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P 2999 God, You are more than enough!

/ DVH

“God, You’re such a safe and powerful place to find refuge! You’re a proven help in time of trouble— more than enough and always available whenever I need You.”Psalms 46:1 TPT.

‘Here it is in a nutshell: Just as one person did it wrong and got us in all this trouble with sin and death, another Person did it right and got us out of it. But more than just getting us out of trouble, He got us into life! One man said no to God and put many people in the wrong; one Man said yes to God and put many in the right.

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.” Romans 5:18-20.

We have a wonderful Heavenly Father, and the Perfect Saviour, Jesus Christ, and the glorious ever-present Holy Spirit to help us. Just let that sink in for a few minutes. We are not alone. The God Who made the world is more than enough for you and me! God’s Grace changed everything for everyone, and now we need to change our point of view to line up with Who He is.

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The Lord is not just talking to us about memorising scriptures when He tells us in Psalm 119:11.“I have stored up Your word in my heart, that I might not sin against You.” OR Matthew 4:4 which states: “But He (Jesus) answered and said, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'”

Jesus is also talking about a heart attitude, not just a memory one. He is teaching us that we must value what He says above what we think, or feel, or have already experienced. When we measure God by human standards – things like results, or our ability to remember (!) – we are reducing all that He is to our ideas and opinions. However, the Lord Jesus came here to save us, and show us what a human being led by God looks like — He has deliberately empowered us to live that way with the Holy Spirit’s help. Just like He did!

We dare not even measure our God’s performance by our answered or unanswered prayers, because that is putting Him to the test! Jesus Himself said this in Matthew 4:7.“Jesus countered with another citation from Deuteronomy: “Don’t you dare test the Lord your God.” He was talking to the enemy at the time, but this is an incredibly important scripture. God reveals Who He is to us, through what Jesus said here. 

We must not question His goodness – His goodness hung on a cross until all of mankind was totally reconciled back to Him! He does not have to prove Himself to us … we have a book full of His history with mankind! When we come up against something that puts His goodness into question, our belief in His goodness needs to prevail. I firmly believe some of our prayers may not be answered until after we’ve gone home but that does not mean God has thrown them away. Men and women DIED holding onto God’s promise of His Messiah – I call that enduring faith.

God is holy, and He cannot lie, He is Who He says He is. It is fatal to our faith to question His goodness. Plus His unfailing love is unquestionable – He demonstrated it through everything Christ did. His ability to save us, transform us, and make us even bigger so we can receive even more of Him – is legendary! Don’t ever be satisfied with what you have, always go after more.

We need to learn to respond like that widow-woman, in 2 Kings, whose husband had run up a debt. She had two sons, who were going to be sold into slavery. She ran to Elisha the prophet for help, and as he instructed her, she grabbed anything that was in her house that might hold oil. These verses are not just an illustration or a great story about something God did long long ago …it’s for here, it’s for now … it’s for YOU! … and me! Give Him any areas that remain untouched by His Grace, His Spirit, His OIL in your life … and let Him fill them.(2 Kings 4:3) “We have not because we ask not.”(James 4:2)

The history of God and mankind related in the Old Testament are the true stories about the Love, Goodness and Grace of our Heavenly Father toward His own ungrateful chosen people. They rejected Him over and over again. Instead the Israelites just wanted to be like everyone else around them. Boy! That’s a big fat danger sign if ever there was one! If we want to fit in, more than we want what He wants, we are tottering on the edge of a ditch. God will get us out again, but then we will most likely have to battle shame and guilt afterward because the enemy will rub our noses in our failure. It is so much better to just do what He says!

Our enemy sneaks about watching for opportunities to pull us under, because when we are under pressure of drowning in our situations and sorrows, it is easier to doubt God. The thing is: with God on our side, any one of us, from the littlest child, to the oldest person is ENOUGH. We can’t afford to rate God by His Answers to our prayers, that attitude will make Him too small in our eyes. It limits our prayers. Just hold on to your faith and keep telling yourself God is good – He’s not done yet!  WAIT FOR HIS ANSWER – it will blow your mind!

The Lord values things that human beings don’t. The Old Testament proves that!!  It teaches us that HE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH.“Pressed down and running over …” and you and I had better believe it! Bye 👋

P 2918 Know your place.

