New creation

P 3287 The past.

/ DVH

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:19. Here is another good reason to leave the past behind us, it’s in Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” AND 2 Corinthians 55:17. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” Living in the past robs us of who we are in Christ, now. 

I think the above verses are a catalyst for any of our thoughts about our own personal sin. In the Message bible it says this: “So roll up your sleeves, get your head in the game, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy.”

I seem to recall a line from some dumb movie I have watched: “The past is so-o-o ov-er!”  Have you ever been on a merry-go-round? You aren’t actually going anywhere at all. But the sensation of movement, the colour, the music, the excitement make it seem like fun. Unless you suffer from vertigo, then I’d give it a swerve. We need to take the time to escape from the kind of mental merry-go-round that holds us captive to the past and robs us of everything that Jesus died to give us. Human beings can easily get stuck in the land of remorse and regret. That can take us off the playing field, with our head in our hands. Vanquished.  

Let’s get free from the web of our past deeds, even if what happened was only yesterday! Move on with Him into Grace. Count your blessings that you have a Saviour Who loves you. At the same time, presumption is not the answer either. Simply accept responsibility for what you did, and grieve over your sin, then repent and repair things and re-establish relationships where necessary. Then …Let. It. Go. Jesus died for that too. It wasn’t someone else’s fault, it was yours … so do whatever you can to fix it, then put it behind you. 

Peter tells us to be holy. Now there’s a tall order if ever there was one. To start with we would never turn the TV on again, because even the ads are offensive — they are definitely not holy! But one of the ways to live in the peace that holiness produces, is to leave your past behind you. I’ve had to do that, and it is not easy. The past is like a familiar itch that creeps up on you, and pounces when you least expect it. Then you scratch at it to make it go away, and that always makes the stupid itch worse!  It could be a sight, a sound, a feeling, and suddenly you are back down the same old hole, feeling guilty again – as well as hoping the Lord doesn’t remember what you did.  He doesn’t.  Your problem is YOU do. 

This is where the bible is a sword, and remorse and regret are our enemies. Those things distract us from the brand new, bright roads that lead us to know more about Him. Never discount what Almighty God can do in us and through us, simply because we are His. Majoring on the past is a bad plan, it’s flawed. That’s because we are minimising the Lord’s power in us to overcome – sin, the world, the devil. 

Overcoming is not like getting zapped into some super hero’s suit and suddenly having powers! Overcoming happens one step at a time. But it can’t start or go anywhere from what we’ve done, it starts and ends with what Jesus already did!! The real question is this —-is what the Lord Jesus did at calvary complete? Or can what you’ve done somehow cancel that? 

We have God’s Word, which is our sure foundation. That’s the firmest ground this world has ever seen. We can stand confidently on what He did. Accessing our feelings won’t help. They will lie to us and dig up a thousand reasons why our particular sin is the worst one ever. We need to read the bible, then make a list of scriptures that clearly show us that what Christ did. Don’t skip repentance!  Make the time … you’ll thank me later!  Calvary was complete. There are no codicils, no add ons. He died once for all.  

These verses tell us that even more grace is coming toward us when Jesus appears again. Our sin cannot possibly stand in the face of the incredible, momentous GRACE Christ released on our behalf. What God has done is fool-proof, even if you or I are the fools involved! Deal with the past, then leave it alone and let it be. Fight the urge to try and figure out how you could have done stuff better. Make things right, then move on. Bye. 👋

P 3181 A new kind of knowledge.

/ DVH

“In this new creation life, your nationality makes no difference, nor your ethnicity, education, nor economic status—they matter nothing. For it is Christ that means everything as He lives in every one of us!” Colossians 3:11 TPT. Light years ago now, when I was doing my shopping in the supermarket, carefully picking out apples for my family. I looked up and there was a young woman about my age on the other side of the pile of apples doing the same thing. We smiled and then we both spoke at exactly the same time – “You’re a Christian too,” we said simultaneously. 

