chose to be human, God Himself understands how human beings operate, in a Way He didn’t before! He has chosen to experience humanity. He learnt about His creation, firsthand, by being here among us. NOW HIS SON IS HIS PERFECT EXPRESSION OF FORGIVENESS.

Our God He can never be less than Who He is, Almighty, invincible, omnipresent and omnipotent God … But because He IS Who He is – He chose to go the extra mile and experience humanity in all it’s ugliness and stinky attitudes. Jesus Christ is our perfect illustration that men and women don’t have to sink down into the lowest common denominator. That thought comes from the other guy. Look at what Jesus did, as a mere human being! He had perfect obedience to His Father’s will. 

The Lord Jesus totally relied upon the power of the Holy Spirit, and He made that power available, through His death and resurrection, to each one of us today. We don’t have to flounder along feeling guilty and hoping God won’t notice we aren’t perfect yet. SomeBody else took the exam for us AND HE PASSED … With flying colours. Now the Holy Spirit can come to live in us, because God established a precedent with Jesus. He made a Way to make the impossible, possible, and He gave that way to all of us. That includes YOU. Bye. ❤️🥰 

P 3043 Learning lessons.

/ DVH

It is always good to share the places where your faith fell over and bumped its head. I know people love positive testimonies, especially in times like these, where we don’t hear a lot of ordinary Christians standing up to testify about something the Lord sovereignly and graciously did in their lives. But today I want to share a bump in my road that loomed up at me unexpectedly.

Do you ever have those moments when your faith appears to be broken and you pray and … no answer. So you wait on the Lord, and  … still… no answer? I had one of those this week. My faith didn’t just wobble, it fell in a ditch and I couldn’t find my way out of it. I asked people to pray, I read the bible, I talked things through with my husband, yet disappointment continued to prevail. You would think that something cataclysmic happened. Nope. When you hear what it was, you might easily say: ‘well that’s a dumb thing to get upset about.’ You’d be right – it was. 

I lost my wedding ring. To make matters a lot worse for both of us — it was our wedding anniversary! We’ve just celebrated 38 years of marriage – so my timing was pretty off. But it was just a ring. Except it wasn’t … And I had no idea that such a small thing could cause such enormous grief. After all my exhortations about giving stuff to God, I sat down in the dirt, figuratively, and wept my heart out. I felt like a cardboard box in a violent rainstorm. Soggy, wet and broken. Often lost little things like that eventually turn up, but it hasn’t …

I blamed myself of course – which was completely ironic after writing a couple of days ago about blame and shame!! Hullo!! Un-awareness and over-simplification anyone??? The thing is, I am always taking off rings etc. and leaving them in obscure places, because they irritate my fingers. We looked in all those dumb places immediately, then hubby did the hard yards and looked in truly out-of-the-way places … like the vacuum cleaner bag. The rubbish bin. Behind cupboards etc. The whole house – twice!! No ring. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and I still didn’t know why I was crying. 

Yes, this sad little tale has a happy ending, and no! I did not find the ring! But we’ve kept pressing on anyway – who knows what the Lord will do with the things that happen in our lives? So I kept praying and listening. I sat down with the Holy Spirit and asked Him what on earth was going on. Mainly because my reaction was so out of proportion to what had happened. It is only a ring right? Like my hubby said: “You still have ME, I’m still here. The ring is a symbol that’s all.” It turned out the ring was a symbol alright – a whole lot of pent-up grief found an exit.

You would think I could easily get a handle on losing something relatively minor, but I couldn’t. It turns out the ring was one loss too many. I shan’t bore you with my turbulent  background but it is filled to the brim with a whole lot of loss. Some of those things were my own sins, and some of them were other people’s choices.

And of course recently, we found out my dear Mum, who is 97 and was aiming at reaching 100 – has cancer all throughout her body. Praise God she is not in pain, but she is a shell of the person who used to fill any room every single time she entered it. It is hard to watch. She is my mother, and mothers are special people. 

That’s when Father God said to me, in His great mercy: “You have come this far, with those burdens you’ve been carrying, but you must go no further with them.” Amazingly a lost wedding ring uncovered a whole lot of suppressed grief. Who knew?? God did! And He used it for His glory to heal many broken places in my heart. 

That’s when He reminded me of a parable Jesus told once in Luke 15:8-10:“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbours together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” This dear woman tore her house apart trying to find one coin because it was so valuable to her.

Eventually the Lord’s full point finally dawned on me. I was distressed about a ring, but that ring is a lesson. It helped to give me insight – a glimpse into Who He is. It actually shows me how deeply He feels about PEOPLE. The following two parables talk about people. Those thoughts blew me away – that lost ring is merely an illustration of how the Lord feels about human beings – and Jesus explained His passion this way. The lengths He will go to find one lost soul!

If a woman could not stop looking until she found a coin, and my husband and I spent three days looking for my ring –  can we even begin to imagine what it is like for our Heavenly Father to lose just one soul? And He is losing millions of them! I was totally awestruck that He would reveal His heart to me through something so simple. He so sweetly spoke my language to explain His Heart to me. I will probably always remember losing this ring, mainly because it has become a vehicle that taught me more about Him. Bye. 👑🙏

P 3037 Praying the bible.