/ DVH

It is a very valuable thing to know your place in God’s plans. Who you are, and who you are not. Listen to the genuine humility in what John the Baptist says in John 1:19-23. “Now this was John’s testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Messiah.”They asked him, “Then who are you? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?”

He answered, “No.” Finally they said, “Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’”

John had absolutely no problem with his role in God’s kingdom, and yet he had a lot to brag about! To start with, He was born under extraordinary circumstances. His parents were childless and too old to have children when God announced his arrival. This young man looked and lived differently, he was totally devoted to God’s purposes. He practically vibrated with passion for God’s ways. John was the youngest witness ever-recorded in the bible. He jumped up and down for joy, inside his mum, when his mother met Mary, who was carrying Jesus Christ inside her at the time.

This young man knew his place – he simply did whatever God told him to do when the Lord told him to do it. His entire life was devoted to preaching repentance. It still blows my mind that he had a huge personal claim to fame, after all – he baptised Jesus!!  Imagine – he could have founded the “I baptised Jesus movement!” Yet he never once traded on what he did, he simply was obedient to his own calling. Sadly this poor guy got his head cut off because he called sin SIN! Something we all seem loathe to do nowadays.

Today everyone seems to want a big glorious ministry – to be seen and known. While others have given up on any ministry because they don’t seem to be spiritually extraordinary enough. Where are the John the Baptists amongst us? The men and women who know their place and faithfully and humbly stand in what they were given to do. We live in a culture that says that we should become famous, so we can make the Lord’s Name famous. Like HE needs our help!! I love the scripture below, because it smacks ambition right on the head – hard!

“For who do you know that really knows you, knows your heart? And even if they did, is there anything they would discover in you that you could take credit for? Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God? So what’s the point of all this comparing and competing? You already have all you need. You already have more access to God than you can handle…”1 Corinthians 4:7 MSG.

Another version says: “What do you have that was not given to you?”  Our answer to that should always be … nothing. Not one blooming thing. I’ve had 3 children, and I know each one was a gift from God. I also live in a safe place – the Lord gave me that too. Some other Christians live in anti-Christ cultures and they live with great fear. Because they know Jesus, and they love Him, but the Lord is not welcome in their country.They are living like His salt in a deadly stew, fearing a knock on their door.  

Looking at this world all around us and realising what we have been given, introduces gratitude and a sense of place and purpose. The pressure is off, we don’t all have to be big time evangelists … some of us live ordinary lives faithfully serving an extraordinary God! Yesterday hubby explained the gospel to a lady who had never ever heard it before. She asked what the gospel of John was about, and he left her reading the bible for the first time. Our faith has been designed to be active and vibrant — as well as love-filled and dripping in compassion. That’s the only criteria. Fame brings its own pitfalls.

Some of us get to practice love on people who have absolutely no idea or understanding of what they have been freely given. Many saints weep into their pillows in fervent prayer, because they know the fate of others around them. You and I might pass these people on the street and we wouldn’t even know that we are passing one of Christ’s passionate unknown soldiers.

Ambition is a deadly trap. The person imprisoned by it can never do enough, there always has to be more – preferably bigger and brighter. For these poor souls trapped-by-extraordinary-visible-results, the joy of salvation can be lost in the anguish of not-being-effective-enough. Or the need to have recognition. We must find our own place, and start being active and obedient to our heavenly calling — where He put us. Here’s a very old hymn, many may have sung in their childhood that reminds us of that calling:

“Jesus bids us shine with a pure clean light, like a little candle burning in the night. In this world of darkness, so we must shine – you in your small corner and I in mine!”   Bye … 👋.

P 2831 The place of satisfaction.

/ DVH

The Christmas season can bring family time sharply into focus, because Christmas itself came into being from what appears to be a perfect family unit. Let’s briefly look at Mary, Joseph and Jesus. Mary was pregnant-before-marriage, so she had to hide her pregnancy from her neighbours. Joseph, her soon-to-be husband was instantly installed as a step-parent to SomeOne else’s child – imagine how much Almighty God trusted that man! The tiny family were poverty-stricken, instantaneously homeless because of targeted persecution, and refugees to boot. God placed His precious Son into an ordinary family with its share of harsh difficulties.

