Lean on Him

P 3225 Please don’t settle for postponing your only life.

/ DVH

The bible says that hope deferred, (postponed) can make our hearts sick!  Being ill or having a permanent infirmity can lock us into going round and round, searching for answers. We can easily forget to live the life we have. Sadly we are often bombarded by things on TV about what is wrong with us health wise – it seems we are obsessed with trying to live forever, here and now. Let me tell you that if this lot down here is the best we’ve got to live for, then we are all sunk! We definitely need higher aims!!

Some precious people in this world live their whole lives in abject poverty. What is appalling about that, is the fact that many of those who have more than enough, won’t share. Our world currently produces enough food to feed everyone in it. Back to the point: every single day the TV is full of diseases that might, or probably WILL kill you, and how we can and should avoid them. Cheery stuff! Turn off the TV I say, and put on something calming and relaxing. Something that lifts your heart. Counting symptoms doesn’t do that, it creates fear.

There are times when I see smiley-faced young and fit people doing repetitive and ridiculous exercises, or they are selling some gizmo or other and they happily tell me that ‘I can look like them if I just buy one of these.’ I laugh my head off. These people think they are telling me how to get and keep health … like somehow we have control over it! What a joke!! My genes have nothing whatsoever to do with me. The Lord knows what I need and He will always give it to me – in the meantime I want to concentrate on finding and keeping GRACE! 

Let’s do whatever we can to help ourselves, and then move our thoughts on to better things – like loving Him and loving others. Father God is not going to ask us if we used our faith to get good health. He will ask us if we took the time to help others to get to know Him. Meanwhile who wants to be the best looking old person with a great body …in a casket? Not me! Personally, I want people to remember me as that mad old lady who wouldn’t stop talking about Jesus! Let’s just aim at being His witnesses, and tell others He’s alive and He lives in us – so when we keep consistently loving others, eventually they will stumble across His reality too! 

Meanwhile good luck with keeping well enough to get out of this world alive, only one guy ever did that. All I can say is – Enoch knew how to choose a brilliant walking Companion. It never fails to astonish me that the easiest road to living forever seems to be the one people avoid the most! They’d rather do thousands of push ups! I’m not sure that being supremely fit is the best aim we can have, I don’t remember Jesus running in any other marathon but the one He called LIFE.  Moo-ving on …

Because of God’s incredible generosity, you and I have eternity to look forward too … neither of us will be sick or infirm there!  Healing is always God’s gracious generosity generated toward the sick person. It doesn’t matter whether the doctors say they can help you or not, just pray over it and give your health to Him and keep walking. 

Go after having enough Grace to manage whatever is going on. Remember we are all growing the fruit of patient forbearance in our lives. However, even when you are sick, don’t stop believing He can heal you. I urge you to keep your expectation in His goodness toward you alive by reflecting on how good He is.

Jesus didn’t only heal people – He also delivered them, taught them, fed them, physically and spiritually. Making one thing more important than another often leads to heartache for many. Especially those who struggle to believe He is good in the face of pain and suffering. Let’s just go after Him and see where that leads us. 

Even battered and bruised hope can make the best of whatever situation it is placed in, as we point that hope toward the One Who holds the future and loves us all more than life itself. Our faith rests in Him! I lean on Him and ask for mercy – a lot! I also hope today will be a better day than yesterday, and I will look more like Him today than I did last week.

Our hope needs to be well-placed and the best place for it is in Him. In His character, and love for us. When our hope is in Him, and not in our circumstances, we will not be swayed from our God-given course. It is the same one that was laid out in front of Jesus. “For your heart will always pursue what you esteem as your treasure.” Matthew 6:21 TPT. “He is no fool who gives away what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.”(J. Elliot) 

Don’t settle for postponing living your life when bad health grabs you, because hope deferred can make our hearts even sicker. But focusing on Jesus first, becomes a tree of life. 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 2932 The 3 W’s.

