Reliance

P 3233 Here’s hubby!!

/ DVH

1 Corinthians 14:12: “So it is with you. Since you are eager for gifts of the Spirit, try to excel in those that build up the church.” Today I want to introduce a very special guest speaker. My husband made these remarks to me a couple of days ago, when we were sitting talking together. What he said was so good, I simply had to share them with you guys. So I asked him to write it all down. My dear husband loves to see people like you and I stepping up and using their gifts to help others. Today I’ve  made it his turn to help you. I pray you will be blessed by the wisdom and clarity of what he said to me. 

“There is a gulf of real difference between 2 paradigms — the world’s way and God’s way.  One is about procurement of information to ‘better’ the self — and the other is about God’s kingdom activated and working through our lives. 

If you are working person, you will already know that workers can get Professional development days. They are paid to do courses to improve their professional status and expertise. Or perhaps someone might buy self help books etc.  Alternatively someone else has been encouraged to gather more information, to gain a greater advantage, or knowledge of a subject – as a person or a professional. So the self gets ‘better’, more improved, stronger, to gain an advantage in this world. This system glorifies man himself.

However, God’s way is to die to self, to serve, to prefer others to yourself, and constantly rely on Him. That aim is to glorify God alone. If we take the methods of the world’s paradigm into Christianity, we too will begin to gather information, and be deceived into thinking that we are progressing in the faith life and equipping ourselves to be a ‘better’ Christian. But in reality, we are piling in more knowledge – without the power of God working in us, and through us to others. We will have more reliance on self, instead of on the Holy Spirit. More insight from human knowledge, instead of revelation from heaven. 

Christians have learnt to gauge their ‘growth’ on how much we know, instead of allowing Jesus to teach us “through the kind of active obedience that can only be learnt through suffering.” This means yielding and allowing the Holy Spirit to divide our soulish attitudes and actions by deliberately choosing to use the scalpel of God’s Living Word, in and on our lives. At the same time, we also make quality choices to love others … even those who are not with us.”

…I’m not going to play ‘top this thought’  today— quite simply because I know I can’t. Hubby is saying a whole lot of stuff that I know I have said in various ways for the past 8+ years – except He took ONE page … and I have taken 3,232 of them! Is my face red? Ho-hum! I think this is what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 14:12, when he exhorted us to excel in gifts that build up others. This means we will know it’s a spiritual gift when it benefits other people! That, BTW, is our Godly criteria. 

Let’s choose to be a people who don’t care about all kinds of spiritual hoop-la, the kind of enthusiastic stuff that turns up in our churches to try to attract the-people-who-don’t-know-Him-yet. We want Jesus to come and be with us, to do what He wants to do. He loves to set people free. We want true, genuine joy and wisdom from God Himself because He always changes lives. Those things can only come from the Holy Spirit, not from our own clever self-improvement think tanks!  Plus we want all of us to thrive in the Holy Spirit’s Presence, and go out and do whatever God has set for each one of us to do, for His glory.

I won’t say anything else today, I will leave you to think on what hubby said. Man I love clarity and he’s got bags of it. Such a blessing! Bye and bless you! 👋

“I pray for you that the faith we share may effectively deepen your understanding of every good thing that belongs to you in Christ.” Philemon 1:6 TPT. “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.” James 3:17

P 2682 Easy Peasy … NOT!

/ DVH

“For the Scriptures tell us: Whoever wants to embrace true life and find beauty in each day must stop speaking evil, hurtful words and never deceive in what they say. Always turn from what is wrong and cultivate what is good; eagerly pursue peace in every relationship, making it your prize.” 1 Peter 3:10-11 TPT.

Monitoring our words is so powerful and special, when we fail to do it, we can prevent ourselves from finding beauty in each new day!  I bumbled along saying whatever came into my head for years. I was being true to myself – a common theme nowadays – but I was in the wrong spirit, because I was not yet walking in a renewed mind. Jesus Himself talked about that kind of thing in Luke 9:55. The disciples were unhappy because the Samaritans did not welcome the Lord into their village. They wanted to call down fire from heaven to consume this village, like Elijah did and the Lord Jesus rebuked them for saying and thinking like that.

To be honest, it seems to me that the disciples did not fully understand the working of the Holy Spirit. He came to facilitate our new birth, not to exterminate us! Watching what we say means we will always need His full-time help. Today I want to share the little bits I’ve learnt so far as I’ve been walking along with Him. To start with, the Holy Spirit always gives me a warning nudge. What I mean by that is that He knows what I want to say, and He will speak to my heart and say: “Don’t say that,” before I’ve opened my mouth. 

You see it is much too easy to think I’m a big girl now, I can judge and choose my own words and I don’t actually need a filter. But the truth is … I need a full-time filter BIG time! The whole thing about our words is that they are intimately personal. They come from our own private thoughts. The Lord knows my heart and He knows that other person’s heart as well, and He knows what will hurt, and what will heal. He also knows what will send me off into a tangent, or what will build up my faith, as well as theirs. Knowing someone’s heart means knowing their motivation, and inclinations – our God is brilliant at that!

He knows when I feel inclined to bad mouth the other person or try to put them in their place, because I happen to think it is called for.  So unless my mind is renewed, I am sunk … I will actually need to make quality choices to participate in His renewal. In other words – unless what I think, is the way that I act, not just something I say I believe or agree with – I can, and probably will misspeak. That realisation is a ‘woe is me’ moment. The best thing to do after woe is me is to repent … fast! Repent to the Lord, the other person and to anybody else within ear-shot.

