Nazareth

P 3031 The Holy Spirit loves to remain.

/ DVH

Acts 3:11-12: “And as the lame man who had been healed held on to Peter and John, all the people ran together unto them in the porch, which is called Solomon’s, greatly wondering. And when Peter saw it, he answered unto the people, “Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? Or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man walk?”

Peter himself says: ‘don’t look at me! I don’t have that power, and I’m not special.’ Listen to what he says to the beggar in verse 6: “Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” I think this illustrates clearly something that might lead us astray when it comes to healing and the power of God. Remember, these guys were fresh from the day of Pentecost, full of the Holy Spirit and His purposes. This is just a throw-away line toward the bystanders to sort out their wrong theology. However, Peter’s point is very clear – WE don’t heal people, GOD does.

My secondary point is that this healing is about the Holy Spirit’s character, not our ability to be holy! We will live our lives holy when we choose to remain in Him, and we let Him remain in us. It is about our heart attitude. Don’t go after holiness, you can end up in legalism that way. Seek His Presence whenever you spend time with Him, and then just follow His instructions from the book. EG: If you are angry – fix it. Attention to repentance is a necessary attribute.

At this time, Peter was absolutely overflowing with the Holy Spirit’s Presence, and ministered to the beggar’s need out of the overflow. THAT IS A GREAT PLACE TO TO AIM AT. Living in the overflow of His love. Peter doesn’t just give God glory — He SEES His glory everywhere! That’s what we need to see, God with us, everywhere. We can end up doing all sorts of things, claiming this, and praying that, because human beings need healing etc. — but the truth is that we only have what He gives us … and He gave us Himself!

What did Peter have if he didn’t have power or holiness? He had the ongoing greatly cherished Presence of the Holy Spirit within him. That’s why he could give away what He had! He imparted God’s presence to this beggar and the Presence of God made the man well. This is the reason, BTW, that I don’t much like the terminology “anointing” — the word “anointing” implies that the power of God is a thing, something incredible that some people have or do. Unfortunately we can use that as an excuse so we don’t have to be obedient. EG: “I don’t have the anointing, but that guy does.” Anybody can walk with the Holy Spirit if their aim is to make Him welcome in their lives.

The Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost and He has never left. Peter had a Person living within Him, teaching Him, guiding Him, the Holy Spirit not a thing or tool we can use! This man deeply loved and cared for the Holy Spirit so the Holy Spirit remained with Him. Peter probably gave up many things, simply because he loved the Holy Spirit’s Presence more. Walking with the Holy Spirit is a matter of Who we cherish, not some special thing that we can’t do that someone else can. 

Here’s a small illustration: When we go to a restaurant, someone comes to our table to ask us what we would like from the menu … we tell the waiter and he tells the cook. The cook makes the dish, but the waiter is just the delivery person. In God’s marvellous ways, we are the vehicle, the waiter God uses to bring whatever He wants to those who are needy. 

Why is that so important? Because if we feel we must somehow have the power, or be holy …  or supposedly have the anointing before we pray for others— we can easily feel too intimidated to even try! Instead we end up  wandering about looking for feelings and signs and wonders to prove to us that we can do the very thing Jesus Himself told us to do! The bible says we can do this. Sadly, sometimes if we still don’t see anything we can also think –‘I can’t pray for the sick.’ Yes you can, because the RESULTS aren’t up to you. Jesus said “YOU lay hands on them and THEY will recover.” 

Like most Christians, you talked to Jesus this morning, about your life and the universe etc. You know His voice – through the bible, or in the depths of your heart when He speaks to you. We simply take that attitude with us wherever we go. We choose to be protective regarding our Beloved Friend the Holy Spirit, this means that we don’t do this or that, because He doesn’t like it.

You and I don’t have to have some kind of wonderful power to pray for others … (yes I know Jesus said ‘you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you’) but that POWER is a PERSON. We intentionally live this life – the only one we have – walking with His Spirit, and we follow His instructions. If the person gets well, He did it and if they don’t, all that happened was we tried to obey. 

