My grace is sufficient for you

P 3312 Staying in the river!

/ DVH

“Believe in ME so that rivers of living water will burst out from within you, flowing from your innermost being, just like the Scripture says!””  John 7:38 TPT. Great scripture! … I love to watch things on YouTube that many people might think are a bit boring. Every morning we put on one of those supposedly, sappy Christian music videos, that feature pretty pictures of nature. They can stream away for like 11 hours. And then I just let that stuff quietly run, so I can be engaged with my blog, bible reading, prayers and thoughts. You might like just plain silence!

I’ve personally found I’m far more likely to recognise His ‘rivers of living water’ when I am not distracted by other noises, or things that fly past on the TV screen trying to capture my attention! Meanwhile, I’m incredibly blessed and grateful that my time is my own, and how I spend it is up to me. Many people reading this don’t have that kind of freedom. But I think the secret to staying in the river of God begins with staying aware of Him and giving Him my attention. Have you ever watched a well trained sheep dog? The dog never takes its eyes off its Master. Meeting with Jesus is the place where we can ‘let it all hang out,’ because He knows our junk anyway!

Today, I want to talk about the importance of spiritual breathing. Living this new life the way God Himself has designed it, is a natural process with no striving involved. It’s just as natural as breathing IN and OUT. After all we do that without even thinking about it – unless we have some sort of disease or obstruction – we just do it!  “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  Philippians 3:12-14. 

Jesus has taken hold of my life for a reason, He will help me find my real life in Him. I am greatly cheered up by the fact that the Apostle Paul, who wrote most of the Epistles — who was, some say, taken up into the 3rd heaven  — told us, he hadn’t arrived at that goal yet! This means that the best bits are still out in front of each one of us. However, just because this goal can seem unattainable, that doesn’t mean we should give up on aiming at it! It simply means we are in the best company, so I shouldn’t give up I should press on! He is now my focus.

Pressing on involves dogged dedication. So does finding out,  knowing and liking the same things the Lord likes! Plus doing whatever Jesus would do in any situation. All that takes focus, time and energy. To do this we need to sort out our priorities. Is it to be God – or the washing first? Jesus has to be more real to us than the people around us. Be assured that I don’t always get it right, that’s why I keep pressing on. However, I have learnt over the years that when my heart is pointed in His direction, the Lord is incredibly loving and tolerant of my muddles and misses, and ‘He makes my paths smooth.’ 

His infinite patience lovingly watches over us. He despatches angels to catch us when we fall, or fail. He can redeem everything and anything. “Who redeems your life from the pit and corruption, Who beautifies, dignifies, and crowns you with loving-kindness and tender mercy;…” Psalm 103:4. In other words, to the Lord, human beings are not just a hobby, or a pastime – we are the focus of His attention and affections. Let’s not relegate Him to the back burner as SomeOne we call on when the ceiling falls in. He is our refuge, not our emergency standby. 

“But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” 2 Corinthians 12:9a. What does that scripture mean when we are talking about the River of God? I think we can often put an accent on one bit of scripture over another, and in this instance that means we will be skipping over the best bit. The River bit. The bit that says: ‘My grace is sufficient for you…’ that is the important bit. His Grace is always enough! We just need to return our focus to Him when distracted, and GRACE WILL BE THERE.  Instead of looking into our hearts and seeing our inner cupboards bare and bankrupt—choose to look into Jesus’ eyes and heart, and see the abundance He has for you. We dare not try to manage the weakness we see in ourselves without looking at the greatness of His Grace toward us. Despite our whimsical feelings, we are not poverty stricken!

His power is made perfect in our weakness, but we can’t afford to be distracted by those weaknesses! Instead,let’s pray that He will give us the Grace to comprehend the incredible POWER that was released through the cross.  Our weaknesses cannot stand in the face of that power. Let’s not focus on the negative, let’s focus on Jesus and what He already did. The only thing that can negate His power from releasing itself into our situations, is our decision, or choice, to believe that our badness can possibly be bigger than His goodness!

The Lord Jesus did not just emerge from that grave ‘alive’ like Lazarus did! He was filled with so much Grace and power, He instantly saved the world! That included those Who believed before He came and all those who came afterward. The Grace He gives us is without limit. We need to cherish it with every part of us. The river of God is always available to us, so let’s jump into His love and grace, and stay there on floating on our backs. If we fall out of the river, then we need to jump back in again. Bye.👋

P 2580 Unblocking blockages.

