New nature

P 3185 A road map for your day.

/ DVH

“Let every activity of your lives and every word that comes from your lips be drenched with the beauty of our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One. And bring your constant praise to God the Father because of what Christ has done for you!” Colossians 3:17 TPT. “Walk in the wisdom of God as you live before the unbelievers, and make it your duty to make Him known. Let every word you speak be drenched with grace and tempered with truth and clarity. For then you will be prepared to give a respectful answer to anyone who asks about your faith.” Colossians 4:5-6 TPT.

After reading those two scriptures I felt a bit like a sheep! Drenching here and drenching there. Then I looked up the word ‘drenching’ and I found out that doing that to the sheep gets rid of internal parasites. Hmmm. Perhaps I need this drenching stuff, because it is beneficial to my new life in Christ. It is way too easy to pick up internal parasites. You just have to drive in peak traffic and all that internal stuff starts coming out of your mouth! For these two scriptures to have power in our lives we need to hone our focus, with the Holy Spirit’s help. I think about it like this– will what I am going to say help that person to feel loved? Love is my aim. 

Did you notice the conditions under which all of these lovely attitudes toward all kinds of other people transpires? Colossians 3 v17 is talking about those activities, plus our need to focus on the Lord Jesus and all He has done for us. And verses 5-6 of Chapter 4 is talking about walking in His wisdom, as well as letting the people around us know about Him … It also clearly mentions that we will need His grace to do it … I’ll say! 

I definitely need truck loads of grace, I ask for it all the time.

It is easy to see how conflict occurs – one person can have a different version of truth than someone else. This scenario will probably end up in collision. It means we need a common denominator, or we will end up arguing about our differences.Instead we need to find a place of agreement, so why don’t we agree with His VERSION of the truth. When we agree about our love for Jesus, that brings Him back into focus. It is not helpful to talk our different theologies or our behaviours. This why those two verses are good together – they show us where our focus needs to be.

OK. So HOW do we spread abroad the love of God into our family’s lives first of all? We do whatever we need to do, in a quiet way under His guidance – no matter what the job is, or how difficult or irrelevant it seems. Our lives belong to Him so we deliberately choose to follow the Holy Spirit!  We can get into a quandary when we try to live for us and for Jesus …all at the same time, because a divided heart won’t get us where we want to go. It seems to me that I need to be aware of every word that comes out of my mouth or I will end up circling the drain. Part of being daily transformed includes being careful what I say.

This life makes it blatantly obvious to me that I need a Saviour, and the Holy Spirit’s help. My own methods are broken. Praise God Jesus died to give me His methods so I am not powerless in the face of adversity! I can now, bless and praise God immediately for giving me a new nature simply. I just need to choose to live like He did, preferring others, and living aware of His Father’s Love for Him. Love is the oil that throws light into our everyday thoughts and actions.

Because I walk with Jesus, that means that the people closest to me will not get my worst behaviour! In fact, if I follow the Holy Spirit around in my own life and I can practise learning to process what I think, without even saying a word. His Grace flows more freely when we deliberately choose to take the lowest place. And the Lord Himself will guide me into activities that are His choice for me. And He will help me deal with the ones that bring up those pesky parasites we were talking about before.

We need to remember, that the scripture in Colossians 3 talks about letting. Letting means allowing! We allow the Holy Spirit to keep our focus on Jesus, and guide us into whatever He has for us to do today. Plus we allow Him to correct us as we go along. In reality, our focus has to stay on Him, because we can’t do a thing without Him! That’s when praise starts – when we become witnesses to what He is really doing. 

Our own little list of‘things I have to do’ will have to be surrendered to Him, simply because we are now letting Him guide us through each day. That’s what ‘dead to self’ means. I am no longer just a homemaker, or a mechanic, or a computer expert –now I am an ambassador for the King. That’s my title. That’s my Job! And it is by my own choice. That’s also when interruptions stop being a pest, and become His heaven-sent opportunities to change my responses. He can change me, or someone else – it doesn’t matter –because my focus in everything is on Him.

