Prison

P 3315 A monument to a dead past.

/ DVH

“We LOOK AWAY from the natural realm and we focus our attention and expectation onto Jesus Who birthed faith within us and Who leads us forward into faith’s perfection. His example is this:  Because His heart was focused on the joy of knowing that you would be His, He endured the agony of the cross and conquered its humiliation, and now sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God!”  Hebrews 12:2 TPT.

Jesus, because of His love and passion for us, endured the kind of things that make us shudder when we read about them,  Now HE is our example of what we are aiming at in this life. Let me put that this way: ‘Because our hearts are focussed on knowing He is ours, now WE are learning to endure like He did…’  God wants us to leave behind those things that cripple us, and choose to refocus. We have focussed too much on other people, it’s time to put our focus solely on Him!

When we are hanging around with Him, we are relating to SomeOne Who is so perfect, and so beautiful, His Presence promotes a desire for personal change. Especially when Who He is begins to saturate us. I think I am a nicer and totally different person than I was before I met the Lord – simply because I met Him and He has impacted my whole life.

Before I met Jesus I held grudges. I could only see someone else’s faults. I didn’t even bother to look for their good side. Back then I could be cynical at the drop of a hat and make it sound funny, but there was a sting in the tale of that scorpion. Leaving that behind me was a hard attitude to break, because it had become a defensive weapon. The Lord and His Word have helped me leave that kind of past behind me. But first I had to learn TO LOOK AWAY FROM the things that I had adopted to define myself, and look toward Him instead. I had to see ‘ME” through HIS eyes. 

That junk I had picked up to protect myself, was like a pile of filthy laundry sitting in my heart. It came from my own rotten attitudes and other people’s sins against me. Their actions against me continually weighed me down. Plus I kept going back and digging around in the ugly stuff other people did, and concentrating on how bad it was back then, and my own revulsion of what ‘they’ had done. This meant that I could not see beyond that pile of dirty laundry. 

That stuff grew and grew until it filled my vision. The people involved became evil in my eyes – they did bad things to me and somebody needed to pay, so I picked them!! I had no clue SomeOne else had already paid before I was ever born. I focussed on the BAD and it influenced me and I happily excused my own abhorrent behaviour. I used my own knowledge of their flaws to influence other people against them … and told anyone else who would listen to me about their abuse. “Love covers a multitude of sin …”

I couldn’t see the Lord, yet He was always there, standing behind that giant pile of dirty laundry. However when He wanted to talk to me about the person I was furious at, I wanted Him to take my side— agree with me, and authenticate my rotten attitude. Why didn’t He punish these people for doing such terrible things to me and ruining my life? The incredible truth is, He never gave up on me. Eventually, I understood that the people who hurt me were as trapped as I was. Their behaviour had tainted their personhood, and as the years went on, they became defensively stuck too.

That’s when I realised that the Lord didn’t approve of what had happened at all — Instead He was asking me to forgive others and move past it. My new life in Him, was going to be so much bigger than that pile of dirty laundry I kept staring at — and He wanted to lead me out of captivity into a much bigger place. The more I edged around the horrible pile of ‘aughts against any,’ by randomly throwing forgiveness on the top — the clearer the world beyond other people’s sins against me, became. I am an adult, so it was time for the wounded child within me to grow past anger and revenge and step into a brand new mature life. My new life was worth much more than a pile of dirty laundry! 

If I continued to let that stuff torment me it meant I was losing the life I had NOW – today. These people were broken, and I had let grief and anger drag me from the past into the present. It tormented me. I had to learn to say: ”I’m not going to let those things torment me anymore.” In the end the other people didn’t actually change — I DID! I walked out of that prison of bad focus. However, if I even accidentally looked back, the pain would rush toward me like a river. So I regularly asked the Lord for healing and kept right on looking straight ahead, doggedly forgiving others as this stuff came up.