My point is chasing perfection is a thankless task. Perfection does not exist outside of Christ Himself. Satisfaction comes from the Lord. However, as we are daily being perfected inwardly by what Christ did for us, I’ve noticed that everybody else changed along the way! Except they didn’t. Now I’ve woken up to the fact that my personal view of other people has changed, because I have started to see others through His eyes, and boy are His eyes kinder than mine!

The absence of loved ones in this season can make Christmas a very hard time. I have a grown daughter who lives 1800 kms away from me, and I don’t see her or her family, including my eldest grandchild at all. Hubby rarely sees his family either … we’ve chosen to live in another state! We try to make the effort to bridge the gap so we can see both sides of the family, but even when we do, there never seems to be enough time to catch up. Sometimes it seems like you’ve barely said “hello” and you have to say “goodbye” again.

This situation has given us an opportunity to be inventive about how hubby and I share His love and our love with our resident families. At the same time,  we are very acquainted with the kind of sadness that sits on you when you miss people who are so special to you. There is also the yearly fight about whose parents should we visit this year? Whose turn is it this year? Not to mention those people who will face Christmas alone. At the same time, a number of important people in our lives have died, and Christmas definitely seems to be the time of year when you think of them and miss them. One day God Himself will wipe away all our tears.

Here’s what I’ve managed to learn about this season as life has rolled along —“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep.”Psalm 127:1-2. Boy I wish I had taken those two verses to heart every Christmas for most of my adult life!! In my efforts to see everyone years ago, and do the right thing, I just did whatever my hand found to do, but I didn’t ask the Lord what He thought about my ideas! Dumb.

Inverted logic is a really stupid way to live one’s life. By that I mean thinking … “Well, I can’t see any harm in me working hard to make sure everyone’s Christmas is great. Other people are going to be blessed, so this can’t be a bad idea, God will like it.” Like I said – it’s dumb! It can quickly lead to exhaustion! Today, more than ever before, we need to be doing whatever we see Him doing. So my advice to others is this: skip that turkey, ham, Christmas pudding and cranberry sauce if cooking them means your Christmas is frustrating. Before you jump down the very deep, labour intense hole of making everyone’s idea of Christmas appear – ask Him what He thinks instead!! Otherwise you will end up exhausted and in no shape to share your faith, hope and love with the people you love dearly.

So today, here’s my testimony about how I’ve learnt not to do Christmas. For us now all that fancy specialised food is no longer important. We are just grateful for the opportunity to see the people we love and take the time to bless them. I’ve learnt if you are going to labour then make sure you labour over something God Himself is building, not just something that upholds the kind of stuff that doesn’t last. In years gone by, I know I tried desperately to bring a child’s idea of a fairy-tale dream about a perfect family to life. Like that worked!! I alternatively tried harder, year after year, and so I constantly had a lousy Christmas! At the same time, I got annoyed at the people who didn’t help me.

Christmas is a celebration – it needs to be shared by all, from the youngest to the oldest, otherwise we are over- stressing some people and exhausting them, as well as perpetuating problems that are not necessary. If you had asked me all those years ago I probably would have said: ‘I like doing all this work, I love blessing people’  More fool me — because, to be truthful, I actually didn’t. Other people’s thank-yous never seemed to scratch the itch of my enormous need for appreciation. I worked so hard, yet I couldn’t wait for it to be over!

Instead I badly wanted to be sitting with everyone else chatting like they were, while they were waiting for me to get all that food ready. The lies we sometimes tell ourselves!  You know, some pain is unconsciously self-inflicted, and it can lead us into anger toward the very people we are meant to be serving. And, at the same time, that pain will steal away our PEACE! Take the time to ask the Lord what He wants you to do this Christmas. To be brutally honest, I’ve learnt that I need to stop being so proud that I can’t ask for help.

I loved my kids so much, I wanted them to have a happier life than the one I had. It took me years to see that even that statement was judgmental toward the people who had cared for me and raised me. If we want to bring about real change in our lives we will need to target the root of the tree of dissatisfaction, not just the leaves. The leaves on that tree can easily be the inconsiderate, sometimes selfish and self-centred sinful people around us. 

Most people cannot love us the way we want to be loved. They are busy trying to manage their own lives – so catering to our needs  will not register on their richter scale. Without Christ and His Way of living, this world is doomed to continue to seek out something that is not real. This life is depicted over and over again by the media as an over- idealised, irrational dream. Perfect love simply does not exist outside of what Christ did for us. We must start with Him, not our feelings or needs, and throw away the pretty fairy-tale dream of what family is supposed to look like.

