Rooted

P 3082 I AM your oasis.

/ DVH

“Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden? Come to Me. I will refresh your life, for I am your oasis.” Matthew 11:28 TPT.

When I read this verse today the thing that hit me right between the eyes was that Jesus said: ‘I AM your oasis.’He didn’t suggest going on a 4 week cruise, or going to some spa, or theme park or even a Christian conference of some sort – the Lord says HE(!!) is our oasis. We have been misled by our feelings to think that Jesus only goes to conferences or turns up for revivals – He’s IN US – we take Him with us wherever we go! Ya might want to sit and think about that for like a millennium – I know I did – OK so it was 60 seconds … you caught me. 

You know I think we can be really bad at comprehending what the Lord is saying, most of the time. We either overstate it to the point of fanaticism and make it into rules, or we ignore it and hope He won’t mind. We can be so lax with our obedience that we only participate in extending our faith for minor things – like finding a car spot when we need one – or asking God to help us with our day. He wants to BE our day!!

He’s not an add-on. Faith steps are about things we can’t easily do by ourselves — and maybe we kind of step really quickly around things like submission, which is also a faith step. It’s like we think these things are beyond us … so we hope the minimum participation will do …”After all, Jesus knows I am weak!” That’s why He wants you to call on Him to be your strength. We go through this life trying to avoid problems or pray them away, He wants us to confront them with Him!  He longs to be our oasis.

It seems we have yet to work out that His motivation is not just to bring relief, but to usher in permanent change. Transformation of our hearts. Maybe we are hoping the Lord won’t notice because we are embarrassed with our lack of engagement with the things that matter … well guess what?? He knows, because the same Heart that tenderly watches over you, pays attention to everything else. Some problems can be solved by simply changing the way we live. Please do not misunderstand me, He is not watching over us to catch us out in our sins or errors. Instead He patiently waits and watches for us to turn our heads, even just a little bit in His direction – because He knows a better way. 

There is an easier way to live this life we have inherited from Him. But we will have to humble ourselves and submit to Him in order to fully participate in it. Everything in our world’s current view of modern reality suggests submission is not a good thing. Children don’t have to submit to their parents, wives don’t have to submit to their husbands, and nobody has to submit to anybody else’s agendas — unless they pay them well! Submission seems to be a bad word — but that word actually means we have a primary mission which takes priority over other things. Seeking His kingdom is primary – then other things get added on!

It is no wonder that we have left God’s Kingdom behind, it’s because His kingdom is a theocracy, not a democracy. Let’s daily remind ourselves that Jesus Himself submitted to His Father’s will. Sadly it seems that unless human beings can see that it BENEFITS them, they don’t give those ‘other things’ He wants to add into our lives very much attention. So many Christians have cleverly found and featured all the me-first benefits … because the bible tells us“to forget not all His benefits…” I am not sure this response is all He had in mind! 

Off-loading our burdens onto Jesus seems to be a gigantic benefit to me – but we will have to relinquish our anxiety, worry and fear at the same time. Personally, I can’t think of anything better than handing my awful pile of nasty impossible stuff to Him. However, what does He mean by – I am your oasis? An oasis is a place of water in a desert, or a place of refuge in a crisis — or even a place of refreshing. When you view that word this way it begins to make sense. The Lord is not talking about using His Presence like we would drop off our dry-cleaning and return to find everything neatly pressed and clean …He means in this life His Presence is our dwelling place.That’s an AIM – not a suggestion.

I like Ephesians 3:16-19. These 3 verses are great to meditate on because they show us what we are aiming at. 

“I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,  and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Being filled to all the fullness of God is another AIM. We need to remember ..these verses are a prayer … the Apostle Paul prayed it for the church at Ephesus. But the Holy Spirit Himself not only inspired it – He preserved that prayer in the bible for our benefit. Paul is praying for US too – every time you read it say Amen! And please –  read it a lot. Now we need to use our faith to believe that Christ actively dwells in our hearts, and we need His power to understand what we have been given! It is not enough to say ‘yes’ — we have to DO yes!

Then our roots go down, so deeply into His love we cannot be moved. This is how and why the saints of old gave up their lives and were martyred. They didn’t do it for an ideology, they did it because they had been internally changed, forever!! His Presence in our lives is our OASIS. Bye. 🥳

P 2733 Let’s let PAUL pray for us.

/ DVH

“I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being,  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:16-21. 

Aren’t we blessed to be His? After all, God has made His love available to you and I, in so many ways, through Jesus Christ, as revealed by the Apostle Paul. Most of us are in fact, Gentiles. Now there’s an interesting thought to start our day. I’ve been praying bits of the bible for myself for years. I pray this other verse too … ya just gotta love Ephesians! Here’s chapter 1:V18: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people, …” Amen to that one as well. I need that! Hope deferred can make my heart sick, but hope that is recognised enlightens my inner eyes.

Praying the scriptures is another way to digest them. Meanwhile, it seems to me that we can all use greater spiritual vision. Here’s an interesting thought, I’ve noticed something interesting, older people seem to gain spiritual vision as they start losing their physical eyesight. I wonder if that works for hearing too? However, it seems kind of a shame that you can see stuff more clearly just when your energy starts to run out! But then again there’s that other thing that Paul said elsewhere in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10 …  “His Grace is sufficient for us, for His strength is made perfect in weak people …” Now that’s definitely a cheery thought! I’m weak all the time, how about you? This means we can all be stronger, spiritually!