It was truly awesome and …pretty weird … all-at-the-same-time! We chatted about Jesus, and eventually she went off back into her world, and I went off into mine. Jesus in me, recognised Jesus in her. That’s because He is the same, yesterday, today and forever! The bible tells us other people will know we are Christians by our love— but in this instance, it seems to me the Lord went a little step further. I saw, for a brief moment, that there are no strangers in the realm of the Spirit.

The bible itself exhorts us to know one another after the Spirit:“So from now on we regard no one from a human point of view [according to worldly standards and values]. Though we have known Christ from a human point of view, now we no longer know Him in this way.”  2 Corinthians 5:16. Which brings me to my point today …

I have a question. Do we only know Jesus as the Man, the One Who walked upon the earth like we do now? Or do we also know Him as the risen resurrected Christ? Is He now the mighty One Who appeared to John in the book of Revelation? People make a great deal out of creating movies that bring an image of Jesus into this world. They retell His story with a human being playing Christ. Praise God for those who have come to know the Lord because of those films! But why must we reduce everything to movie land? What’s wrong with talking to people?

When is the last time somebody was healed because your shadow fell on them? Me neither! We sing ‘He is Lord’ and then go out of the meeting and do precisely whatever we want to do. Where did ”Live for Jesus” go? Are we excusing ourselves over and over again by saying, God understands? Does He? Or is that comforting voice that reassures us that we’ll be OK, not Him? Paul describes our society to Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:2-5: It’s a warning!

“People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.” Having nothing to do with people like that, could be a bit hard to carry out when the person you are looking at is in the mirror! Maybe that soothing voice is not the Holy Spirit after all, but someone else lulling us all back to sleep. 

During Jesus time on this earth, there were mixed reactions to the Man He was. Some of the people back then walked away from Him, and some actively opposed everything He said. These people were in the Presence of God Himself, and didn’t know it. Why not? I think their idea of religion blocked their spiritual sight. They saw Jesus as SomeOne Who was like everyone else but He had nice impossible ideals. Have we made religious decisions about the Lord, instead of being guided by the precious Holy Spirit?

Disobeying SomeOne we see as a man like us, probably won’t matter much, but disobeying our Almighty Ever-lasting Father, God will! Perception is a valuable thing.  We can let this world down when we do not make it clear that we will all one day stand before God Himself. Instead, it seems to me that we are hiding in holes, hoping this nasty, vicious, slimy world around us will wake up to itself. It won’t – not like that it won’t! What works in places like Africa with poor underprivileged people, may not work at all here in we have-pretty-much-everything-we-want-land.

Jesus is not merely a carpenter with dirty dusty feet, and good stories to tell. We dare not lose sight of the One we know as our Lord, because otherwise holy things can become common. Back in Israel in Jesus’ time some people immediately fell at His feet in worship. Those people saw more than just a man! We need to move on past our personal view of Jesus as a human being, and also see Him as God incarnate. Heaven and earth’s Darling, Who calls us brothers and sisters. What an honour!

What truly matters is Christ in us… and then our mandate is to release His love to anybody we meet, wherever we go. We can’t just live in our happy little Sunday clubs anymore – we need to take Him with us, out into the places of suffering and sorrow. And yes, we just might get our nice new blue skirt, or jeans dirty. A new kind of knowledge requires a new kind of response. Bye. 👋

“And so the Living Expression became a man and lived among us! We gazed upon His glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father overflowing with tender mercy and truth!” John 1:14 TPT.

P 3155 “Behold the NEW has come.”

/ DVH

“My OLD identity has been co-crucified with Christ and no longer lives. And now the essence of this NEW life is no longer mine, for the Anointed One lives His life through me—we live in union as one! My NEW life is empowered by the faith of the Son of God Who loves me so much that He gave Himself for me, dispensing His life into mine!” Galatians 2:20 TPT.

Right here, in this scripture, we can see the benefit of living that new life we have been given – ‘in Christ.” IN CHRIST always means He is IN CHARGE. It also means because it is IN Him – then it is NOT in us. However, we can get the benefit, by simply acting on what He says. Despite our unrealistic hopes and expectations, this is not an automatic thing!  It will not fall on us, the Lord wants our ongoing permission, so we must choose His Way, every single time.

