Ignorance

P 3173 Dumb things I have done.

/ DVH

Years ago we used to sing this song: “I’m comin’ back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about You. It’s all about You, Jesus. I’m sorry, Lord, for the thing I’ve made it. When it’s all about You. It’s all about You, Jesus.” (Matt Redmond.) That song is so sweet. There are moments when I think we don’t need any more new songs – we just need to pay better attention to the ones we are already singing!

On that very subject, many years ago we used to sing a song that I privately called the ‘Mahatma’ song. I called it that because two of the lines in the song consisted of three words that were easily run together in the rhythm of the melody. It went something like this: “that my heart might cling to you.’  It’s a fantastic thing to say to Him— but, unfortunately, around about the second time we sang it as a group, we began to rush the words together – because there are quite a lot of them! And as a consequence we all enthusiastically sang ‘mahatma’  instead of ‘my heart might.’ Mahatma, for those who have no idea, was a brand of rice in those days.

After a while, I couldn’t sing that song without falling over laughing. In my squirrelled up brain, it has been called ‘the mahatma song’ ever since. My brain is now officially under revision OK? The Holy Spirit is renewing it as we speak! Around the same time, there was also another song where people’s diction wasn’t always what it could be so some loving words became something else entirely! 

It also became a diagnostic tool for me! It too, used to make me fall over laughing. That is, until the Lord had words with me about it! A dear friend of mine years ago advised me: “don’t get taken to the wood shed about things you can fix.” It would have been nice if I had listened, but I giggled on. Sigh, my bad.

Trust me, you don’t want to go there. Especially when you know you are wrong, and the Lord is right. You can argue all you want, the only response is to get on your face!  The Holy Spirit lovingly explained to me that worship leaders pray over the songs that they sing, and my job was to follow the worship leader into worship.This process is not about what I like…it’s about what the Lord likes. Worship is not there to make me feel good. “It’s called submission” He said. ‘Remember the verse that which says submit to one another? Well this is one place where that verse applies.’ 

After I scraped myself up off the floor, I realised I had a superior attitude. I used to sing in a Madrigal group back in the ark – the donkeys were very good at harmony – and it transpired that I had a prideful attitude toward the way music was meant to go. Oh my! Pride hides in the darndest places. Meanwhile, Almighty God has angels who can sing better than any of us — so He isn’t all that bothered about the words or singing. Even if it is off-key, flat, sharp, or it has words that don’t make any sense … that doesn’t matter to Him. 

He listens to our hearts ‘singing and making melody to Him.’ I confess I still smile, a teeny bit, if I ever hear ‘the Mahatma song’ – but now I pull myself together and sing along with everyone else. My actual point is this —sometimes, in my own thinking, the scriptures that correct people often belong to someone else, and the ones that are sweet and faith building are mine! Not selfish or anything! 

‘Submit to one another’ doesn’t just mean people are supposed to submit to ME. It also means I need to submit to THEM. Now there’s a revelation nobody wants. Sadly, back then, I was merrily creating discord with my judgmental attitude. It really doesn’t say you only have to submit to the people you admire, respect or honour– it says each other because it means… each other! A-n-d it also doesn’t say … just tolerate or put up with each other either. Paul puts this great advice into a bigger context. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Ephesians 5:21. Even when we are singing!

Yeah that last step is a doozie. We can so easily excuse ourselves and accuse others! And then these things pile up like leaves outside our door, distracting and preventing us from freely entering into His Presence. At this point, we can try to feel better about ourselves by shoving our bad attitude onto the worship leader and blame them for supposedly, doing a bad job, BUT … the reality is, we can’t blame others! Well, we can, but it’s a really, really bad idea!  The problem lies within our own hearts. Meanwhile, I am sure you’ve never fallen down that particular hole like I did – you probably have your own holes instead! Now that I know about this one I am praying to stay away from those dumb things.