We minister out of our own ongoing personal relationship with Him and that is an ever-increasing  developing thing. It grows like all relationships grow, by nurturing it, protecting and cherishing it.. The Holy Spirit’s language is LOVE.  We will see He is with us when we speak LOVE … and love is patient, kind, full of faith and hope etc. plus it is sacrificial. Love doesn’t resent sacrifice, because we don’t do this stuff for people or performance – we do it purely because we love Him.

We may need to sacrifice many things, actions, speech, attitudes – in order to maintain our relationship with the Holy Spirit – because this world we live in promotes the things He hates. But He wants to remain with us, that’s why we cherish and chase LOVE. At the same time, we cannot afford to define love, HE DOES. He’s the only One Who can be trusted to do it accurately. Don’t live chasing the symbol of His Presence – chase HIM.  Bye for today, 🥰.

P 2897 Peace is our portion.

/ DVH

“And everything I’ve taught you is so that the peace which is in Me will be in you and will give you great confidence as you rest in Me. For in this unbelieving world you will experience trouble and sorrows, but you must be courageous, for I have conquered the world!””John 16:33 TPT.

We cannot survive 21st Century living without His peace.  Injustice pops up everywhere like wild mushrooms, all across the world. Peace is an inside job. Everything around us will try to steal it away. This week we have had a procession of endless, skilled tradesmen parading, banging, clumping, etc. right through our house. We discovered mould in one of our least used rooms. It’s a long story and not worth repeating here. One of my mum’s brand new hearing aids has grown legs and walked away, plus our daughter and grandson are moving in about a month. And our next trip is in 16 days. Not to mention all kinds of malfunctioning arms, legs, heads, backs, knees …a-n-d … we are both preaching this Sunday! 🤣

None of us can afford to rely upon good, positive circumstances to help us feel peaceful. We already have peace within us because the King of peace resides within us. That peace will thrive in an atmosphere of faith as we believe and act on what the Lord has said. It gives us confidence so we can face whatever comes at us from the world around us. Christianity is an ongoing relationship with the Man of peace, Jesus Christ. We learn to live in His peace as we watch and study Him, because He didn’t just teach us what to do, He showed us how to do it, by the way He lived! “Keep turning your back on every sin, and make “peace” your life motto.Practice being at peace with everyone.” Psalms 34:14 TPT.

We need to remind ourselves that we are foreigners, ambassadors of Christ, living in a foreign land where peace is now either enforced or ignored, or labelled impossible. Unfortunately, peace cannot be legislated, otherwise our freedom to choose His way, goes right out of the window. To me that means peace is always OUR choice to pick up or put down. It means we learn to bend with the winds of change and opposition, not just strive to be in control and stay rigid. Peace comes with a great cost to the people who are living any conflict. 

Sadly when there is no positive choice made, there can be no true peace, because the ‘machinery’ of our lives returns to a habitual default setting of agitation and worry. Yet Jesus Himself chose to live at peace in a society that hated everything He stood for, He had no home, His relatives opposed Him, His church leaders wanted to kill Him, He was surrounded by needy people … yet He had true peace, all the time, because He chose to walk with the Holy Spirit and obey His Father. 

The people who lived around Him were superficially content to live within their religious rules, and often those rules actually opposed or destroyed peace for many of them. Rules carry within them the possibility of failure – true peace doesn’t see failure as the end of the story. The Lord was not affected by people’s approval or disapproval, He carried out the things He did by choosing to reflect His Father’s will. He wasn’t looking to win a popularity contest then, and He still isn’t. 

He teaches us in this verse that rest, which is a part of peace, is also our portion. It is OURS. We learn to rest when we choose to put aside our own opinions, and feelings, and aim at His Ways, with His help. As we do that we are mirroring Jesus’ own relationship and trust in His Father. Father God made the supreme effort for us, to come here and reveal His will in Person. God Himself stopped being remote, and hard to access, instead He walked the roads of Israel and its surrounds. Jesus was assimilated into this world so well, that some people identified Him by where He lived as a child. He was known —as Joseph the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. 

