Idols

P 3437 He wrote it down. 

/ DVH

As I mentioned yesterday, I believe God calls us, and then we respond. Even when it seems like it is the other way around, we will eventually discover that the Lord has been working behind the scenes in our lives and we have not noticed Him working. The bible tells us His Word not only feeds us, it washes us clean, but we have to let it do what it has been sent to do.

I think the way to get to know our heavenly Father, His Son and Holy Spirit is to watch the way They work in other people’s lives, to see Their compassion and kindness toward ordinary people. It is not enough to read the bible stories, we must let those stories read us, and that means we will probably be convicted along the way. Here are someone’s thoughts as they talked to Him and read His book.

“I wrote it down  I stretched out the heavens, I numbered the sand I gave you the breath that you hold in your hand.  The world cries for answers, but you look away.  Yet My Word has spoken of this very day.  

I wrote it down.  Every line, every page for the humble and the wise, for the young and the aged.  The truth is alive. It will help you to stand. I left you My Word. It’s all in your hands. The nations are trembling, the earth shakes in pain. But still you chase idols and call on My name.  I warned you of kingdoms that rise and then fall. I gave you the prophets to speak. Through it all, 

I wrote it down.  Every line, every page. For the humble and the wise, for the young and the aged. The truth is alive. It will help you to stand. I left you My Word. It’s all in your hands.  You say I don’t see it. You say I can’t know. But My Spirit will teach you if you let it show. Heaven and earth will both pass away, but My Word remains unshaken today. 

I wrote it down, for the darkness, the fight, so you’d walk in the day, not stumble at night. The truth is before you. Don’t let it be banned. I left you My Word. It’s all in your hands… … I gave you the scriptures don’t say I was silent. (The artists are “In God’s World.” It’s a collective. This song is on YouTube if you wish to listen to it..)

This is one of my favourite songs to listen to at the moment. I love the haunting beauty of the words, melody and music, and the fact that what it says is relevant today. Especially the exhortation that the bible is not just any old book that can be read and forgotten. Almighty God wrote His love down on every single page, through ordinary people who didn’t live fancy-schmancy fabulous lives. They simply worshipped and followed our spectacular God. The thing is, I can hear the intense cry of the Lord’s heart in this song.

Our Shepherd wants to lead us… however, it is easy to think that everything He does is going to be spectacular. That does not resemble the Person we see in the Gospels! He didn’t chase opportunities, like we would. He simply moved about with His disciples and helped the people who asked Him, taught the ones that were interested, and healed everyone who came to Him. The bible clearly says in Isaiah  53:2: “He (Jesus) grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.” 

This means that the Lord Jesus’ beauty came from within! The Holy Spirit was beautiful IN Him and through Him, expressing the love and life of our Heavenly Father. (PS we can choose to look like that, when we daily choose to follow Him.) Jesus looked just like any other Middle Eastern man, so if you weren’t searching for God Himself, you’d pass Him on the street! This obsession with outward beauty is a reflection of the age we are living in, where we think things have to be gorgeous and stunning, to be significant. 

There is nothing more gut-wrenchingly, devastatingly beautiful than that cross! This one event is so beautiful it reaches through time and space to touch us here and now.

Father God tells us that He did not leave us alone. He is with us … every time we read His book … we have the Holy Spirit with us – and His book! The key ingredient is to believe He is talking to YOU when you read. God is far more incredibly wise and creative than we can understand, He can take the pages of an old book and make it food for anyone.

People can get so extraordinarily tied up within the thoughts  that this word means this, and that word means that – which is useful and helpful —- but it is not what the bible’s for! The bible is spiritual MANNA. You EAT it. You treat it like a steak or a piece of broccoli … you simply cut off a chunk and chew on it.

And because digestion begins in the mouth, then you talk about it, question it, research it … that’s what chewing looks like! You ask the CHEF, the Holy Spirit, to explain to you why He chose to make the broccoli into a cream sauce on the top of the steak. Then you wait and listen. Let’s remember to ask QUESTIONS and press in for ANSWERS. “How do I do that?” is a great question. 