Just like Lot’s wife I had to turn away from the things that dragged me down, or I too would turn into a pillar of salt! A monument to a dead past. Other people’s attitudes were their business and not mine. This stuff still pops up unexpectedly on my radar occasionally, and I take my feelings to the cross and leave them there – I do it because Jesus told us to do it. The benefit is peace in my own life. I left regret, self-pity, sorrow and suffering behind me when I realised the only person I was hurting when I kept on going over what had happened …was me! I had been rubbing salt in a raw wound wondering why it would’t heal, but Jesus healed me when I wasn’t looking as I moved on following Him.

Let’s all look away from the past and leave it where it belongs – behind us. Destroy those monuments of your past! Or perhaps you are currently listening to the Lord Jesus and daily choosing to leaving your past behind you too. God bless you … and WELL DONE!!  Bye 👋.

P 3266 It’s the way we live!

/ DVH

‘So then faith that doesn’t involve action is phoney. But someone might object and say, “One person has faith and another person has works.” Go ahead then and prove to me that you have faith without works and I will show you faith by my works as proof that I believe… …Wasn’t our ancestor Abraham found righteous before God because of His works when He offered His son Isaac on the altar? Can’t you see how His action cooperated with His faith and by His action faith found its full expression?” James 2:17-18, 21-22.

If people cannot see our faith in action then perhaps we need to revise the way we live. We are His witnesses. When witnesses don’t speak up, the truth is left to lie dormant and undiscovered. We have not been designed to live undercover! What we know about Jesus is meant to be ‘published abroad,’ by what we say and do. Our willingness to witness for good, is a sign of our spiritual health. Faith is more than buttering buns for morning tea – it’s the way we live.

I really hesitated about writing about this true story from my own life. But after prayer, the Lord gave me clearance to do it. Years ago, our family lived in a tiny cottage that had a rental property next to us. They often had pretty wild parties, which wasn’t much fun because our houses were a couple of metres apart. One night some noise or other woke me up and I could clearly hear someone crying, pleading with some male voices. I could hear a female sobbing: ’Stop, stop! Please let me go!’ 

My poor hubby was regularly on night shift back then so it was hard to wake Him. The terrible sound of fear, pain and anguish and sobbing continued next door. Eventually hubby woke up, but the terrible sobbing etc was gone, and so we phoned the police to report it and get help. The woman, by this time was a long distance away,  walking away from the house and a man came out and yelled at her: “I can do whatever I want to you, whenever I want.” 

The police eventually turned up, much later, but by then next door was quiet – they knocked on the door and spoke to someone, but there wasn’t much else they could do. They took note of what we said and left. So we continued to pray for the people involved and left it alone. 

It was more than a year before we heard any more about it. A female police officer knocked on our door following the incident up, and she was canvassing the area asking people in the neighbourhood if they knew anything about it. She nearly fell over when I answered: “yes I had,” and we let her in. We told her we had rung the police and then we gave her the same details we had given before. 

Then she asked me if I was prepared to testify in court, to what I had heard. I said: “yes,” so did hubby, and again she seemed very surprised. Nobody else had come forward, apparently people are not willing to get involved in such things. She took our details and told us she would be in touch when the matter went before the court. My extended family didn’t want me to testify, because their fear for our safety took over… the man next door might try to get revenge etc… whatever! 

Eventually we fronted up to court, which involved its own difficulties, and I stood up in the dock and I told the court what I had heard, and hubby gave testimony about what he heard the man yell out in the street. I guess what we said must have helped, because this man was sentenced to a whole lot of years in prison for rape. After that we heard no more.

A couple of months later, I was outside in the garden hanging out the washing, when the side gate flew open and this little bit of a girl raced in, carrying the biggest bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen. She was weeping copiously, and she shoved the flowers at me, with tears pouring down her little face, and said: “thank-you thank-you, thank-you,” she hugged me really tightly, and then ran out of the gate again. It was all over in seconds. My best guess was that she was the victim from what had happened next door. 

We didn’t get a chance to talk about Jesus  … we just did what He told us to do. My point is this: we weren’t witnessing, we were simply living for Him. When I saw that young woman that day, she looked like a 12 year old she was so tiny. I was so incredibly glad we had followed the whole thing through to help give her some sort of closure. Personally I could care less if someone sees what we do or not. 

