Jesus’ blood

P 3211 Procrastination.

/ DVH

“Procrastination is the thief of time.” I was taught that saying in my teens, years ago. Here’s the meaning: procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying tasks, even when you know it will lead to negative consequences, by choosing less important activities instead. It’s a common behaviour, not just laziness, often stemming from poor emotion regulation, perfectionism, fear of failure, or executive function challenges. While occasional procrastination is normal, chronic procrastination can cause significant stress, guilt, anxiety, and harm productivity and well-being. 

If you are a Christian, this particular attitude can cause doubt, fear, unbelief, and eventually inactivity to grab us. These traits often show up in our thought patterns: “Did God say that?’ “He wouldn’t really want me to do that would He?’ ‘I need to wait to be ready to do what He said.’ ‘He knows I can’t do that!’ ‘There are other people who can do things like that better than me.” ‘I don’t have an anointing to do that!’

That last thought is just plain dumb. We have the Lord’s instructions written down in the bible, signed in Jesus’ blood. It almost goes without saying that none of us are ever ready! I urge everyone to stop looking at famous Christians and let go of the kind of thinking that says, they are our example. Maybe you and I don’t have their anointing but we can still be obedient to our own personal heavenly calling. Besides —Jesus is OUR example, and motivation – not other people.  

Sometimes all I can do in a ‘talking to people’ situation, is to get my feet moving. When that happens it is not because I am disabled, it’s because I’m scared! Scared of someone else’s response, scared of somebody being mean to me, scared of the consequences in my life and in theirs. Maybe I will mess witnessing etc. up! This is a good time to remind ourselves of the things the Lord has done in the past. God fought without-number Midianites with Gideon and 300 men, and He also got Jonah to Nineveh via a whale taxi. Of course He can help us! Here’s something from His book to sort out our excuses. PS … when the Lord says ‘ME” He means YOU too!

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on ME, because the Lord has anointed ME, to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent ME to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of His splendour.” Isaiah 61:1-3.

If we both sit about waiting to feel super spiritual, or hoping to have some wild experience with Him, to signify we have been sent by Him – we will miss the boat. Famous Christians are the exceptions, not the norm. Procrastination can easily steal the time that God has generously given to us, and we will end up at the end of our lives in the land of regret.  

The bible says this in 1 Corinthians 3:15 In the Message bible: “Take particular care in picking out your building materials. Eventually there is going to be an inspection. If you use cheap or inferior materials, you’ll be found out. The inspection will be thorough and rigorous. You won’t get by with a thing. If your work passes inspection, fine; if it doesn’t, your part of the building will be torn out and started over. But you won’t be torn out; you’ll survive—but just barely.”  Um… found out? We won’t get BY?! Torn out and started over?!! Barely survive?? None of that sounds good! 

There is a kind of evasive thinking that can dominate our hearts and minds, spiralling us into fear, as well as hiding from our calling. We can never afford to forget that we are now dead! We died with Him. We’ve been saved for His purposes now – plus we’ve been given gifts to use for His glory, and to benefit other people. None of that has anything to do with our comfort, lives, families, or our careers. When we live our lives for His glory our focus actually changes.

Someone once told me that their boss was so demanding they couldn’t find a minute to talk to anyone about anything, so Jesus was relegated to the back seat…. plus it didn’t seem fair to do the Lord’s work on the boss’s payroll! That kind of sounds OK eh? Except the bible tells us we can ask for anything and it will be given to us, and if we have a need He will supply it. Ask the Lord to make a way, where there seems to be no way! He’s really really good at it. 

I’ve had to face facts, one of them being there is nothing extraordinary about me. I’m everybody and nobody rolled into one older lady! But it’s a New Year and Father God has left us on this earth for a purpose. We need to find out why, and start doing it. Postponing God’s will, together with doing things His way, means we are postponing the very thing that will set us free from fear, anxiety and the spirit of stupid that seems to be extremely prevalent everywhere.

We are called to pray so we can find out what we are here to do. We do not pray to get Father God’s rubber stamp on what we think we should be doing! If HE is not in charge, then whatever we do, it will fall on its head! And produce no fruit! Procrastination is the thief of time, I urge you to watch out for it. Otherwise it will steal your birthright away. Bye. 👋

P 3078 Anger is like Hydra – it has a lot of heads!