/ DVH

As Christians we can experience spiritual blockages. So today, let’s look at attitudes that can get in our way, and sometimes we are almost unaware of them. Our God is not legalistic, we are forgiven. However, WE can block the flow of the Holy Spirit in, and through our lives by ignoring Him or choosing not to be aware of His ways. Or even by disobeying the things we don’t like! It is our responsibility to discover for ourselves what He wants from us, by talking to Him, reading the book and then doing it. At the same time, praise God, He is always willing to engage with us at any hour or any moment, of any day to help us whatever is currently going on. 

Here are some things that have helped me. If I find myself gossiping about someone, then the first place I go to is – am I angry with this person? If perhaps I get sick of somebody I know bragging about their skills, or their possessions etc. then I look at jealousy. Instead of blaming my attitudes etc. on others, the first place I need to look at is myself. Personally, I try not to excuse my behaviour, by saying ‘I’m tired or sick, or life has been a bit much.’ If I really believe that the Lord holds my life in His hands, then I need to see that everything that comes toward me is Father-filtered. But that does not mean I will not hesitate to tell the enemy to take a hike when oppression comes at me! 

The thing is, I refuse to let my sinfulness prevent me from running toward my Father, because Calvary took care of any legal requirements on my behalf, so now His Grace predominates. Grace frees people everywhere it is embraced – Grace is not ‘permission to sin!‘ Grace is ‘we have an advocate!’  Now I am free, Christ made me free and I’m the boss of what I do, say and think, and I can’t blame you! We can stop the flow of His life through us by our choices, actions and attitudes at any given moment. God gave us power, and that power can be used to help others, help us adjust our behaviour and theology – or … tune Him out! Paul wrote this in his second letter to Corinthians, chapter 12 verse 9!

“But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” You know there are days when I wish the Holy Spirit would just arbitrarily do this stuff through me, or to me, instead of me having to choose and apply myself? But freedom means choices. Dying to self is hard. The problem is this, a lot of the time, my ‘old man’ is trying to bring about an unlawful resurrection! That’s called necromancy. We can blame the devil if we want to, but really, the devil ain’t that big! Nobody can stop us from moving, but US. Seriously. Like the book says: “What then shall we say to all these things? If God is for us, who can be [successful] against us?” Romans 8:31.

The answer to that rhetorical question is ME. I can exercise my God-given power of choice at any given moment, and simply refuse to move on. I can take offence with something that God, or someone else has done, and spit the dummy and opt out of discussing it with Him. I can look at my circumstances and decide that I am too weak to fight, or I am sick of fighting my old self. Instead I can just feel sorry for myself and sit marinating in my sorrows.

This whole ‘walking with Jesus life’ is optional. And if we do not use every opportunity to get to know Him better and fall in love with Him, and the way He works — then we can be pretty sure we will eventually take ourselves out of this marathon race, in favour of comfort and safety! Some people, sadly, have even walked away. The good news is repentance will bring us back again!

There are areas in all our lives with big fat “KEEP OUT” signs on them. You and I put those signs there in some moment of desperation, angst or a fit of pique. Maybe someone hurt us and we feel we can’t get over it. My advice is to exercise the power of choice and … just get over it. Here’s why I think that. We can actually tie ourselves up like a loin of pork and wonder why we aren’t moving on spiritually. Or we can discover, by prayer, persistence and reading the bible, where we have put up stop signs. Blockages come from us, not from the Lord.

Christ took away every single road block between God and us, even though it killed Him. Brothers and sisters, there is so-very-much-more-of-Him-and-Who-He-is for us to know. Why waste time? Let’s go on a “seek and ye shall find tour,” and pull down, or starve out, every single one of those strongholds that are imprisoning us. Let’s throw away the balloons, cakes and streamers at our frequent pity parties and just get on with it. 👋

P 2109 Transformation is the way ahead.