Now we are daily learning to rely upon Him and His Grace. I have a glorious Person Who is active, and helping me, and He knows exactly how to get me through the bumps of this life. I intentionally stand in His Grace and remember all this stuff that is going on around me, will never have the final say. Jesus does! However, if we choose to run with our own little lists … well, that’s when those pesky parasites come up, and they usually bring tanks and rockets with them! I need-to-be-drenched-with the Holy Spirit, continually, on purpose.

Who we are outside our house, depends on who we are inside our house. Part of overcoming daily difficulties is that we watch over our immediate focus, then it will become natural for our conversations to be about our faith in the One Who is helping us … minute by minute. That’s the road map from Colossians. Bye.👋

P 2381 Out with the old and in with the new.

/ DVH

“Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at Him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new.The old life is gone; a new life emerges! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and Him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other.”

“God put the world square with Himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what He is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses US to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ Himself now: Become friends with God; He’s already a friend with you.”

I think the above scripture from 2 Corinthians 5:17 in the Message bible version is a pip … it’s the bomb! Meanwhile, those Message translators managed to get a whole lot of words out of a single medium-sized sentence in the King James. I think this very large translation is one of the very best versions of the gospel there is, and it is worth knowing and remembering what it says. It’s a fantastic summary of what happens when someone is changed by meeting Christ.

This new life we have now is not one of ticks and crosses. ✔️Tick, this is good behaviour, ❌cross, this is bad behaviour. This new life is an attitude of the heart followed by obedient, appropriately God-ordained actions. That’s why we need to take the time to get to know the Holy Spirit. He is our God-appointed Leader and Guide, as well as our Helper. After all, Jesus deliberately went away so the Holy Spirit could come here, so that ought to tell us something!  The Holy Spirit can be everywhere, with everyone, all at once …

The place this fantastic system falls down is on our watch. At this moment in His-tory WE are the only messengers of this gospel. Isn’t it amazing that God should trust you and I to be the people to tell everyone around us what happened in our life when we met Him? We can drag miserable, grumpy Aunt Minnie, to a thousand church meetings, but unless the Holy Spirit kisses that time — she will judge Christianity by the way we treat her. And that, my friend is a very sobering thought. One we should not take lightly.

We can pray: “Dear Jesus please save grouchy Aunt Minnie, Amen.” And then go away and think that we’ve done all we can to expose her to the gospel – because we prayed, and she’s so difficult and dangerous – just saying ‘hello’ is like running with the bulls in Pamploma! Some people are so nasty it is definitely a risk to life and limb just to get into their cage with them! So we blindly go along trying hard to be nice to her whenever we can, but she’s truly such a grouch it is almost impossible. However, this means we are basically leaving the responsibility we have to be Jesus to her … behind – and we are denying the power of His Word. No faith in that! I also think it is good to focus on the fact that tolerating Aunt Minnie is not the same as loving her. Holding in 4,000+ biting words when she rails on you isn’t either. I’m just saying … !!!

Because we are now in the process of being transformed, that life-style choice means someone who used to see grumpy Aunt Minnie as a matter of familial responsibility, now sees her as God’s gift in their life to give them opportunities for their transformation. After all, we have been told that Jesus loved the cross, He regarded it as a joy, because He saw what the result of the cross would be for this world. We need to learn to love the Auntie Minnies etc. in our lives, because they are now our personal tutors into His kingdom. It is incredibly easily for people like this to diagnose, and disclose our ugly hidden side.

In that process I will discover that the difference between Auntie Min and me, is that she is honestly horrid … however I think, and probably hope that I am not! The reality is, I just know how to hide my horrid far better than she does. Auntie M is actually my new best friend, and she comes complete with active provocation and mega annoyance. I don’t have to like her behaviour, but I must learn from my response to her behaviour, or my new life in Him will cease to flourish.

The Holy Spirit will use Auntie Minnie to show me sides of myself I never knew were there. But that only happens if I stop excusing myself and accusing her! So, because the gospel is always the issue … here’s a knotty question —  if your life was a gospel tract on witnessing what would it say? “I got saved, and now I have a Saviour Who answers my prayers?” Hmmm. A truly transformed and changed life is a powerful thing. 

It is time for us to take off the self-protective glasses and learn who we really are, so we can love the people who have been even more badly hurt than we have … and at the same time we need to pay attention to our responses and reactions so we can cultivate our new nature by walking with Him. 👋🏻

“We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.” 2 Corinthians 5:20