Many brave souls have gone on before us unseen and unacknowledged and they’ve done far greater things for others, and for the Lord, than I can possibly imagine! This way of life we have all entered into needs to become a lifestyle. You don’t have to debate this and that, plus the dangers of whatever … you just do what is good, right and profitable! Jesus knows when we lay down our lives for someone else.

Faith without works is dead and so are works without faith. Those two things go together. There are things for each one of us to do that won’t happen if we don’t do them. Our actions, whether they are seen or not, are the expression of our faith. It is the tangible expression of what lies within. If there is no expression then faith goes unnoticed. Faith is the way we choose to live.  Bye. 👋

P 3141 The power of Choice.

/ DVH

These pictures directly above the blog, all look so pretty — the golden poison frog, the aconite flower, mercury, and the last one is deadly nightshade. All those things look harmless, but they can kill you in a heartbeat. So does sin. And most human beings are very poor judges of what will harm us. Plus we can be adept at finding thousands of great reasons why what we are doing won’t hurt anyone! The thing is —sin in our lives affects our spiritual hearing, our spiritual sight and we can’t recognise what the Lord is doing. The truth is we are dead to this world, and we no longer have to do anything. 

You know, dead people no longer have anything to do with the law, simply because laws don’t apply to the dead. They apply to the living. We are dead to sin exercising its power over us, when He died. When we chose to follow Him we died. Maturing faith continually chooses to enforce this new reality, day by day. We can’t afford to let the world tell us who we are, instead we let Jesus define us. Independence is overrated! It is a small-minded story thrown up upon the screen of our minds by a deadly enemy — who points out someone else’s sin, and says ‘poor you,’ whenever life is hard. We can end up living under the influence of a lie!

In this modern world people covet getting their own way, because they think they know what makes them happy, and they know best!  True happiness can only be found in Jesus. That’s not just a pretty saying – it’s the truth. in reality, there is no happiness, peace, joy, love, faithfulness, kindness etc. outside of Him..“For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” Romans 7:5-6.

One of the most wonderful things Father God gave Adam and Eve when He created them, was the freedom to choose. As we mature, we need to grow into making Godly decisions, through our daily choices. Our decisions can have huge ramifications, as we decide to die to self, we will need to walk away from the things that came naturally to us in our past. Now we have chosen to live a different way, and we want to cultivate the reality of the cross in our lives. It hurts to say ‘no’ when everything inside you screams ‘yes.’ Just ask a drug addict or an alcoholic – they grapple daily with choices. 

Human beings have become obsessed with sacrificing the long range benefits of this life, at the cost of immediate gratification. We want what we want now. And we will work day and night to get a holiday that only lasts 3 weeks, or slave to pay for a house we may never own.“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36. As Christians, we need to live our lives focussing on the things that will LAST! The thing that is wrong with leaning on our own understanding is that our own understanding is faulty!

When Jesus went to the cross, He took our sin WITH HIM. Now we no longer have to be held captive by the things that have haunted us our whole lives … “no longer to be subject to a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1. Our enemy daily tries to trick us into giving our power to him, so he can set up his nasty little strongholds in our lives.  But the answer is in the book – our obedience to God’s word. Choosing to die to self is the way to kill off our rampant self-centredness. It is foolish to indulge ourselves. It’s death in a prettily wrapped, greatly appealing, immediately gratifying box!

HOWEVER – right, here, right now – we have a Helper, a guide, a counsellor, a comforter Who wants to help us win! Babies cry and crank over lost things, mature people move on. Sin has no power to make us do anything – it’s all down to our choices. We need to practice asking the Holy Spirit to help us!  The power for us to be transformed was released over 2,000+ years ago. The Holy Spirit exploded all over Pentecost and demonstrated to those believers what God’s power looks like in action. Lives were irrevocably changed. That power is still here to transform us — we get it by using our faith as we follow Him.

The power of God looks like preaching when you are scared to death of it. It looks like praying for the sick when you don’t feel so flash yourself. It looks like owning up to the things in your past that you have tried to keep hidden, and then deliberately taking the time to fix them. Mature people don’t leave sin lying about – they take responsibility, and prayerfully and obediently, deal with it. Babies expect someone else to do that for them. We are suppliers of God’s love and grace, not consumers like the rest of this world.