Most of us know that verse off by heart, but do you know the rest of it? “Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Let’s just pause there for a minute, Paul is saying that he is glad, to the point that it gives him pleasure — that he is weak. Because now he has to rely upon God’s strength and not his own. I wonder if anybody is brave enough to pray:  “Lord please make me weak so I can be strong in You.” Do I hear an Amen? ….Moo-ving on… Actually I don’t think Paul is over emphasising anything. I believe HE LIVED THAT WAY. Instead of barraging heaven with personal prayers for relief from our difficulties, maybe it is time we started to thank the Lord for giving us the opportunity to be weak and helpless, so we can be strong in Him, in the middle of whatever is going on!!

The bible is designed to challenge us at every turn. It says so many incredible things that it becomes easy just to nod our heads and say, ‘yes, that’s great – hallelujah!’ But as we’ve seen before, nothing will change just because we agree with it. I honestly don’t think the Apostle Paul was prone to exaggeration or that he indulged in overbearing rhetoric – I think that he did not say one word that was not alive and active in his own life. As well as prayerful about. So what does that mean to us? Only you can answer that question.

So when he says:‘ask for the power to comprehend how deep, wide and all-encompassing God’s love is…” – let’s just ask expectantly for it! Let’s pretend it’s an important parcel and wait and watch for it to turn up! It’s not like we have to dig and slog away to try and find it. That’s what it says, so why not take the man’s word and ask the Lord for it? I think that sort of comprehension of the power and passion of God’s love for us has to change us, and mark us forever. Let’s ask … and keep on … asking!

Praise the Lord we have a book full of these things and they all belong to us. Feel free to cheer, after you catch your breath at the enormity of it all. Like I said at the beginning, let’s let Paul, as well as Peter, and Jude and John, all the authors of this book, pray for us. It’s in the book, so we can’t get muddled up about it. Bye. 👋

PS: JESUS HIMSELF PRAYED FOR US TOO, THAT’LL REALLY BLOW OUR MINDS! LOOK IT UP. 🤪

P 2619 Let us not misunderstand God’s Love.

/ DVH

Our Heavenly Father’s Love is always ON. His love is ablaze with fire and passion for all of us. His love burst forth in a visible form at Pentecost.  And His Grace has been abounding on this earth for centuries. Imagine that! It doesn’t wane, become greater or less, or fall away. That’s because our God is love, it is His nature.

Jesus Christ suffered unimaginable pain and suffering, not to mention humiliation and death, so WE could be called the Sons of God. His death teaches us, by example, that Love ALWAYS looks like something. It looks like a broken, bruised, bleeding, unrecognisable, totally innocent man, hanging on a wooden cross, tortured and dying … simply because He loved us all, and He spoke the truth. But people rejected His truth because they could not comprehend a love that could love the unlovely.  Humanity’s glorious opportunity to know God’s love for us, literally cut Him so deep, it was, and still is – incomprehensible.  Father God spared no cost, and held nothing back, now we know that Almighty God’s idea of love includes sacrifice not just emotion. 

“If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates (works against) his [Christian] brother he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”1 John 4:20. Our Heavenly Father takes love  seriously and His love is so far-reaching into our lives, plumbing our very depths, simply because we choose to belong to Him. Now the way we love our brother, exhibits a direct reflection of the measure of God’s own love IN, and toward US. We cannot conjure up such a love, but we can learn it if we choose to – one sacrifice at a time. 

That thought today made me wonder if one of the reasons that we feel we can’t love some people is because we have not actually comprehended what we are constantly being given! We often excuse and underestimate our sins, and exaggerate the sins of others. God didn’t love each one of us just enough – as in a measurable quantity – just enough to meet the requirements, and no more! His love is so overabundantly great it is always available and it is designed to daily transform us. His love is so deep we can swim in it, drown in it … and yet still live.

As we start to understand, through our own experiences with Him, and others in this life, how much undeserved GRACE we have been given, we will start to comprehend what Paul said in Ephesians 3:17-19.“…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Most of us have never experienced what being filled, right to the top with love, over and over again, is like … even though we all know Jesus. I have prayed Ephesians 3 for myself for years! I know I need ever-increasing comprehension! It seems to me that everything we know about Almighty God and His kind of love hangs on those verses. He wants our hearts to respond to His heart with the same kind of passion He has already shown us. And we will all definitely need His help to do it, because human beings have a habit of hiding who we really are from ourselves.

In the Old Testament the Israelites were kind of …blah about God. He was a figurehead Who was there to provide and care for them, and when it appeared to them that He wasn’t doing what they thought He should do – they voted with their feet and went after empty pagan symbols that had no power or meaning. That’s a childish kind of love. Our reciprocal love toward God is not meant to come from a “I won’t love You if You don’t please me.” kind of response. Our admiration for His Grace toward us, needs to overtake our judgment of others.

Maturity understands that what He did surpasses anything we can possibly hope for or imagine. Let’s remember God’s love in Christ is not exclusive.  It is utterly inclusive. He doesn’t treat us as we deserve – EG: ’that guy’s sins are worse than mine.’ Instead His love is part of His very Being, His substance. It simply doesn’t have self- imposed limits. The reason the bible tells us to love our enemies, those who hurt us – is so we will quickly realise that we need to be constantly and comprehensively flooded with His love to such a level, that the other person’s reaction or response doesn’t come into it! A shortage of His love is not the problem, our decision to die to activate it in ourselves is!

Let’s not misunderstand God’s love or make it into something that it isn’t… God’s love is utterly incomprehensible unless you start to chase it. His kind of love causes the one He loves to flower and be the best version of themselves. Loving others transforms ME so I don’t see them the same way. It is a key to “His kingdom coming here on earth as it is in heaven…” Jesus Christ left us His keys to His kingdom. Sadly this means we can lock other people into being less than they can be, by our lack of love for them. But if we live this life, prepared to die for others, like our Saviour did for us, the passion and fire of the Holy Spirit is always with us. He will do that IN US.  👋