‘Search me O God and try me and see if there is any wicked way within me.’ Psalm 139:23&24. Half the time, we don’t know what we don’t know, and even though ignorance is bliss, it ain’t an excuse either.  Bye.👋

P 3147 Walking with the Holy Spirit.

/ DVH

Romans 8:5-9b “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you..”V5(NIV) “Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.”

The battle over whether we daily live and walk with the Holy Spirit is first fought in our minds. Quite simply, the secret to walking with Him means we can’t even think about continuing to walk accomodating our flesh. When you and I gave our life to Jesus – He took it. It’s a done deal. Now, by our choices, we daily step out of this world’s way of thinking, into His Way of thinking.

The Holy Spirit loves to glorify the Father and the Son. That’s more than church or preaching or singing! It’s the way we live now. Walking in the flesh sadly comes naturally to us, after all, we’ve been doing that all our lives! But walking with the Holy Spirit requires hard choices. Cheer up! He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows what you can and can’t do – He will “let you learn at your own rate.”

There are some people who think that they have to be super-spiritual to walk with Him, or have some kind of supernatural encounter, or they need some special spiritual gifting! None of that is true. When we welcome Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit – we can’t be born into God’s Kingdom without HIM. Now we need to value Him, more than we value what we or others want, or think or feel. If we go about our days only doing the things we feel, or want, or we think we need —we are ignoring His input. He has a WAY for us to do those things that will give Him a channel to impact the people around us. The more we ignore Him, the less we will hear His voice saying:“…this is the way, walk in it whenever you turn to the right or to the left.” Isaiah 30:21b.

The Holy Spirit wants us to personally know Him, His voice. He came to be with us, to stay. This is how I think that works – when we choose to live this life mindful of Jesus and His Word and we take His word seriously, and obey what He tells us – we are walking with the Holy Spirit. The word mindful means your mind is full of Him and His Ways. Our ability to perform does not come into this – His ability to keep us, as we lean on Him, does. It is another way to look at our lives – which are now HIS. This is how we die to self.

It’s all about priorities. When we look at Jesus, our Heavenly Father, and the Precious Holy Spirit as add-ons to everything else in our lives, that is all They will ever be. But when we take our commitment to Christ seriously, and live each day with our spiritual antenna up, watching and waiting for anything that He might ask us to do — we will see His kingdom come …all around us, as well as in us. Honestly speaking, we cannot afford to hang onto our nasty attitudes, bad temper, lack of generosity toward others, cold-heartedness etc. and expect to walk with HIM! He loves people more than we can possibly imagine. Jesus has invested Himself in mankind!

Sadly, we’ve accidentally made a club mentality out of something that was intended for everyone. The Holy Spirit’s Way is living like Jesus did. He lived for the Father’s will. He “only did the things He saw His Father doing… He only said the things He heard the Father saying …”Now we too need to allow the Holy Spirit to flow through us, by yielding to God’s Ways.“How can two walk together unless they are in agreement?”That’s when we become a channel for His love to flow through.

Let’s think of other people, no matter what they believe, as people Jesus loves. He loves them so much He died for them. Now He has appointed and anointed us to be His witnesses and representatives, alert to what He wants, as well as the needs of others. We can’t afford to only love the people we like.

The bible is our guide and governor, under the Holy Spirit’s tutelage. This book daily shows us what God wants from us. We are alive in this world to demonstrate His word, His kingdom, and we’ve been given the honour of revealing His love to others. Let’s choose to see things through His eyes. Ephesians 4:17-18:“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.”

Every single time we say no to something the Holy Spirit brings up with us, we are hardening our heart against HIm. The Holy Spirit is gentle, mild, and unobtrusive, so He will quietly step down, and we will not even know that He is gone. I don’t care if you are the best preacher in the country – how’s your heart doing? The state of our hearts is our business, and we need soft hearts. We have been destined to live this life alive to the Spirit, walking with Him and yielding to His wishes, just like Jesus did. Bye. 👋

P 3028 Yield.