Family are the people who voluntarily stay when the world falls on you, whether they are relatives or not! Christmas can be a time of pain, unless we are prepared to throw away our own unrealistic plans and take the time to discover His. The Holy Spirit will carry us through every single bit of the loss, suffering and disappointment we face, into a brand new place, the place where whatever He wants — we want. That’s the place of satisfaction. Bye 🌲.

P 2773 The place where intimacy starts.

/ DVH

Lately, it seems like every single person I talk with, is having an appalling time. It is as if the floodgates of trouble, irritation, strife and frustration have been flung open and bad stuff is flowing rapidly out into our lives. Boy! Have I got a great scripture for all of us! Isaiah 59:19-20: “So shall they fear the name of the LORD from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him.” 

A standard is described in the dictionary as: “…a baseline, a value about something that you just don’t go below.” This verse is not about our standard, or lack thereof — this verse is about God lifting up HIS OWN STANDARD. (Jesus!!) Every single word or phrase in our bible is a door into a bigger and better understanding of the Ways of our God. It doesn’t matter what version we read, because the Holy Spirit made the world, so He can translate and use whatever one we use! Even those little words we would normally skim across because in ordinary life they are not important. In the bible they are important!

We cannot afford to read the bible like a magazine or an ordinary novel, because these books are not a collection of ‘stories;” they are God showing Himself to mankind, revealing His Will, His Way. Whenever we pause, and ask Him questions, we open the door to wisdom. At the same time, what we read will start to become familiar to us. We begin to know Him through what He says and does. The people who think God is a softie who turns a blind eye to the daft, disobedient things we do, have not read His book properly. 

The God of the New Testament is the same God Who is in the Old! The New Testament changes who man is  … not God! HE is always the same‘ …yesterday, today, forever – He never changes.’ ˆ(Hebrews 13:8) God is so much bigger than we can ever understand, and He is incredibly and wonderfully, deep! We cannot afford to limit Him. However, we will grow spiritually when we stop blindly accepting everything somebody else says in a sermon – instead go after wisdom and understanding with the Holy Spirit’s help, for yourself under His guidance.  

Proverbs 4:3-6 MSG: “When I was a boy at my father’s knee, the pride and joy of my mother, He would sit me down and drill me:“Take this to heart. Do what I tell you—live! Sell everything and buy Wisdom! Forage for Understanding! Don’t forget one word! Don’t deviate an inch!  Never walk away from Wisdom—she guards your life; …” Wise parents!!

When we persevere, and press into God, by reading His Word, looking for things to do – in response to what we’ve read — we do it because we want to know Him and His ways. “Lord show me Your ways so I might walk with You.” By pressing in, wrestling with the bits we don’t understand — we are showing the Lord how much knowing and understanding Him and His ways means to us. That’s where intimacy starts. Intimacy means I know that other person well, no matter what sort of situation I am in with them – I know enough about them to know they are trustworthy.

And if there are spiritual delays sometimes, we learn that they have a purpose. …John 11:11-15: “After He (Jesus) had said this, He went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then He told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Some answers to prayer are delayed for reasons that only make sense much later!

Now let’s go back to today’s verse from Isaiah … What is God’s standard? Jesus Christ is God’s perfect standard. We have a visual illustration in the bible of what God wants, and WHY He wants it. Jesus perfectly represents our Heavenly Father and His Ways. Our question to the Holy Spirit in hard times needs to be like this: “What do I do now? How do I handle this flood coming at me? Do I fight like Jesus did, when He turned over the money changers’ tables and they were too astonished to stop Him? Or do I simply hand everything over to Him and lie down like a lamb, and go to sleep because He’s going to take care of it?” Amen.

When we ask Him questions we are carefully examining His standard. Anyone can read this way – you don’t have to be a scholar, but you do have to be a lover pursuing the One you love! Otherwise you will just come up with more rules, and not much revelation! Galatians 6:9 says: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Remember, God wants intimacy, but it will cost us time. We need to value what we have been given. We cannot afford to stop short of reaping the harvest that comes from perseverance. We have an onsite, always available Helper – Who also loves intimacy. Bye. 👋