If you and I have no peace, then we have somehow left Him out, or left Him far behind us. His peace within us is present to saturate the atmosphere around us. But if we lose our peace, then we need to return humbly to the Source of all peace, Christ, and ask Him to help us live in harmony with Him, and His ways again. When trouble and difficulties bash on our doors or seep into our lives, those things are not a statement about our personal efforts or lack of them. Instead they are simply the result of living in a fractured, unredeemed society. It means we have forgotten who we are and WHO He is! The answer is not to condemn society, instead we are to flavour it … with His qualities.

Peace is a Person. We walk in peace, when we choose to walk with Him. If we revert to our old ways of thinking, then we simply repent and start walking with Him again. Walking with peace means we do not have to carry our own burdens, we turn them over to Jesus and ask Him to deal with them, us and the situation. Peace is our God-given birthright, freely received – part of our inheritance.  Jesus said:“Peace I leave with you, MY peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” John 14:27.

Jesus gave it to us, so now we have it, just like salvation whether we feel like it or not. Bye. 👋

P 2863 The fight!

/ DVH

This world is not our home. Seriously. And I’m not an alien and I don’t come from another planet, either! I have simply been reborn into another permanent, everlasting kingdom and … so have you! Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog. The only way you or I can move away from living in that kingdom, is if we are ignorant of His Ways. OR if, and when, we choose to be disobedient to what He asks us to do. Just FYI His kingdom has no end.

Now let’s read 2 Peter 3:8-9 to find out a little bit about what God’s ways … what His idea of time is looks like. ‘But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.’

This thing we call “time,” that human beings measure with clocks and calendars, is not what this passage is talking about. Here are my thoughts about the way Almighty God regards what WE call time. We are living in the time of God’s PATIENCE not permissiveness. It all started that day in the synagogue when Jesus stood up and read Isaiah out loud. God’s kingdom is so much more real than anything this world has to offer – plus you can SEE IT in action!

Luke 4:16-21: “He (Jesus) went to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day He went into the synagogue, as was His custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. Unrolling it, He found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”Then He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.” He sat down because that was the end of His mission statement!

Let’s look at what Jesus Himself said, about His mission… why did He say God’s Spirit was upon Him? To establish His authority, and to witness to His Father’s participation in what He was about to do, because the Holy Spirit was going to do glorious things through Him! He had an anointing to do those things to demonstrate God’s will, word and favour visibly toward these people. And He explained to everyone present that favour had arrived when He arrived. His mission started when He chose to undergo baptism.

In the bible it often says: “in the fullness of TIME…”  God has timing. This is mentioned in Isaiah, Galatians and Ephesians. There is a point to His patience with every single person on this planet – He is waiting for everyone to hear, and respond, like it says in 2 Peter.  Sadly, lately we’ve been leaving the bit He told us to do, to the experts. Look around — we’ve dun run out of experts! God has been extremely patient with you and I, because He wants us to walk with Him, just like Jesus did, while we are still here. You and I have things only we can do!

Part of His plan is about us learning to overcome, sin, this world, and the devil in our own lives – with His help! Overcomers always have something to testify about. Our overcoming is daily, sometimes minute by minute – it is our new way of life. A battle we willingly enter into all the time that ends in transformation. Our testimonies are about telling others HOW THE HOLY SPIRIT HELPS US win the daily fight for this transformation, as well as talking about how “God did this or that for me.”

These changed things are the result of the active nitty gritty daily choices we deliberately make to obey His Word. The things we suddenly find we no longer want to do, because we’ve learnt they are not part of His Kingdom. Here’s one of my icky questions; if someone were to ask you to talk about the reality of God in your life, today, what would you say? We often think salvation is just about when we are DEAD – instead it is about what we do when we are still alive HERE.

Lastly, we need to pray for eyes to see what our Good God is DOING, all the time, in each of our lives! That’s when we will have something to talk about. I am of the opinion we sometimes barely notice what He has done, or is doing on our behalf.  So this is our daily FIGHT – to recognise what He is doing in the middle of the junk that flies at us day after day after day! Think of this life as an opportunity to grow and when it gets even more difficult – it’s weight training! Bye👋