Privacy

P 3067 Rules don’t reign here – Love does.

/ DVH

We are not in the Old Testament, under the Old Will – now we live in His kingdom. So rules don’t reign here — LOVE DOES. It is a very limiting thing to live by rules, because there is no freedom to change or explore other possibilities! In the past few weeks I have discovered that the loss of a loved one sharpens your awareness of who you really are. The pressure and sadness bring up things that might remain undisturbed, or even unseen.

People make choices that separate us from one another. So much more of this life can be explored together, if relationships were valued more than privacy. Sadly, my whole culture values privacy! Have you ever experienced getting angry with people who do some dumb thing you advised them not to do, and when it doesn’t work out — they want you to fix it for them?  Boy do I have a word for you today. It starts with RE and it ends with PENT! We are told to bear one another’s burdens so we can carry them to the Lord for that other person, not collapse under the load!!

Recently I found piles of anger, stuffed into previously unknown corners, all over the place in my heart. Apparently, I also have a postponing habit! I see something in my heart, and think, ‘I’ll fix that with the Lord, later!’ Well, later finally came, for me, and it wasn’t a bit like Christmas! I discovered I was sick to death with being asked what I thought, only to find, lo and behold – the other person didn’t like that answer and threw it away. It wasn’t that I wanted things to be done right – I just thought they could have been done better. 

I’m an external processor. I find out what I’m thinking by what comes out of my mouth and sometimes that is a bigger surprise to me than it would be to you! It’s dangerous stuff, trust me. It is amazing how easily my foot gets into my mouth. Especially as in the natural – I can’t even put my own socks on! Stuff started coming out of my mouth that definitely wasn’t true, and so the Lord began to deal with me about my own attitude toward myself. 

I had developed a habit of thinking that if I had said what the Lord told me to say in a better way, maybe things would have turned out differently. In other words I had picked up false responsibility, which meant that everything that went wrong was most probably my fault. It’s taken a crisis for me to see that I am definitely not that clever!! Other factors have come into play.

Individual people that I care about and respect, gently began to suggest that the way I was thinking about myself was not a great way to deal with things. And then another one came along… before you knew it — I had a queue of them, that nearly went around the block! And they were all saying the same thing. They didn’t all use the same words – but what was said had the same theme. The theme was —- “punishing yourself for other people’s poorly made decisions, is unscriptural and a bad idea.”

That’s the problem with honesty … it’s great but it can be brutal when you swing it like a sledge hammer… at yourself.I had developed an ungodly attitude that was disguised as humility. It seemed to be easier to me to be self-effacing, than it was to say to someone else: “But God said.” The Lord explained to me that attitude was not humility, it was negating the gift He had given me. Then I explained to Him that if I didn’t self-efface stuff, people would not only get mad at me, they would find, and use, that big hammer on me, frequently.! He very gently said: “Isn’t that called fear?” I sure didn’t have any answer for that one. Unless you count … UM! 

But that conversation led me to one question – how often does fear stop any of us from obeying Him? I mean, think about it. We live in a world where there are no rules – because we think rules restrict other people’s freedoms. So now we’ve made rules that say that you can’t stop others from being themselves! Does anyone see the irony in that?

In God’s kingdom, wherever we have had rules — He is actively helping us replace them with His LOVE — because Love is the perfect bond of unity. We can’t get to unity with rules because all of us are rebellious – even the nice people! I can’t get to the place where I am not afraid of you, simply because the bible says “don’t be afraid.” Instead I need a revelation of how great His love and acceptance is toward me. Those rules have not been discarded, they have been gloriously upgraded in one life-changing event! Jesus died in our place.

Sadly, I can keep on doing the very things that are preventing me from growing up into God’s plan for my life – by undermining myself. The Lord wants to tell each one of us today, that there are always areas in our hearts that He is working on. At the same time, He is preparing each one of us to be ready for what comes next, because He knows when those even more difficult things will land on us. 

We can miss the opportunities He brings to prepare us, by not replenishing the oil in our lamps. So don’t tell yourself: ‘I’m just broken.’ Our God can mend anything. The rules have been replaced by LOVE and love cannot, and will not ever fail. 👋 

P 2910 What’s NEXT?