Our Father’s reply to us is always about His love for us. Even correction is LOVE. If you truly want to know your Heavenly Father, and His Son, read the book. The Holy Spirit waits for us to open His Word. It is amazing. This book appears to be a pure bright white light – but inside it, there is a rainbow – a depth and diversity of colour, transformation and thoughts. Bye. 👋

P 2635 Obedience is everything.

/ DVH

“Great is the Lord’s anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the words of this book; they have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us.” 2 Kings 22:13b.

I’ve been reading through the bible, from the beginning again, and so far I am up to the book of 2 Kings. I gotta tell ya, some of these stories are kind of tedious to read. Stuff like:  this king didn’t do what God said — he didn’t get rid of most of the idols and accoutrements;  and that other one didn’t get rid of any at all — and another king with an unpronounceable name got rid of the weird sounding idols, but he left a few stragglers behind. These guys all flunked their obedience tests big time! The bible says that they left some of the idols in the ‘high places’— so maybe their kingly horses didn’t like mountain climbing. Perhaps they thought obedience was optional back then.

It all kind of reminds me of an illustration I heard once… What if I were to give you a nice clean glass of water and I put one teeny tiny drop of poison in it? Would you still drink It? Me neither!! But the one thing that these two books of Kings have taught me is that we all can tolerate a level of indifference to the things of God and what He wants, especially while we are doing other things we like better! Meanwhile, although nobody says it out loud, sadly, we are counting on the blood of Jesus to make the difference! It’s not deliberate disobedience, it’s careless disobedience.

I mean, I’m convicted just writing this blog this morning! Near enough definitely ain’t good enough. Whenever we read the bible, we need to pray over it and ask Him how to do whatever it says. The long winding road through those two books of Kings has taught me that, and Chronicles still lies ahead! There are lessons upon lessons in the bible.

Along the way, I picked up the clear idea that blaming the guys who went before us;  like our parents, our grandparents, our great grandparents etc. etc. does not work! My disobedience is MY disobedience. We can’t wiggle out of obeying by trying to sneak back through a generational door!! This subject is too important. It is even disobedience if we know to do good – and don’t do it. One king ripped his clothes and threw dirt on his head when he discovered what the book of God said when he read it. People were so careless with it, it was found dumped like an old rag in a cupboard … I wonder where I left my bible again???

The bible says: “obedience is better than sacrifice”(1 Samuel 15:22) But what I have found is that obedience requires sacrifice. Those two things go together. One thing leads us to the other. At the same time, obedience is the best way I know to make friends with the Holy Spirit. That’s because I can’t do things without Him. If I try to, then half the time ‘I don’t want to’ catches me by the throat and I end up quitting before I start. I need help, all the time – and He is my all-the-time loving Helper, praise God. Through practising obedience I am learning to know and rely upon Him. 

I also try to do my best to pay very little attention to my own understanding, because my understanding is always looking for a back door to wiggle out of doing anything difficult!  Obedience is often about doing hard things BTW, but after a while, living to obey Him becomes a way of life. There are times when I think to myself, what does Jesus have to say about that? Trust me … He has a whole lot to say about many things!! 

The Lord is not really keen on people pretending to do the right thing, while they are slicing and dicing others up in their minds either. He calls that hypocrisy. But He loves the guy whose heart is set to please Him. The good thing about obeying is once you’ve done whatever He asked you to do, you can just walk away and leave the results to Him. I like that bit!! Obedience is just like honesty – don’t leave home without it. People may get a bit startled when you start to live this way, but the results are straight out of heaven. 

EG: in the past, I had to tell somebody in faith … somebody who actually drove me clear up a wall (!) — “I love you” for a very long time … before it made a difference. But over time, my decision to obey sunk into the mud of my well-established-disobedience and transformed me. That other person hasn’t changed much at all, but my own attitude has changed HEAPS. Now I can say “I love you” with agreement and conviction, because I really do love them. 

All the glory goes to Him!! He helped me stick at it. The Holy Spirit’s Ways are so much better than our own ideas of avoidance and pretend. I remind myself that He took chaos and darkness and made this world. Trust me — there is nothing He can’t transform into something beautiful. Obedience IS everything. 👋