/ DVH

“Let me emphasise this: As you yield to the dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life. When your self-life craves the things that offend the Holy Spirit you hinder Him from living free within you! And the Holy Spirit’s intense cravings hinder your self-life from dominating you! So then, the two incompatible and conflicting forces within you are your self-life of the flesh and the new creation life of the Spirit. But when you yield to the life of the Spirit, you will no longer be living under the law, but soaring above it!” Galatians 5:16-18 TPT.

Father God has a better way to live, instead of being driven around by what I think I need or want. When I follow Him, He takes care of all that stuff along the way. If He doesn’t, then I didn’t need whatever it was in the first place. Meanwhile, that statement comes under the heading of “easier said than done!” My flesh yells at me, “too hard – enough already!!” Being extremely spiritually sharp, that’s when I finally figured out: “Oh! He’s doing something else!” 🙄

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says this:‘Yield’ can mean “to stop trying to resist something” or “to stop trying to fight someone or something.”

Yielding to the Holy Spirit means denying myself – will I have that last word or not? When I yield to the Lord’s processes, that will definitely teach me how much flesh I still have. People have asked me how do you know when you’ve prayed enough and you need to let go of things, or even people? … My answer is this – let go the minute you realise you are holding on! Put the Lord in charge of everything in your life. That’s what Jesus’ blood bought and paid for. He paid to give us access to all His wisdom, His ability to love, be joyful, be patient etc. But we will need to let GO of what we want, or what we think is best, for us. 

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” 1 Corinthians 1:27. I’ve found that I simply need to listen, pay attention to the book and obey the One Who knows everything … and then you can look wa-ay smarter than you really are! “For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” 1 Corinthians 1:19. Clever people need to watch out, you may need a big dose of humility any minute. However, that is not an excuse to hide in ignorance either.

I am not talking about rejecting education, by the way. Get some – be that person, go for it! What I am talking about is that you cannot just ‘study out’ or manufacture a relationship with people, or the Lord! It has to be ‘lived out’ minute by minute, both the good bits and bad bits. Learning to trust that other person by being open and honest about who you are. Knowing any subject does not mean you know the writer!

The secret to dying to self is to love Jesus more than you love you! Then any sacrifices become part of the process. However having faith and dying to self does not mean you sell your house and possessions, and go and plonk yourself on the curb somewhere because a voice told you to do it. Check with more mature people and get them praying too, first.

Our flesh does not like to go without what it wants. In the West, we are quite addicted to comfort, safety and the opportunity to do what we want, whenever we want to. In other places in this world those things do not even enter someone’s agenda for a minute. Those dear people are too busy avoiding death, prison, disease, starvation, and active opposition, while they are trying to find somewhere to sleep! 

The most important word in the whole scripture I’ve chosen today is YIELD. We can hinder the Lord from doing what He wants simply by indulging ourselves. It is so easy to let the flesh tell us:“It’s too hard, God wouldn’t want me to do something hard, He loves me. Life has been terrible lately, surely He doesn’t want me to continue to suffer!” BTW, knowledge, or acknowledgement of our faults is not enough, action is always required.

Father God loves us so much that He willingly gave His only Son to die in our place … did you get that? Jesus died, and the Precious Trinity agreed that it was the only way to save YOU and ME!  Ya might want to stop and think about that. God has a much different value system than we do! 

Fear can be a huge hindrance, so can pride. But yielding to God is a great way to get rid of those things. Face the fear head on and do it anyway. Some of the time pride is just a ‘front’ we put on to hide fear of failure. 

But the most important thing we need to remember is in those above verses — whatever we yield to will dominate us! Remember, we have been reborn to live above earthly things, Now we have a brand new life waiting for us to claim it, using our faith, and we aim to walk with Jesus day by day. We simply need to practice doing things His Way and remember to yield. Bye👋.

P 2521 The cross needs to be at the centre of everything.