/ DVH

Many people give up on God because it seems to them that following Him from day to day, doesn’t work, and so they just float off proclaiming “that religion thing didn’t work for me.” The good news is – Jesus never ever gives up on us. Even when we are kind of pretending we are OK, as we sob or angrily bob about on our man-made li-los. The Lord Jesus will always come after us. Reconciliation is at the core of Who He is. 

Anybody who has had a difficult person in their lives will tell you that being misunderstood;  or having your motivation treated with suspicion;  or even being judged by someone else’s standard —  is an awful kind of suffering. I think Christians are a bit like salmon, swimming against the pressing tide of the rest of humanity, waiting for the power to jump up the next waterfall. Meanwhile the people-who-don’t-know-Him-yet are merrily cruising the freeways of this life, creating accidents and disasters for others.

This week I fell over, or under, or maybe into!  — an old learning curve and it knocked me on my head. My spiritual life lately has forced me to re-evaluate a whole lot of things, a death in the family does that. It included issues that I thought were kind of settled. I discovered that sometimes being ‘angry’ with someone else doesn’t go away permanently, even when I am trusting Jesus to help me with it. Instead it hangs about and waits for an opportune moment to pop its nasty little head up again and poke you! That aforementioned many-headed Hydra! Things often make a return appearance when we’ve been weakened by adverse circumstances.

I am astonished at how ordinary events can hit buttons you didn’t know you had anymore, because they have remained hidden. Even those things that you’ve given over to the Lord and forgotten, can still be dragged up and used by the enemy against you. satan will still remind us of our past grievances, and at the same time, we can get sucked into into a ‘poor me’ vortex. It is good to remember that when we confess our sins our God forgives us, and now our sins are under Jesus’ blood. We need that!

I’ve prayed about anger a lot, I had to!  And the Lord reminded me: “It says in the Bible: be angry but don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” This is what I’ve come up with since then —I’ve been practising giving my anger to the Lord before I go to sleep! Because right now when I am in an unexpectedly pressing moment, I can’t seem to deal with my anger. It just keeps popping out, unbidden, in the darndest places. I was in the bank the other day, facing mountains of idiotic red tape — and what I actually thought just flew out of my mouth, at someone else, and boy was I grouchy.

And, even worse,I wasn’t sorry either!! I fake apologised to the person I grouched at, but the inner rumblings continued. So, I exercised self-control, but I practically had to whack my hand over my mouth. Then  I managed to shut up. I actually didn’t repent, repent, until we were back home again. That’s when embarrassment grabbed me by the throat, because I had been caught publicly being rude to someone who was very nice and polite to me. Sigh.

God’s Grace came to meet me, through my husband. He reminded me that part of any normal grief is anger. I always thought that meant you got angry at the person for dying and leaving you. Wrong answer!  I’m actually  happy for my mother, because she was very old and very ill. But at the same time, I was also relieved, because we often had a complicated relationship while she was still here. 

My anger came from many many unresolved issues between us over the years. Instead of confronting those issues at the time, I simply sucked it up because she was my mother. They say one straw breaks the camel’s back? Well, I had a bus load of straw that landed on my head — and the bank’s rigidity and inflexibility regarding their rules won. The lack of justice banged on a wound, and I ran out of Grace. It instantly reminded me of my past injuries. Our enemy is a snake, he knows right where to poke us and find a sore spot..

Up until then, I thought I had been a bit successful at overcoming anger, because I had defeated my bad attitudes after a bit of a skirmish or two. It sounded like this: … “that was so tough, but I made it through to love – ya-ay me!” Here’s a really good thought to remember, pride goes before a fall! But fortunately Jesus throws all our sins in the sea of forgetfulness … however, our enemy still has a whole other agenda. 

This battle we are currently living in, will not be over until the Lord Himself comes back. Plus anger has a lot of heads, and it comes at us in many different ways. However, the bible tells us that the martyrs under the altar are continually crying out to be avenged. Revelation 6:9-10: “…I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying,“How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” 

I found this scripture oddly comforting. These Godly people have left here and now they are in the safest most glorious place and yet they still want to be avenged!  Ya might want to think about that yourself – I did. Bye. 👋

P 2805 Righteousness.