Most Christians have faithfully memorised heaps of scriptures. Now we need to take those scriptures from theory into practice, and INTO our lifestyle. Agreeing with what God says, won’t change a thing unless we act on it. Obedience is the key to His kingdom, but it’s the one key we like to leave dangling on its hook! We can all have genuine reasons why we should hate this person or that circumstance. We’ve chosen to forget that we don’t have to live under any circumstances anymore, because Jesus has let us out of that prison. His love set us free and that love is so powerful, it will continually do it. Our daily choices are powerful. 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 2973 My Strength and Song.

/ DVH

Isaiah 12:1-6: “And you will say in that day, “I thank You, God. You were angry but Your anger wasn’t forever. You withdrew Your anger and moved in and comforted me. “Yes, indeed—God is my salvation. I trust, I won’t be afraid. God—yes God!—is my strength and song, best of all, my salvation!” Joyfully you’ll pull up buckets of water from the wells of salvation. And as you do it, you’ll say, “Give thanks to God. Call out His Name. Ask Him anything! Shout to the nations, tell them what He’s done, spread the news of His great reputation! “Sing praise-songs to God. He’s done it all! Let the whole earth know what He’s done! Raise the roof! Sing your hearts out, O Zion! The Greatest lives among you: The Holy of Israel.”

This scripture is a wonderful example of someone enjoying Almighty God and all He has done for each one of us. This is our true destiny – to enjoy God Himself. And that’s not just worshipping Him with songs etc. Sunday by Sunday either. Daily being grateful, and noticing whatever He does lifts our hearts like nothing else. I love that Isaiah is realistic, he does not pretend he is perfect. Instead, he features what God does about his imperfections.This guy’s whole perspective has changed, he is so soaked in joy for all God has done for us, he’s dripping all over the carpet!

I love it in the Old Testament when people say stuff they cannot know, purely because they are under the influence of the precious Holy Spirit! Jesus Christ is all over these verses. He’s the reason we, the Gentiles, can stand and sing our hearts out – because He came and changed the whole game-plan. Just stop reading for a minute and ask the Lord to help you to pull up a couple of buckets full of the joy of your salvation. That will help you more than reading what I am waffling on about. You know, sometimes I think we don’t have a song because we have our lives so organised there is nothing to be delivered from!

These verses in Isaiah remind me of Moses’ and Miriam’s song. I can’t put it here in full because it was a huge spontaneous song that just flowed out of everyone, as they gave thanks for Who He is and what He did … in front of their very eyes!  Exodus 15. They broke out the tambourines and just let it rip! After all they had seen the sea standing still and they walked on the bottom of the ocean! Water standing still is in the bible a few times, its in Exodus 14;  Joshua 3:16;  Psalm 89:9 … the thing is: God had already pushed aside the water away from the land underneath, all the way back in Genesis 1:6-7. And people wonder where fossils found on land come from. Duh! Read the book!

I think I’m going to be stuck all day singing Miriam’s song in my head… there’s so much joy in it. (Pity I haven’t got a tambourine at hand!) I don’t think we know anything about rejoicing in the Western world and I’m not sure we’ve met JOY yet either…We need joy! He’s always doing things for us. That’s the kind of wonderful God we serve!! Always caring, ever-present. Isaiah understands the idea that God’s plans are long-range and he acts accordingly, expectantly. His faith level is off the charts as the man says: … “ask Him anything.”!!

Isaiah has been to heaven, before the Throne, and his perspective is now clear, it is not clouded by this world’s troubles. But, because of what Christ did for us, the bible makes these things clear to US in Ephesians 2:6 MSG:“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose His temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, He embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on His own, with no help from us! Then He picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.”

Right about now we should all be searching for a tambourine! Father God has done so much for all of us it blows my mind, over and over again. I can’t believe His intentional devotion to someone like me. I know I deserved hell, yet in His great mercy He provided — A WAY.  A way for me to know Him and live with my heart already in heaven, even if my feet can sometimes be still stuck in the mud and muck of this life. When pain haunts me – and it does sometimes – I can look toward Him and be radiant.