Our free will needs to be yielded to the Lord out of love and trust in what He has already done for us. This our gift to Him. It consists of daily, progressive choices, to yield and die to self, and live for Him instead. “In Christ”  means His Grace is in action in our lives and the lives of others around us. We are learning, first-hand, from Jesus things like ‘how to stop judging others from our flesh.’ At the same time we also realise this world hasn’t got anything lasting to offer. But now we can start seeing others through the Holy Spirit’s eyes. We are honouring the consistent pursuit of what Jesus calls “good.”

Let’s be clear, everything we need in this life to walk with Jesus, is already in our “heavenly account.” It was deposited there 2,000+ years ago. Now we simply exercise our faith to step into what is already OURS. We quite literally go into our heavenly bank account and make withdrawals over and over again — using that faith He already gave us. Because God says I can love the unlovely, that means I can step out and ask the Holy Spirit to show me how to love the person in front of me. I simply follow His instructions using my faith.

In our past, these blessings were presented with trying harder as a subtitle. And so we did our best to try to be nicer. We’d try to be the kind of person Jesus would be proud of, and we would try to persevere, etc. but in the end our soft, flabby flesh, outweighed our ability to try to push through. We need ongoing daily faith. In the try harder system, we learnt to give up, and go back to hating ourselves for getting it wrong, or we became proud and superior, because we think we got it right! God never meant for us to be frustrated by a system. Instead we are to be drawn into an incredible relationship where we follow HIM, step-by-step into a new way of living this life. 

We cannot continue to use the systems of the past to usher in whatever our God wants to do next. Jeremiah tells us that any system we can devise will spring a leak! “For My people have committed two evils: They have abandoned (rejected) Me, The fountain of living water, And they have carved out their own cisterns, Broken cisterns That cannot hold water.”Jeremiah 2:13. This scripture shows us, that Almighty God requires our loyalty … not just our lip-service. Our hearts need to change and when we obey His will, His way, the Holy Spirit writes that onto our hearts. You don’t forget those lessons!  Jesus came here to be an illustration of how God’s Way works. He even modelled dying to self right up to the end of His earthly life. His kind of faith moves away mountains of doubt and unbelief. 

In the past, the church centred itself around men and women who we saw as ‘specialists.’ They were God-gifted, and God-appointed, and they seemed to have a better hold on how to operate in the Holy Spirit than most lay-people did. They grabbed hold of His promises and operated in their gift by using their faith. But our God did not mean for His promises to be relegated only to specialists – He wants us ALL to walk in faith. The Holy Spirit is here to lead us into this kind of obedience.

When the bible says we are dead to the things of this world, it is not just a hope-filled saying … that saying has a whole lot of power attached to it! It is an absolute concrete reality. But living in that reality is not something the average church goer understands. We have no idea, that despite our age, or injuries, we are all elite runners who are spiritually fit for the journey ahead of us. What Jesus did for us, made us fit. Now we need to believe and ACT on whatever He says in the bible.

We have accidentally accepted a level of unbelief that is not biblical! We need to know His voice because Jesus Himself said: “My sheep know My voice and they follow Me.” John 10:17. In some versions it says:“My sheep LISTEN to My voice …”  Listening is every bit as important as hearing – we have to give HIS truth our attention!

“Since we are now joined to Christ, we have been given the treasures of redemption by His blood—the total cancellation of our sins—all because of the cascading riches of His grace.” Ephesians 1:7 TPT.

We were given something of incredible value and it is now up to us to choose to enter into it. Let’s take the time to comprehend what we have been given, so we can co-operate with the Holy Spirit, and give it away to others. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, the new has come into being.” 2 Corinthians 5:17. The new is already here, because the old has been gone for 2,000+ years! Bye👋.

P 3120 Know what you believe.