/ DVH

“This gospel unveils a continual revelation of God’s righteousness—a perfect righteousness given to us when we believe. And it moves us from receiving life through faith, to the power of living by faith. This is what the Scripture means when it says: “We are right with God through life-giving faith!”” Romans 1:17 TPT.

Righteousness, means the ability to live, day-by-day in right relationship with God, and others. It is not a static thing – it keeps unfolding and expanding in and through our lives. We need to live valuing what we have been given, and we do that when we live justly, honestly, and faithfully according to God’s instructions from the book. This kind of life is not a dream, or a wish-thought, it is an ongoing process that we enter into with Him. It flows from a continual revelation of what He died to give us.

Jesus Christ revealed, in Person, what righteousness before God looks like. It looks like – praying for lepers, forgiving those who have treated you dreadfully, giving without measure, and loving others, as we honestly wrangle with the hardships of this life. After the Lord went back to heaven, He left behind Him a small group of ordinary men who changed history. However, those men found out everything He told them was true – firsthand – for themselves. Don’t ever be content with knowledge about righteousness – learn to live in it instead. Let the Holy Spirit teach you.

‘Righteousness’ is an old fashioned word that is easily overlooked or ignored in today’s abbreviated language. As we embrace absorbing this incredible, church-ified word into our lives, and we choose to look our lives through His eyes — the way we think is changed. It needs to be. We must move past the try-harder-to-be-a-good-person school into the I-can-never-do-that-by-myself … one! There we will learn that our faith is not just series of idioms we repeat endlessly hoping they are true. We will begin to see what we believe come to life, like the disciples did. We will learn to rise up to be all each one of us was sent here to be.

That’s because the cross was an exchange and not just a destination — we were taken out of this world’s kingdom and made citizens of heaven when we said yes to the Lord Jesus’ sacrifice. Christ’s righteousness, His Godly, right way of living, giving, and dying on planet earth, is available to us. We gave Him our sin, and He gave us His Grace, His place – His position before our Heavenly Father. 

If you pause and take the time to think about it, Jesus was never ever worried that God would not listen to Him when He prayed. He expected to be heard because there was no sin to separate Him from His Father’s will. “Jesus raised His eyes to heaven and prayed, “Father, I’m grateful that You have listened to Me.I know You always do listen, but on account of this crowd standing here I’ve spoken so that they might believe that You sent me.” John 11:41. That’s why we can be trusted to ask for whatever we want – because now we’ve entered into a new agreement with God. We are going to live our lives for His will, His way, from now on.

We too, can have confidence we will be heard when we stand on the simplicity of the gospel and let it daily work on our lives, thoughts and hearts. Now …”In this [union and fellowship with Him], love is completed and perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment [with assurance and boldness to face Him]; because as He is, so are we in this world.” 1 John 4:17. The thing we need to remember is that His righteousness is not permissiveness. Jesus Himself “…only did what He saw His Father doing  etc…” The limitless One chose to limit Himself, as He lived in obedience to His Father’s will. Even to His death. 

The bible tells us that God’s kind of Love avoids even the appearance of wrong. We call that self-control, and it is a fruit germinated and fulfilled by our relationship with Jesus Himself. We choose to live like this because of the passion we have for Him – He is our Beloved! We limit ourselves in this life for His sake, because He limited Himself for our sake.

Almighty God became one of us and He came here to show us He means us no harm! Now when He looks at you and I, He sees the pure, spotless, innocent blood of Jesus covering our sins. We’ve moved out of sin and darkness into His marvellous light. Which is why it is D.U.M.B./stupid to deliberately keep on sinning. God is so good! When we sin – Jesus is our lawyer/advocate – He points to His blood covering our lives and claims us as His own.

Real repentance is our only way back into the light of love. Ask yourself: ‘Why would I ever choose to move out of His light? What can possibly be more important than walking with Him?’ We can see this world far more clearly in the light. Darkness blinds us to reality. Jesus Christ died to give us His righteousness – so let’s live our day-to-day lives for Him, grateful. Bye 👋.