/ DVH

Hubby shared the following verses with me the other day, and this morning I want to encourage you to use them for prayer – because that is the way he sent them to me. I am learning to do it when I can’t think what, or how to pray. It kind of ‘primes the pump’ so to speak. 

“Grant me to be strengthened with power through Your Spirit in my inner being, so that Christ may dwell in my heart through faith as I encounter Him in Your Word. Root and ground me in His love, so I would have strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that I may be filled with all of Your fullness, O my God.’ Amen. Ephesians 3:16–19.

We need to know, that we absolutely know — that we are dearly, passionately, LOVED, by God Himself. It is not enough to just know that in our heads, we need to be rooted and grounded in that love spiritually. We must hold tight to that fact in the good times, and, in my way of thinking, especially in the bad ones! To be grounded in His love means it goes right down inside us, comprehensively covering every part of who we are. The bits that are seen and unseen.

Then it will flow out of us when we are squeezed tightly by this life. Lately at my house, that seems like practically every other day!  If I were attending baseball practice in the nets – the pitching machine has gone insane, and I keep getting bopped on the head by the multitude of random, erratic balls flying at me. Not fun. I want to yell: “Will somebody please turn that rotten thing off?” Stuff just keeps happening! Sometimes it seems like there is no time to take a breath. 

You know, a big dollop of curiosity is a valuable thing in this life. It helps me to step outside the same old same old routine and look at them differently.  I used to take things apart when I was a child. Fortunately they mostly still worked when I put them back together again, or I might have met the hand of great disapproval on my delicate rear end! 🤣

Once, when I was about 9 or10, I took apart a pair of pyjamas I particularly liked, and used the bits as templates to make another pair. I hand-sewed both pairs back together again and I had two pairs of pyjamas instead of one. They weren’t Chanel – but they worked! Another time I took a watch apart … but that’s a whole other story with a less happy ending. However the watch still worked! Curiosity is just part of my nature.

So, whenever I read the bible, that’s what comes out, and one of the first things I want to know is… “why.” There are times I also want to know …“what on earth were they thinking?!” Or even; “what does that mean?” Then the ‘game is afoot’ and off I go. The Lord points to something and I start researching this and that, fitting bits together like a big jigsaw puzzle.

Sometimes I suspect that In His great kindness He indulges me, because He knows I like that kind of chase. He just drops one word or a phrase into my heart and tells me to go look it up. Then I am off like that artificial bunny running round the greyhound track. My step-Dad liked to gamble, so I went to all sorts of interesting places I’d rather not talk about, when I was a kid. 

Moving on … Jesus helps me with the process.  He gives me the strength to get up and sit at the keyboard tapping away writing this blog. Some days it feels like I would rather be a contented carrot in His garden — not mindful of anything! Yet every single time, when I read His Word, things just leap off the page and off I go again. Meanwhile there are days when I get lost trying to accomplish the task, instead of just simply walking with the Holy Spirit. He is wonderful at helping. The moral of that story is ask for His help immediately!

When we pray the bible over ourselves, we are doing more than just reading it, and agreeing with it. We are acknowledging its power. This book is incredible. It has within it, the power to change our minds. I don’t know exactly when this happened to me, but after years of reading, praying and doing, now I find myself using the bible as the reference point for everything else! I bring absolutely everything up against what His book says and chuck anything out if it doesn’t fit. I didn’t set out to do it, BTW, I just left secular understanding behind somewhere back there, and now all I care about is: “What does Jesus say about that?” 

In the above verses, I particularly like the phrase:“so I would have strength to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that I may be filled with all of Your fullness…” Boy do I need that kind of strength. My comprehension of love is so limited by my life experiences. Have you ever noticed how our enemy likes to reinforce negative stuff? I’ve  become aware of a little kink in my thinking that just slightly colours everything so that I miss out on LOVE.  Yes, I’m praying about it!

You and I are in a race. Some of us aren’t as fit as we used to be, and some of us weren’t fit in the first place! I  understanding most word meanings, but the word love, the way it is used here, often escapes me. It’s bigger than I am. I have nothing to tie it into, no reference point. My own personal experiences of love have darkened its meaning for me. So I have to start with the fact that I need His help to even begin to understand the kind of love the Holy Spirit describes in the book! It is much too easy to revert to;  love means I get what I want. 

At those negative times I desperately need His power to understand what the Lord has freely given us. That’s why I pray the scriptures over me. Otherwise I can very easily get stuck in error, subscribing to the age-old system “if you do something wrong you will be punished.” Jesus was punished in our place and Almighty God paid an incredible price for us to know how very much we are loved individually and corporately. Wouldn’t it be incredibly sad, if we missed it because we don’t understand how anybody can be that loving, and care that much about us?

I want to encourage you today, to see the bible as a resource for your prayers. Especially for intangible things like love, joy, peace. Find a verse that says what you would like to say, and pray it for yourself. Bye.👋