We must never forget that our words are powerful. We can speak life or death to someone else, whether they are present or not. That same voice we’ve been given that can raise the dead and heal the sick, needs oversight!  I have struggled with a number of relationships over the years, and I have found that if I give in to self-pity, grumbling or criticism, whether those things are justified or not … I’m definitely going to end up saying something stupid that I will regret. 

It is better to remain silent rather than say something that cements the other person into a role you have created in your own mind, whether they mean to treat you badly or not. We have the power to speak life, this means we need to pull our focus back onto what is “good, right and profitable.” The bible tells us to “let our minds dwell on these things.” So when we let fly and say something unkind etc. — guess what our minds have been doing??  Yeah, I don’t like that idea either.

We have to choose to live this way now, and it cannot be a religious thing, it is a reliance thing. It’s a choice we make for the Lord and the other person. If you can’t trust yourself to say something good, then saying nothing at all, is a truly great idea. However, we are not meant to lie, so how do we say good things about people who have deliberately and sometimes maliciously treated us badly? Glad you asked that question – because I have an answer! We ask the Lord what He wants us to do or say in that moment. We choose to lay aside our own judgment, anger, and hurt, because when we do that, we are also avoiding being judged ourselves. So we either keep schtum or we choose our words carefully with Him helping us.

Just to make things clear, this can be a very difficult thing to do when you are someone who finds out what they think when they say it out loud! I’m an external processor, and telling me to watch what I say is like sending me to the Paris Olympics to enter a relay race. Not happening! BUT … I have a Helper Who knows exactly what I am going to say before I say it so I am learning to rely upon His judgment not my own. I’m happy to do that because the bible says: “lean not on your own understanding …” Win win. Easy peasy … with His help. Bye. 👋

P 2672 We either believe what the bible says and act on it …

/ DVH

… or we don’t!And we are deceiving ourselves that agreeing with it is enough!

“God has transmitted His very substance into every Scripture, for it is God-breathed. It will empower you by its instruction and correction, giving you the strength to take the right direction and lead you deeper into the path of godliness. Then you will be God’s servant, fully mature and perfectly prepared to fulfil any assignment God gives you.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17.

We are told in the bible, to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. His book explains that living like that is our ‘good acceptable and reasonable service.’ Every single time we yield our right to do things the way we think we should, over to Him, and obey what He says in the bible instead – we step into living this life, His Way. The way Jesus lived when He was on earth. THAT’S when we are ‘truly presenting our bodies to Him.’ At that moment, because of that choice –  we die.

Praying: ‘I present my body to You Lord, as a living sacrifice,’  first thing every morning, is not worth a hill of beans if I don’t follow that prayer up with reliance upon Him, during normal, ordinary days when other people annoy us! If we keep silent, or we choose to give the other person a soft answer, then we step into the resident power of the Word of God, simply because we are acting on it.

When we choose to obey, the bible stops being a book about lovely theories, and it becomes a part of our inner life – ‘IT HAS SUBSTANCE.’ And that’s how we ‘taste and see that the Lord is good,’ for ourselves. The word of God will work within us, just as surely as it does to save us! Our spirit-man gets bigger and stronger and more devoted to Jesus. Plus the fruit of self-control … and other Graces …  grow. We cannot grow His fruit with our own will-power because to grow His fruit we need the power of His Grace. 

We have nothing in our own mortal bodies that can produce supernatural results – BUT – we always have the Holy Spirit, our Resident Helper, Who wants to show us the way to go. He talks to us when we read the bible. Even when our enemy targets us with distraction, hurt, or a desire for revenge, the bible teaches us to go beyond our own understanding and ask the Holy Spirit what He thinks about what is going on. He knows the Way through everything!

When I finally grasped that doing what the book says is a key, my spiritual life exploded in ways I never expected. But at the same time, I’m still the same old me. I can still use the power of choice to give a sharp retort when someone annoys me! If I struggle with someone else without praying and asking for His help – I know I will eventually react, and run out of patience. But if I follow Him through His processes, step by step, and I ask for a scripture to stand on, that’s when I start to grow fruit. That fruit is incredibly powerful, it will feed others. Now, I am learning to abide in the Vine, doing what Jesus would do. 

A number of years ago, something happened that challenged me to the very core. It shook me. Rejection came at me from a family member in a very painful way, and I was at a loss to know how to deal with it. Eventually I simply had to choose to listen to the Holy Spirit, because I was going round and round spiritually, like one foot was nailed to the floor. When I chose to believe the bible enough to act on it, even though I was afraid – I found that being obedient opened my heart up to Him in unexpected ways. His book came alive… I already knew what was in there simply because of constant revision… but when I acted on it appropriately, as the Holy Spirit quietly coached me, I began to access the power we ALL have to overcome.

Just recently I was blessed to be able to comfort that same person in their time of extreme distress. I found I already had the comfort He had been continually giving me, when I interacted with them. Suddenly I had a supernatural storehouse to draw from, instead of trying to psyche and drag myself along, trying hard to do the right thing. Obedience had led me into the wondrous supply that Jesus Himself had, when He was dealing with mankind. It is a remarkable thing to choose to die to self, because ‘laying your life down for your brother‘ is the greatest love. Jesus said so.

The crux of any matter, difficult or not, is this – we either believe what the bible says and act on it … or we don’t. 🙌