/ DVH

When God kisses whatever is currently going on with His peace and power, maybe we would like to look like the guy in Psalm 18 who said:“For by You I can run through a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall. As for God, His way is perfect! The Word of the Lord is tested and tried; He is a shield to all those who take refuge and put their trust in Him. For who is God except the Lord? Or Who is the Rock save our God,

The God Who girds me with strength and makes my way perfect? He makes my feet like hinds’ feet [able to stand firmly or make progress on the dangerous heights of testing and trouble]; He sets me securely upon my high places. He teaches my hands to war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have also given me the shield of Your salvation, and Your right hand has held me up; Your gentleness and condescension have made me great. You have given plenty of room for my steps under me, that my feet would not slip.” (verses 29-36.) 

I know this mythical guy talking here is actually King David — but I call him leaping Larry! You’ve met someone like this too. They pirouette around other people like Nijinsky. They have a perfect spiritual life, and while you are slogging away fighting off stuff on every side, spiritually speaking — they dance all around you telling you about how yesterday they defeated 45 demons, healed 19 sick people and reorganised their closet all on the same day … And they still had time to cook a three course dinner! …I’m not jealous or anything…😳

There are things that we do and say to each other  😱 … without even a thought for where the other person is. When we leave our humanity and faults out of our testimonies, we instantly eliminate most of His army from identifying with us. His army consists of people who continue to get it wrong as well as the broken, the down-trodden, the outcasts. Even Paul told us once he almost despaired of life itself!

We need to stop inflating our spiritual image so we can feel like we belong to His kingdom. I know that God can win anything with just a few people, but … He wants us ALL to live in the blessing of doing the work of the kingdom together!  And sometimes the guy we need the most is on the floor with his marriage in tatters, and his kids have walked away from all things spiritual..

We cannot afford to stand about simply observing the half-dead person walking next to us, even though we can see that they are staggering. Maybe that person is carrying more stuff than 12 people could. Of course we pray for them, but unfortunately, we are often spectators, instead of participants in whatever is happening around others. And we optimistically call that fellowship!

If your brother is up to his neck in deep trouble and he is not coping, then we need to take that suffering human being by the arm to a quieter place, and ask if we can pray for them. Then ask if there is anyway we can be of help … AND THEN, we need to start suggesting, and doing, helpful stuff!! Privacy can sometimes be overrated. Meanwhile when someone is overloaded, and burdened — trying to think up what someone else can do to help you, ends up overtaxing your brain, emotions, energy and time! Love carries people. It recognises difficulties and the weight of sin upon an individual’s life, without judgment, and it HELPS others.

True fellowship is far more than tea or coffee and cake at interval at church. Here’s a fantastic scripture to chew on …“He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.” Isaiah 53:3. This is what happened to Jesus – people hid from His suffering and pain too! This fatal flaw has become almost normal behaviour in today’s world. We think support means throw money at it, but we are His servants, so we need to actively accept and adopt an attitude that says: “I will not let you suffer alone, I’m standing with you. SomeBody Else already did the work for both of us.” 

I am not saying we should take over someone else’s life, or leave our own lives endlessly dangling over an abyss while we are ‘helping.’ But at the same time we need to do something concrete, that makes our love for others something they can stand on. Love is an action that can be seen.  God’s Love, the love we are all aiming at … covers sin, plus it has a strong belief for good when the other party can’t find any! It hopes for everyone’s future. It puts up with all kinds of rubbish, and stuff simply rolls off a God-prompted person like water off a duck’s back! We can’t fail each other when we participate in His kind of love. 

Waiting for that kind of love to fall on us is folly. We get this kind of all-purpose, all-encompassing love for others, by being obedient … doing whatever He tells us to do in the bible. This means that we don’t sit around waiting for a “voice” to tell us to help people. Instead we’ve read the book, on purpose, and we know how to obey what it says. We don’t excuse ourselves, or hide away from reality. Our true spiritual life is all about growth, so we don’t pretend we have arrived! 

Let’s treat the people we know, and even those we don’t, the same way we would treat our own family – simply because everybody is valuable to Him. In these troubled times, my prayer often consists of ‘what’s next?’ That way I can’t easily miss anything. Bye 👋

P 2807 Keep your anchor fixed in His Love.

/ DVH

Part of the reason Christians can become inactive is that we have been careless, we have lost our first love. That means we will have no sense of purpose. Here’s what I have learnt … when you watch what the Lord does and is still doing, every single day, you will fall in love with Him over and over again. You know … somebody ought to write a song about that! I believe our love can grow cold, when we are not using our faith … and ‘.. faith without works is dead!’ 