This is what being seated in heavenly places is all about. Isaiah experienced it and he was not the same afterward. You and I may not have his experience, but we know the same God he knows and …  ‘our God never changes.’ He’s not mad at you and he’s not mad at me, even though we fall over and fail Him. This is why Paul said: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”Philippians 1:21. This man was in prison in Rome when he wrote those lines. But he knew the Beautiful One in Isaiah 12:1-6, and this is why I think he said: “… nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Romans 8:31.

🎼“I will sing unto the Lord for He has triumphed gloriously the horse and rider thrown into the sea. The Lord my God, my strength my song, has now become my victory!…”🎶 Bye. 👋

P 2972 Options are an illusion.

/ DVH

“Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If you truly want to follow Me, you should at once completely reject and disown your own life. And you must be willing to share My cross and experience it as your own, as you continually surrender to My ways.”Matthew 16:24 TPT. The trouble with reading the bible in a modern version is that then we are kind of stuck with what it says. We can’t quit reading just because we can’t understand the language in an older one! What Jesus said here is as plain as the nose on your face. Now there’s a spiritual experience people aren’t keen on! 

I think the place that the church at large got into so much trouble is right here, in the above verse. We’ve made dying to self and taking up your own cross, into an optional extra. Hmmm. Does it sound like an optional extra to you? You know, I’ve tried all kinds of excuses to wiggle out of dying to self.  I’ve said things like… “I had a hard childhood;  people were mean to me;  I’ve been sick a lot;  …”  Sigh. I couldn’t make even one of them fly! You can’t actually successfully talk about sickness, suffering and hardship etc. etc. to SomeOne Who took ALL our sickness and diseases, sorrows and suffering! 😳 He already knows – He’s very kind about it but it isn’t news to Him. 

Thankfully, because of His mercy and grace, He won’t condemn us when or if, we feel sorry for ourselves, because He’s much nicer than we are, and not even remotely religious! The bible teaches us we can make a case and discuss everything with the Lord – that’s in Isaiah. And even if whatever we have done is so horrendous it is as scarlet as blood, He will faithfully wash it for us whiter than snow, simply because He loves mankind, and He personally killed off all the legalities the enemy has held against us.

The thing is if you try talk to the Lord about avoiding dying to self thing you will get nowhere. He actually knows what is good for us,  so we haven’t got a leg to stand on. Maybe that’s because He is the expert at ‘love bears all things… hopes all things … love never gives up.’ And He refuses to give up or let go of us – His primary aim is transformation not comfort.. Here’s a secret I have learnt – you can postpone growth, but that means you are postponing change. We often look at other people and hope they will change, when WE are actually the problem.  

I think that sometimes the reason we feel we can’t die to self is because we are dragging ourselves around struggling with religious rules, and ought-tos, plus all the politically correct junk we have to give lip-service to nowadays —so the thought of dying to anything else is just way over the top. Have you noticed that Jesus   simply treated everyone lovingly, no matter who they were, or what they did, or what they had already done.

There was one time when the Lord called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers.” These leaders made it clear that they didn’t like Him, right from the beginning … but He didn’t care about what they thought, His Father’s opinion was the only one that mattered to Him. Make me like that please Lord! His aim was to stir them into thinking about the way they were affecting other people’s lives.

Sometimes I sit with the Lord and start chucking all that religious PC stuff over the side of the boat, into the sea of His glorious forgetfulness. We don’t need it. We’ve already decided that we will treat people with love — and He will help us to do it. And that’s a lot easier than remembering all the dos and don’ts! The bible clearly tells us that we have better things to do with this life we have been given. In my thinking, there is nobody better than the Creat-or, to tell the creat-ed how it works. Just saying is all …

Take the time to delight in the fact that we are living and breathing with the One Who made everything we can see … and a whole lotta stuff this world hasn’t even found yet! Did you know that there are“… about 15,000 to 20,000 new species discovered each year. This equates to approximately 40 to 55 new species discovered every day.” Doesn’t that just blow your mind?! God has better things for us to think about.