/ DVH

“Christ’s resurrection is (y)OUR resurrection too. This is why we are to yearn for all that is above, for that’s where Christ sits enthroned at the place of all power, honour, and authority!” Colossians 3:1 TPT. My first question—do you often during your day, reflect on what Jesus did for YOU? Are your thoughts on His kingdom, or yours? I thank Him when blessings come, and pray ‘help,’ when stuff is difficult. Whatever we mull over and meditate on influences our daily walk of faith. Don’t beat yourself up if you forget or overlook His new way to live. Just remember, that  faith, and our awareness of His love for us, will simply melt away IF we lose focus;  or we choose to live in the dark and pasty, unhealthy light of this world’s rejection, ideas, schemes and plans.

Meanwhile, even though we may not actually say – ”I choose this” – we can end up choosing to stew on bad stuff by default. A lack of a positive God-breathed choice will leave a vacuum that satan would be delighted to fill! That guy will get us going round and round and round:  worrying about this, thinking about how to fix that, and concentrating on the lacks we all have … Until we have wasted away our precious time. Time is a gift. And we don’t have to live that way anymore. Just as surely as Peter, (who was in prison at the time), looked up and saw his jail door open – and walked out a free man!  Our jail door is also OPEN. Look up!! Revise your circumstances. We need to walk out of sin’s prison using our faith. 

At the same time we can concentrate all our thoughts and efforts on dying to self, but in the end that will just make us SIN conscious. We want to be Him-conscious, so I pray He will reveal Himself to me during my day. We need to add to our life with Him, by seeing Him at work in our lives, not just concentrate on getting rid of our sin or adverse circumstances. Jesus Christ has already done that for us! Because God’s unrelenting, always available, never-ending kingdom power was released at Calvary – we can NOW live in this world absolutely devoted to Him.  He has a much better plan for your life and mine than either of us can imagine!

“For we know that our old self WAS crucified with Him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—…” Romans 6:6. Sin, regret, anxiety does not have to be in charge of our lives anymore! Our minds, our emotions will help us when they are fixed on Him;  to do that is not difficult, we meditate on His never-ending love.  We can’t afford to give up our precious time stewing over former things, turn your worry into prayers of thanksgiving for Who He is and what He did for you.

Worry is a habit – habits can be changed. When we gave our lives to Jesus, we put Him in charge. And His response 2000+years ago, was to take our sin with Him to the cross and nail it there in HIS OWN BODY. The urge, desire, and the will to sin has been dealt with, we are now free to choose.“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live IN THE BODY, I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:20. 

That’s how we walk out our Promised land of becoming a new creation. I don’t ignore sin, or gloss it over, or pretend it didn’t happen, instead I acknowledge it on the spot, and repent and repair things. Why? There is incredible power in redemption! satan can’t make us do anything anymore because of what Jesus did for us. But unlike satan – the Lord will not coerce us or make us do anything. He loves our freely-made choices!!  We were not saved just so we can go to heaven and be with Him one day in the future… He saved us for here and now, today—from this world, the devil and ourselves —so we can live our earthly lives, like He would. 

It was a transaction. An exchange, His life, freely laid down, bought us a new way to live and the power to do it. It was the greatest LOVE GIFT EVER GIVEN. Our sin has been exchanged for His new life overflowing in us, we take on His obedience, His passionate desire to please His Father. It was not God’s plan just to kill off sin!… Instead, Christ defeated its power over mankind! Our Father’s plan was to give us back what Adam and Eve had in the garden … the greatest inheritance ever – Emmanuel, God-with-us. The freedom to choose what is good right and profitable, AND THE POWER TO DO IT.

Acts 1:8:“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”The Holy Spirit fell on mankind at Pentecost and HE DIDN’T LEAVE. He is still here, to help, counsel, transform, and motivate us into our new life in Christ. He didn’t give us  power just so we can raise the dead, heal the sick etc! Those blessings are a by-product of our redemption.We should all live like that. But that is not God’s primary AIM. 

The Holy Spirit came to help us, and live inside us, so we can live a victorious, overcoming life, in a world that is going to hell in a hand basket. The person I was 52 years ago, died the minute I asked Jesus to come into my life. That is also true for you. If you dearly love and want Him — He will be yours, forever. His love is so great He chose to die for the whole world, even those people who refuse to accept Him. Imagine that. We have been bought with an unbelievable price.