A boat without an anchor drifts about, moved by this current and that storm – tossed around by this theology, or that special event. Our hope is IN Christ, everything He did, everything He said — Who He is, and what He has done for us. Nothing more, nothing less. MY hope is not in my faithfulness it is in HIS.  I must learn to accept that I can get to know Him, no matter what is currently going on. “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”Romans 5:3-4. I don’t care two beans for whatever fabulous Christian teaching book is currently flooding the market place … our hope is always IN Christ. Loving Him is our finest priority. 

Then all we need to do is to reflect what we see when we look at Him, and be ready to tell someone else how wonderful the Lord is. I’m absolutely blessed when our Heavenly Father gives someone I know this revelation, or that dream, and this vision, and I love that they want to tell me about it…. YAY! But I want to see Him for myself thank you. We need to know Him, personally. He is our only hope, so we cling to Him like a baby Koala clings to its Mum.

The bible says this: “That I might know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings; being made conformable to His death,” Philippians 3:10. Over the years I realised that I will have to die to what I want for my life, in order to know Him. I must take personal responsibility for my response to what He’s done for me. Suffering is a part of life and a great leveller. But it is not a happy word.

We all know we will suffer – it’s in the book, but we must still choose to give up this attitude, and put down that expectation and let Him be God. He never sleeps. Now we no longer say this by choice, instead we simply must say that! When we live chasing Him, we will get to know Him. Jesus Christ chose to live His life for our sake. That means we have a shared fellowship with Him as we choose to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily – and live our lives for His sake.

People can go to church week by week and chat to everyone there, but that does not mean we know each other! So, how do we get to know each other? Here’s my little theory … …you knew I’d have one!  …we need to share each other’s joys, sorrows, suffering together and learn to help one another. We must celebrate our victories, and pray for one another in our defeats! Privacy is great, but it can be costly – nasty things hide in the dark. 

Our hope in Christ, is our firm anchor and without that hope it is too easy to drift from this fad to another one. Sadly we can foster and cling to the things that tickle our ears and tell us we can do whatever we like because we belong to God now. We can’t develop our own personal faith, living like that because we are too busy following the way somebody else does it!  The way to develop our own faith is to USE IT. I call that obedience to the Word.. We read what the Lord wrote and find something to do in it. There’s always something to do in that book! But I admit that I do sometimes need the Holy Spirit’s help to find it.

I’ve read about Samson, just like you … and Jonah and Moses and Jeremiah … however, that doesn’t mean I will grow my hair long and avoid whale-watching trips …  Instead, I read the bible looking at the way God interacted with the people who are in it. So I look at how Moses talked to God … and I see how Jeremiah complained a lot because his life was hard. At the same time, I notice our Heavenly Father’s response. I see His patience with Jeremiah and Samson. Our God is so incredibly diverse, He totally loved both of these very different men. I also see that these men had contestable issues with the Lord, they weren’t perfect. But boy!  Was HE LOYAL!

To me that means I can disagree with God and not get zapped by lightning bolts from heaven. He is way more tolerant of my humanity than that –  I just need to live my life honestly, before Him. I’ve learnt if He tells me to do something, I’d better do it, because it did not go well for any of those men I’ve mentioned when they ignored Him! I have learnt through their testimonies, as well as my own life, that trouble cannot be avoided but it can be an opportunity for transformation, it is not something we must hide from. Holding your breath and waiting until it is over doesn’t work so well either!

The New Testament has taught me that I am so much more fortunate to have been born on this side of Calvary. I don’t have to be swept along by how I feel – or how you feel – I just need to keep my anchor fixed by staying attached to Him. This means my life will be run by my hope in Who He is. Everything else passes away. My hope is fixed. It is in Who Jesus Christ said He is, and what He did, as well as what He said He did. He did it all those things for us … …including the big guy in the supermarket who is a grump … plus the receptionist in the doctor’s surgery who is totally unhelpful. I don’t have to go digging around to find candidates who are eligible for His love – they are all around me! 

Those thoughts about Him, His goodness, His reliability – keep my little boat from swinging about, and going under in a storm. I honestly don’t believe it is wise to live my life rushing from this port to that one, trying to distract myself from the fact that I am finite. One day I will leave all this behind me. But I am going somewhere when this life is over, and so are you. That’s what hope looks like. We are anchored into Who He is, and How reliable He is. His book tells me, over and over again, that He loves me. It is my all consuming hope that one day I will hear Him say that to me in person. Bye. 👋

P 2630 The false cloak of invisibility we need to lose.