/ DVH

I had an interesting thought this morning about – 2 Corinthians 12:9 says: “My Grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” Gird up your girdle Gertie, it’s gunna be a bumpy ride! So why don’t we share our weaknesses more? Yeah you might like to think on that for a month or nine!! As HE is strong where I am weak – then where’s the shame in being weak? All I gotta do is ask for help and the Holy Spirit is right there. Instantly. I may not feel Him – but I know that He is close to the broken-hearted … so … He is there!!  Then when I pray for help maybe using my faith means I will believe that He wants to help me even more than I want to be helped.

It seems to me that we avoid displaying the very thing that the bible says will empower us with HIS power! We try so hard day after day, to keep the wheels turning, hiding our weaknesses, as well as trying to maintain a sense of normal? When the reality is, we can’t do anything eternal and lasting without Him. Christians all around the world climb out of bed daily and try to present a good picture of the benefits of what we believe, everywhere they go. JESUS IS THE BENEFIT FOLKS. He didn’t come to earth so we could try harder – He came to save us from sin and ourselves! So why are we so scared to death to admit that we can’t hack it on our own? Do we really need to have other people admire us so badly? Does envy lead to saving faith?

Perhaps somebody asks us: “how are you today?” And we paste on a fake smile and reply: “fine thank you, and how are you?”  Christians constantly do their best to present themselves as perfectly adequate people who are coping…. WHY? Why do we lie to ourselves and others? Here’s my little theory. We feel if we don’t present a good picture we will be letting the Lord down. You know, FYI, being officially sick can almost be a relief in one way – because you don’t have to pretend anymore.

Back to my point, are we so scared of judgment? Or feeling inadequate, because we are supposed to be bright shining stars for the Lord? Maybe we are protecting His reputation? Except He made Himself of no reputation for our sake – so that’s kind of a waste of time and energy. I just want to say to anyone reading this today – ‘It really is OK not to cope all the time!  It’s OK to struggle with difficult people and situations. It’s not just OK … it’s actually normal.’ Because ‘without HIM we can do nothing’  We were not designed to be the all-singing all-dancing Jesus ad. He does perfectly well by Himself – He has the Holy Spirit at work all over this earth! We are here to point to the Answer and WE are not the Answer – HE IS.

So here are some quick thoughts I came up with to explain why we hide our faults from each other: a/ we don’t know how to access Grace. b/ We don’t know how to give Grace away! Jesus said in the verse in 2 Corinthians HIS GRACE IS SUFFICIENT. because that is where HIS power is. I think the reason we pretend so much is because we know very little about living by faith. We get Grace by using our faith not trying harder.

Speaking for myself I always thought of people living by faith as missionaries, or really holy special people who chose that lifestyle. Boy was I wrong!  People rarely choose this lifestyle – it usually lands on them – often from a great height! The way you learn to live by faith is to be needy, and if you’ve got no money in a world that uses money – guess what?? You’ve just become needy!! I know people who live this way but they didn’t choose it – it chose them. 

Here’s the true secret to living a happy Christian life.: transformation is not an optional extra – it’s a survival skill! Ya might want to Selah that thought. 

If by any chance, anybody else out there has become tired of pretending to be ‘fine thank you’ – then we are all going to have to let Him use our ugly, difficult circumstances to expose all our inadequacies. Those nasty little things we don’t ever want anybody else to know because then they won’t like us, or – we won’t like us. Or – maybe the Lord won’t like us!  How about instead of hiding them- we admit them. The bible says: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed….” James 5:16. It doesn’t say hide them under a rock and hope nobody notices. Unconfessed sin leaves us open to enemy attack.

God was good to Jonah and he had his problems. That man was prejudiced and opinionated, not to mention a racist. The Lord was good to Gideon and he needed more proof than a prosecuting attorney. He was good to Job who thought he had it made and didn’t know that everything he had came from the Lord in the first place! He was good to Moses and David who murdered someone. God was good to Elijah who was the super spiritual guy of his day – Elijah ran away and hid. The list goes on. And now …here’s the GREAT NEWS. We can read all about the men and women of God and what He saw as faith, in a wonderful faith chapter in Hebrews 11.  

The Lord praises every single one of these people, and some of them were definitely not perfect – they made huge mistakes. BUT! The Holy Spirit speaks about each of these men and women of faith with great love. Our faults, when they are transformed by living in His Grace, are testimonies to His loving kindness and glory.  We all might want to think on that with the New Year coming up. Bye. 👋🏻