/ DVH

One day, everything in this universe will bend its knees to what Christ did!1 Corinthians 1:17 says:“And I declare this message stripped of all philosophical arguments that empty the cross of its true power. For I trust in the all-sufficient cross of Christ alone.”Our God tells us He is a jealous God, and the Apostle Paul recognised, understood and respected and honoured that fact, in all of his ways. That man lived his life gratefully.

Paul has a huge discourse in 1 Corinthians 1 because some of the members of the Corinthian church were polarising about who baptised them, and they had divided themselves into factions, under a man’s name. These people were trying to make themselves look important by association. However, Paul could not give two hoots about any of that nonsense … he is not spreading the gospel for popularity. He is constrained by the Holy Spirit to make Christ famous. Our single-mindedness is important.

Paul speaks to these factional people very strongly. His point is that we are all baptised into Christ … not Joe Blogs or Tom Smith … In other words some guys who happen to be prophetic or have a healing ministry. These men and others like them, are just His vehicles, Christ Himself is our whole salvation and destination. Christ living in us is our hope of glory!  It is good to realise that we can be distracted, and we can end up following somebody else whose doctrine appeals to us. But salvation comes from Christ alone, and it’s all in THE BOOK. We have been promised so many things in that wonderful book, but think on this; “would you give care of your car keys to a four year old?” Salvation is the beginning, we need to let Him mature us.

Christ is the centre of our faith. But when we treat the Lord and His death like a commodity, and disrespect what Father God has done for us, we are walking on thin ice. When Jesus died for us, He exchanged His life, His favour with God, His obedience, His humility, His purity of heart and focus, and devotion … for our sins. We can easily be dragged away by our own wilful carelessness, ignorance, and blatant disregard for other people, plus our disobedience, and distinct lack of true reverence for Who Almighty God is!  What is important is not just being saved at an altar — but letting the Holy Spirit transform our hearts INTO an altar for God Himself. We live this life we have now for His sake.

If Christ Himself was not willing to grasp at His Heavenly Father’s glory, then it follows that as His followers, we too need to follow His example.“And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine Own Self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.”John 17:5. Jesus Christ’s sacrifice started before He was born here. It started when He chose to give up every right and privilege He had as God’s only begotten Son to leave heaven and be born here! That is the reason I exhort us all to daily linger at the foot of the cross. 

We cannot afford to be seduced away from our destiny by any one person who has a mighty anointing. That’s what the members of the church at Corinth were doing. They started following and giving their allegiance to the MEN who baptised them, and what they said. We need to thank Almighty God that He gave His gifts to men – but remain steadfast to the One Who gave them. It is in our own best interests to pay attention to what Almighty God likes, and what He doesn’t like and it’s all in the book! That’s the real reason that we ‘hide His word in our hearts’ … ‘so we may not sin against Him.’ .

Salvation isn’t just something we do once, and then we have a free ticket to heaven so we are safe. Salvation is a process, one we participate in. It is a life that choses to be laid down deliberately for Christ’s sake. We were saved and now we are daily in the process of being saved. It is a lifetime filled with moment by moment decisions to follow the way of the cross. It means we live for Him now. Every time we choose His will, His way, we die to the old way we lived before, and we are choosing to live our lives glorifying the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. He breathes His life into us, minute by minute, so we can continually walk with Christ. Our job now is to co-operate with what the bible says, and follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit!

The Holy Spirit of the Living God is going to confront areas in our lives that need change. The fight we fight daily to be transformed is about learning to yield plus learning to overcome. It is not easy, nor does it come naturally. This fight means we are taking God at His Word, and we are responding with obedience. It is the fight to prevail that matters. Remember, Jesus Himself did not want to go to the cross. He has personally shown us it can be hard to do the will of God. That is why we have the Helper Who is always available. There is no greater destiny for any one of us than to live and die for God’s glory. That’s what our Lord Jesus did. His cross needs to be at the centre of our lives.  🙌