When we live this life His Way it changes the way we relate to others. So with His help and our choices, we can be loving, kind, patient etc. and accepting of people, despite what we think about their faults! When Jesus gets involved, our spiritual eyes help us to see the power of love transform US, and all the lives around us. 

Let’s face it, we all have a choice. We can be ourselves, with a rotten stinky self-aggrandisement attitude, or we can be like Jesus! The book says so. And all we need to do to enter into this new place of be ing a blessing to others is —DIE.  However, God is NOT the ultimate party-pooper, stealing away all the so-called fun things. Instead we can study the fact that He loves a good celebration like we do. Read about Jesus’ birth again, or the Holy Spirit’s arrival on ordinary men and women… Father God knows how to have an occasion better than we do, and there are no hang-overs either.

You see the problem for me in the past was this:  back when I was young, we thought we had to fight the establishment in order to be free. We were wrong. We can be in a prison and still be free — because freedom is an inside job, and options are an illusion supported by copious advertising. Read the book. Bye. 👋

P 2882 Footprints in the butter.

/ DVH

In Luke 11:2-4 Jesus says … “…When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be Your Name, Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And lead us not into temptation.’” We’ve all read the Lord’s prayer many times, and part of it says: “Give us each day our daily bread…” BTW, you know I’ve found that temptation sometimes means — ignore what I’ve read, make excuses, and beg off. 

However, lately, I have been captured by those words “each day.” We will get whatever we need from Him to face the day ahead of us, from whatever we’ve read from His Word … today. That’s what active faith looks like, it presses in every single day, until we find His wisdom for us … for that day. And sometimes He even brings us stuff out of storage!!

This daily bread is our time spent with the Trinity, in the secret place, praying, reading Their book – the four of us together. Doing this turns our hearts toward the things and plans of God. We must never forget the precious Holy Spirit is the Administrator of every single thing we have inherited. He constantly stands by, waiting to help and deliver us, whenever we cry out for help. He hears our hearts whenever our mouths or thoughts have no words.

My daily bread for today, was the realisation that the Trinity has carried me through so many things that I probably haven’t even seen!  Lately my knees have not been very friendly, and I had almost convinced myself that I did not have to go and visit someone who lives quite far away from us, simply because my knees were sore. In spite of my feelings, I prayed over it, left it with the Lord, and when I woke up today this phrase bubbled up from inside my heart. “I was in prison and you visited Me …”It seems I have my answer!! 

Oh the unknown, often unrecorded and unrecognised Grace, that continually pours out on you and I, every second, of every minute of every single day! Even when we try to run away from what the Lord wants, GRACE COMES AFTER US. There’s a good place to stop and praise Him! 🙌

Sometimes the things the Lord is doing in our lives can get lost in the ongoing, everyday argy-bargy world we live in. That’s when we need to remind ourselves that He has lovingly provided a store-house of His input every day, as we read His Word and digest it – making it a part of who we are. His word is our spiritual life-line, His blood, transfusing and filling everything else we will do that day. 

How do we know God is acting in our behalf? We notice His footprints! We live aware of Who He is in the middle of what is going on around us. Then when we faithfully study His Word and set our hearts to be obedient to it, His Word will guide us, comfort us, and it can even change our direction. We can let this world’s troubles and trials take over what we see, or we can ask Him to help us recognise His faithfulness.

The Lord’s often unrecognised footprints in our lives can give us direction, or correction or enlightenment. Imagine this scene. Instead of being rude or uncaring toward someone who has annoyed me, I find I have His grace to be kind, as I follow His leading. I call that following His footprints.

Here’s a final example: I suddenly realise that I have made it through something I thought was going to be tremendously hard. The idea of this difficult thing happening was constantly looming at me from the horizon, always coming toward me … and now, quite suddenly, it is in my rear-view mirror, and I have no idea how it happened!  But I survived!! And I suddenly begin to see His footprints in my life, again.

Dumb joke: How do we know there’s been an elephant in our refrigerator? … Footprints in the butter. Bye 👋

P 2810 Discipline is not a bad word.