/ DVH

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to Me. Get away with Me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with Me and work with Me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with Me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28.MSG

The secret to living like this is in the ‘walking’ and ‘working’ … and …’watching’ thing. Praise God we don’t have to do any of those things by ourselves — we are learning to do it all, every single bit of it, WITH THE REAL VICTOR right there with us! Seriously, we will struggle to win this war if we don’t know how to give into God, and lean on Him. This is where we learn to fight (walk), endure (work) and overcome (watch) – by simply surrendering. And yes, I agree, it sounds nuts. 

But yielding to His wisdom and Grace is leaning on Him so … give up! Tell Him you can’t do whatever it is you feel you should do and then keep on forgiving, if that is necessary. Remember to take your errant angry, or disappointed thoughts captive. If you start thinking about bashing someone up, repent, forgive them again. Go back to the Lord – He understands your disappointment etc. with yourself and others. Ask for His help to practice love in the face of hate. Kindness in the face of cruelty, patience in the face of interminable suffering.

We simply must stop pretending to be what we are not, and … let Him make the difference. Lemme ask this question: do you once see Jesus struggling to be what God sent Him to be? The only struggle the Lord had was with facing the crucifixion and even then He yielded! Even reading about that is a blessing to us. When we struggle with our lives, with really hard things, we are not faithless – we are human. Jesus understands our struggles. 

God does not do things the way we do them. We can’t overcome by gritting our teeth and telling everyone we are ‘fine.’  We do it by acknowledging our weaknesses, because that’s when His strength can be made perfect in us. If someone asks you in the middle of a struggle if you are OK, instead of pasting on a smile and lying, say something like this:‘I’m not OK. But I’m learning to trust that Jesus can do a miracle and make it OK.’ 

Christianity is an upside-down world. We receive by giving. We lose our rights voluntarily. We win by giving in to Him. We rejoice in the face of loss. We forgive by choice, not by our feelings. We learn to give people to God for Him to deal with them. He’s good at it. Read the book! God plays a long game! In today’s sue-them-or-punish-them world all that sounds completely NUTS. But eventually, losing means we win! 

That verse above is a wonderful recipe for walking with Jesus. When everything inside us is shouting:“There is no point in praying. This is the end. You can’t come back from here …things can only get worse!…”  We run like bunny rabbits straight to Jesus and say: “Lord please hide me.” And that’s when the Holy Spirit comes into His own. He’s so-oo good at fixing stuff. And every time you say no to what you want to do… you are growing the fruit of the Spirit in so many ways you won’t be able to count them. It’s HIS fruit, we can’t grow it! His fruit needs to be grown His way.

That person you wish you could avoid, or maybe you actually successfully avoid them, probably IS as difficult as you think they are. You are not lying to yourself. Why would anyone need Grace if someone else is already a nice Godly person? We need His Grace for the people whose aim in this life seems to be about making our life miserable. We must stop using avoidance to bring about an uneasy peace, and start walking with Him, working with Him, and watching how He does it. Most human beings are not nice enough on the inside to maintain a pleasant facade when they are under great pressure. 

Here’s a big thought … and … believe it or not I got it from a TV show – because Christians are too busy claiming this and praying for that … so now the rocks are crying out. “Humility makes a place for new possibilities.” There are things we can’t see when we are in the middle of a terrible struggle …but God can! He doesn’t want wounded warriors, He wants to truly heal us. Everything we meet is an opportunity to see this life from His point of view.

We can be influenced by the bad, hurtful things that have happened in our lives. Every now and then some angry word or action bubbles to the top, and we can’t figure out how it got there. Somebody or some situation reminds us of something that is long gone, but the memory of the pain lingers. However, when we deliberately choose to die to ourselves and we yield, God plants a tree in the place of our hurt and that tree starts to bear fruit. 

The only way through this often difficult life, is to live like He would, if He were you. HE UTTERLY RELIED UPON THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HIS FATHER! Jesus didn’t pretend – He loved people, yet He did not live to please them, He lived to please His Father. And then He accepted the consequences of that decision. He was always delighted to do His Father’s will.  

Walk away from your feelings, work at holding onto Him and watch what He will do. Bye. 👋