/ DVH

Today the Lord spoke to me about a problem that is reoccurring in our churches — mainly because the Body of Christ has wilfully remained ignorant of the side effects of our actions and attitudes. Sometimes we pray and pray so faithfully, but we are not responding to the Lord with FAITH in action for the things we are praying ABOUT. We must be prepared to put feet to our prayers, otherwise we are not expressing our faith fully. There is no room for compartmentalisation. If God tells me – then it’s my job!

We need to get up from prayer and go on to engage with the difficulties He has indicated. Then we use our faith to do those things the way He says to do them. I know it can take faith to pray, I know that first hand – but I also know that the Lord wants us to take what we believe and act on it. Otherwise the enemy of our souls can steal away our hope! Plus we become unaccountable for our mistakes and missteps – if we are unfortunately praying amiss. Outside of our own personal, intimate conversations with the Lord – we need to initiate action after prayer, prayerfully.

Sometimes when we are put into difficult situations, we need to say: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, it’s wrong. It’s against my beliefs and what my God tells me to do.” It’s time to stand up, not hide. It is not good to stand silently by and say nothing. I’m not just talking about witnessing here, I am talking about following our prayers and beliefs through with actions. At the same time when we pray for someone to be helped then we need to be prepared to be His hands and feet and help them. Maybe we should take the time to go and pray with the people we are concerned about.

Societally we are being pulled apart into categories —even in families, some of the members don’t always know what their close relatives are doing. As a body, we are often only superficially related to each other … perhaps by using social media accounts. These things allow us to have impersonal PC opinions, as well as superficial ones. Things that we can say freely on paper, but we actually don’t LIVE them out in our daily life. We need to take the time to be accountable. Accountability has all but disappeared because we don’t know enough about each other to expose the way we really live in our own homes. Embarrassment and shame causes us to hide from each other. Hidden sin is dangerous. DEADLY.

Christians are designed to stand up and be counted as His disciples, and that means we will automatically become accountable, as well as visible for our actions. Instead of being “found out,’ we need to “confess our faults!” We need to be honest about our sinful behaviour: “confessing them to one another so we can be healed.”(James 5:16) The bible says:“They will know we are Christians by our love.” (John 13:35.) How can that occur when we only talk about superficial things?

I can’t see privacy being of paramount importance to the early disciples. Transparency flourished. Just look at Ananias and Sapphira. What happened to them came out of a lack of transparency. That incident created holy fear amongst the believers. Nobody wanted to lie to the Holy Spirit, EVER, after that!! And a good thing that is too.

When we keep on living our lives like this world does, we are pulling on lampshades – so we won’t offend people. People need the light!! And you and I have it. There’s always room for gentle, loving disclosure, we don’t have to whack others over the head with our belief systems! However our lives still need to be visible in our communities and homes. The way we live behind closed doors matters. 

God challenges me about that all the time. If hubby and I disagree He says: “Are you going to leave that there? Go and fix it.” Purity of heart matters to the Lord. It is not about getting things right, it is about constantly going back and beginning again until we have mastered the skill of following in His footsteps – always with His direction and help. My own resolve to change melts like butter when opposition comes up – but with His help, I can stand still and stop fighting for my rights and yield to Him.

Human beings are very busy fighting for their rights today – everyone is militant about something! The earth, women’s rights, children’s rights – God’s wisdom is not in any of that. He sees individuals not corporate agendas! We already know the outcome of this earth, Jesus is going to roll it up like an old carpet!  We are told to submit to one another  – one sex is not better than the other! These earthly ideas do not leave any room for dying to self – they profit us nothing! Christians must not hide, or have private lives, we’ve been saved to take this stuff PUBLIC – not by being argumentative or disagreeable but by being loving and open.

Maybe we are ashamed to take things public because we are not living this life the way Christ said. This world already thinks Christians are hypocrites because we don’t live up to what we say — sadly instead, we’ve let judgment rule, to protect our own little world. We need to lose that cloak of invisibility and become transparent. Everybody’s faults were paid for once and for all!  That’s called THE GOOD NEWS. Remember ALMIGHTY GOD MADE HIMSELF VISIBLE WHEN HE SENT HIS SON! Bye. 👋