/ DVH

I wanted to call this blog:“What can you do when life whacks you around the ear-hole?” But then I thought: “Nah! That’s too long for a title.” Bad things have been happening at our house – as well as in our immediate family, and to people we love dearly. This stuff has been going on for weeks, sometimes it feels like forever!  It seems like we are being water-boarded by circumstances! We’ve barely had time to take a breath –  it’s like ‘whack a mole!’  

The latest jolt at our house was my 97 year old Mum being carted off to hospital with chest pains. There ought to be a law against getting difficult news before 7.00am! My mother is fine – she’s still very old – but she’s fine! I had to repent for not trusting the Lord to take care of her. You know when life overwhelms me, and it really does, there are times I have to crawl into the throne room to worship Him. I’m not looking for pity, BTW, we all have things going on that stretch us further than we want to go. 

Actually, apart from the actual circumstances — it’s my response to them that turns things upside down. I have come to love 💕 this scripture. “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” Ephesians 4:26-27. Did ya get that? The bible says it in black and white … it is my all-time fav book, and – it gives me permission to be angry – temporarily! Of course that permission comes with a caveat … don’t sin. Fix bad stuff before the sun falls out of the sky. I guess that means whacking people around the ear-hole is out… sigh. But still … it is not a sin to be angry … BUT it IS a sin to let it go on and on and on, for DAYS, without fixing it.

Lately, as I have mentioned before, I have had to avoid the news. It makes me shouting-at-the-TV-mad! And I can’t even hold onto the mad … I have to get rid of it before night comes!!  I came from an era that believed when kids were naughty or rude you smacked them … not round the ear-hole … just on the padded bit that we all sit on. This whole no smacking kid’s policy is at war with the bible … read Proverbs and hang on to your hosiery… otherwise you just might end up fighting HIS system. 

Where I live 12-14 year old kids, boys and girls, are pinching other people’s cars, bashing up old people, disrespecting the law, and carrying knives and guns. Yeah! I rest my case! BTW, I live in a quiet suburb in a reasonably quiet city. It’s not the location that matters, it is the lack of discipline in the home. We are going to live to regret the new-age idea that children are born blameless. That’s not what the book says.

As a little child I lived in one of the worst suburbs for crime … two of my childhood friends tried to burn their mum’s shop down. Crime bosses walked down the street, and if you were unfortunate enough to meet them, you looked at the ground and said ‘hello’  and hoped they didn’t know where you lived. You also said SIR because you didn’t want to annoy them.  

Consequently, I can get really angry about the lack of discipline everywhere today, because it’s ungodly. Read the book! These poor greedy kids will end up in prison – all because discipline was a distasteful word to their parents. Any bird brain knows that people should not beat their kids up, but a well placed smack on the seat of learning can help little brains realise they don’t rule the world. Start young. You won’t catch them when they get into their teens, they can out-talk and out-run you.

Changing the subject slightly – here’s a great verse that can easily get stuck in anyone’s throat: “For the Lord corrects and disciplines everyone whom He loves, and He punishes, even scourges, every son whom He accepts and welcomes to His heart and cherishes.” Hebrews 12:6. And here’s another one — but this one is guaranteed to bring a huge lump into your throat if you think on it.“Then Pilate took Jesus and had Him scourged.” John 19:1. I think this shows us clearly that Almighty God did not spare His only One-of-a-kind Son– so telling yourself that God will make an exception for you …  ! Well, you do the sum.

It also means that His discipline in our lives shows us that we are cherished by Him. Now ain’t that a rare and precious new thought!! I keep telling people that His ways are not our ways …BTW, did ya get the “everyone” bit in that Hebrew’s verse – no exceptions – not even JESUS! I understand that nobody likes discipline. It hurts. But it is necessary, because we can easily end up going the wrong way.

We must learn to resist the devil and persist in doing good while we still have the opportunity. Be-cau-se we need to be … “making the very most of (y)our time [on earth, recognising and taking advantage of each opportunity and using it with wisdom and diligence], because the days are [filled with] evil.” Ephesians 5:16. Discipline is not a bad word. Bye!👋