Daily, with His help, we identify and guerrilla fight all the stubborn stuff we’ve cultivated over the previous years before we met Him. Those things that keep pretending they have a hold over us. Now we can take God at His Word and believe Him. That’s how faith works. we refuse to listen to the so-called evidence that pops its ugly head up, and say to ourselves: “What does the Lord have to say about that? Is He REALLY like that?” satan can no longer use my history to define me – even if I did something extremely dumb yesterday! I have been redefined as alive in Christ. I urge you, take the time to know what you believe. 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 2985 Learning to soar.

/ DVH

Anything that talks about soaring above the difficult things in this life will grab my attention. So today I want to read Paul’s idea of soaring above the cares of this world —- from Galatians 5:16-18 TPT. “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!”

Eagles soar. Have you ever noticed that chickens are always looking down, kicking up dust, looking for worms, scratching and pecking …  But eagles!! They fly higher and higher above this world’s activities, enjoying the warmer air that helps them fly. They see this world from a different vantage point.

I think this is part of Paul’s point today. We can face this life one of two ways. After the dust of trouble and strife has settled, we can choose to mount up on eagle’s wings. Thank you Isaiah 40! Or we can go on scratching about in this world’s ideas and clever trends, and miss seeing the vastness and incredible plans of God Himself. But we will need to choose to rise up and see what’s going on from His point of view. 

Sometimes, I end up being a chicken! Life can seem like one ghastly event is followed rapidly by another and then another — and I end up thinking “If I could only just get a moment to catch my breath!’  But the waves of life’s difficulties keep coming … and coming … and coming! Suddenly you have the horrid thought that you may be stuck in an endless sea of trouble, and it seems like you’ve been there for months! In the end I asked the Lord “Jesus, what is going on?”

Yeah! Have you ever had one of those moments when you wish you hadn’t even thought to ask a question…because you were pretty sure the answer was not going to be all that great?? I hear ya! This is what the Lord said to me, and I have to be honest – because I promised I would be honest on this blog …I was not over-the-moon thrilled with His answer. He talked to me about pruning. You know that stuff you have to do when you have a garden and the rose bush is heading for another state and your trees are hanging over into your neighbour’s yard? “I’m pruning you,” He said.

That’s when I realised I’d asked a question that I didn’t really want an answer to because I had already decided what kind of answer I would like! Which is an incredibly dumb idea. What I really wanted to say was: “Lemme outta here, I’m drowning. I need a happier times fix!” Eventually I sat and read the book. So far I’ve read John 15 about six times because it talks about pruning. Spiritual pruning didn’t sound all that much fun. The first thing I noticed is that if a branch in my life is fruitless … then a-pruning He will go! That pretty much emphasised the fact that being fruitful is extremely important to the Lord, even though I believe being fruitless can happen to all of us..

The secret to being fruitful is to stay in Him and His ways. This is what came up for me, as I was meditating on it. Remaining in Him, means I live this life aware of what I have been given by Him, but it is not just a happy thought I visit every now and then. Everything I am now, comes from that place of grateful recollection of Him saving me, plus everything He died to give me. I need to live my life, my very ordinary life, aware of the incredible exchange Jesus Himself provided for me. His eternal life for my death to self. His righteousness for my sinfulness. His perfect love for my own natural human affection …His peace for my irritability etc.

At the same time, I will have to actively cultivate and deliberately let what He says in His book remain in me – in my life and my thoughts. So now His Word becomes my reference point for everyone I relate to, everything that happens to me, and everything I do. It becomes my new conscious-thought pattern. Which sounds remarkably like “renew your mind” to me! The Lord cannot be an add-on —. He, and His life in me, are to be my focus. Living like this will lift me up above life’s difficulties and give me an eagle’s view instead!

We all want to be productive for His kingdom. We may be daily growing in knowledge, but if we are not bearing fruit, then we will eventually need to be pruned. Not because He is mad at us, but because pruning produces … fruit! Maybe we have all lived in the natural for so long, we’ve turned into chickens and the things of His kingdom seem hard to scratch out and find. We will have everything we need for whatever comes our way, if we let Him teach us how to soar, and cutting off the old dead wood is a good start. Bye. 👋