Singular focus

P 3331 In but not of …

/ DVH

“Stop imitating the ideals and opinions of the culture around you, but be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think. This will empower you to discern God’s will as you live a beautiful life, satisfying and perfect in His eyes.” Romans 12:2 TPT.  That’s pretty plain isn’t it? Not much to explain there. And here’s another one, where Jesus Himself is praying for us… “My prayer is not that You take them out of the world but that You protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” John 17:15-16. 

The thing is, without inward transformation, we are wasting our time and effort trying to capture the-people-who-don’t-know-Him’s attention with our own clever ideas and plans. We need to have the Lord’s guidance, His way to reach out to people. We serve the One Who took people out onto a hillside and they were so captured by what Jesus said, they didn’t even think about eating.

The point made in this scripture is that the Lord knows how to go straight to the heart of the matter, and we don’t. Let’s ask for His help! The bonus is we get to know God’s will for our lives. We no longer live by this world’s standards. The ‘latest thing’ is the ‘last thing’ on our minds! Unless the Holy Spirit kisses what we are doing and tears off the roof, our plans are limited, His are not.

Jesus isn’t praying for us to live detached from this world, like somehow what’s out there can stop what’s inside us from flourishing!  Our choices do that for us, they are what influence us. We don’t need to separate ourselves from the lives we are here to touch when we’ve decide to make Him our priority. Instead Jesus is praying that we will be protected from the devices of our enemy – who is all around us. Here’s my litmus test for in not of …  Ask yourself what occupies most of your thoughts? 

I have been to churches in many places, that are pale imitations of what this world can produce all by itself. In the end, the productions become more important than the God we worship or the people we are here to reach. Let’s realise that when it comes to production – this world is waa-aa-aa-ay better at it than we are! They’ve got great gizmos to help them make fake things look real.

I think that’s because whatever IS represented by this world is fake. In our churches we want to produce the real thing — but you can’t produce the real thing, from fake roots. Entertainment is by its very nature, anti-what-Jesus-stands-for. He wants to glorify His Father, by what He says and does. He can use entertainment, but He doesn’t need it. We can say we want to glorify God, but I’ve been involved in the production of a number of things in the past and this world does not easily let go of the idea that being bigger, better, brighter, more clever is the way to go! 

Human beings think that doing something well, is going to impress the world and help them to believe in what they are selling. They don’t need to be impressed with us, these people need the King, not our clever, glamorous well-produced rhetoric. Our message doesn’t need any help! It’s in the book and God Himself wrote it. Our God is the God of the Universe, He doesn’t want or need our advertising, He  wants to reach the people around us, with healing, deliverance, salvation and the Good News.

We have been asked to make disciples, followers of Jesus Christ – not groupies. Changing someone’s heart is His job. Ours is to co-operate with the Holy Spirit and make a permanent place for the Lord in our hearts and our churches – then we follow the Holy Spirit’s instructions regarding how we approach others. Our churches are where we meet to glorify Him and give Him the praise He so richly deserves. And all our gifts are to be surrendered and used to glorify Him — our fellowship is sweeter because of Him. 

Our meetings cannot be about “the atmosphere’ either – an atmosphere is easily created and easily broken. What we do is about Him, done for His sake, for His pleasure. We can’t substitute special effects for the anointing – it is far better to get on our faces and find out where we’ve missed Him, than to plough on competing with this world’s idea of a good time.  

To be in not of  means we are totally aware of our surroundings, and we can see and hear the people around us. Their needs, their hopes, their squashed broken lives. It is so easy to segregate ourselves away from the very people the Lord saved us to reach — simply because they do this and that, and that stuff might corrupt us. The hard times that have fallen upon everyone has disproved that theory. People are dying inside – they have no hope.  And guess what we have – HOPE! 

We have the incorruptible One living inside us!1 Peter 1:23 says: “For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.” 1 John 4:4: “Little children, you are of God, and have overcome them; for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.” In but not of is about singular focus, not just distraction. I would rather spend 5 minutes with a Spirit-filled person than 5 seconds with someone else’s clever ideas. Bye for now, 👋

P 3011 He is a Merciful Father.

/ DVH

“Lord, You’re so kind and tenderhearted and so patient with people who fail You! Your love is like a flooding river overflowing its banks with kindness. You don’t look at us only to find our faults, just so that You can hold a grudge against us.” Psalms 103:8-9 TPT. This Psalm was written 1100 years before Jesus was born. Imagine that! Just spend a minute drinking in the knowledge of Grace that exists in David’s words. He had such a clear, wonderful picture of Who God is. Almighty God was this man’s singular focus. Not sin. Not what he did, or what I did, or even what some Philistine did! His focus was on God Himself. David knew God and His mercy so clearly.

It would be an utter tragedy if we became so obsessed with our failures, that we cannot see, or imagine the Niagara Falls of our Father’s Grace falling, falling, falling into our lives, day after day after day. Let’s always remember to thank Him for it! He’s such a good good merciful Father! We must continually chase after Him, longing to know more about His goodness and mercy toward us, until it fills our thoughts and eyes. If we look at our failures, we will end up obsessing over them and letting those things rule us. That is that kind of stuff that makes people hide from God.

What we need is balance. The ability to see His mercy-in-action in our own lives and yet not presume on it.  To do that we rely upon what the bible says and the Holy Spirit’s help and guidance. His singularity and purity of mind and heart is like our compass, pointing us to true north. So we press on hoping to be more like David, he treasured our God with so much passion. Let’s leave our sinful attitudes and actions at the foot of the cross and praise God He didn’t given up on us!

The letters in the Epistles were written so we can understand the comprehensive everydayness of God’s divine intervention into our lives. Like the people who followed Him then, we lay aside the weights that try to attach themselves, and keep thanking Him for His goodness. Always remembering we are never ever going to deserve anything He has done for us. The pressure to perform is a weight. These saints knew, firsthand, that they could not have done what was done without our Father’s Divine Love, plus His incredible intervention. They marvelled at what they were allowed to see and take part in – their joy, suffering, miracles and troubles. 

That’s the starting point for each one of us, giving thanks that He loves us. We cannot move past that. Then we will begin to understand our role in His plan and receive power from Him to do the works He has prepared for us to do before we ever arrived into this world. I like to cultivate, fertilise and weed the seed beds of my life with His totally engaged oversight. When God puts His finger on something, then it is important and it needs to become a priority … not a postponement. He does this with loving mercy, not accusation.

I often think about all those other people-today-who-don’t-know-Him-yet. The people who worship so-called gods that have no power to help their followers to change the very things that have driven them to find someone, or something, greater than themselves in the first place! And, how I love the Lord Jesus so much for coming here and illustrating what LOVE looks like in a Person. 

Mercy is a greatly underrated virtue, today. Many people think it means we go soft on someone who has terrible attitudes and actions. Actually, mercy means we don’t kill them for what they’ve done, we forgive them instead. But mercy is not about standing against a wall for someone else’s target practice – that’s giving that person the opportunity to abuse Grace. It is not just bad for you – it is bad for them! Grace was expensive. We need the Holy Spirit’s guidance to help us live in it and administer it. Jesus persevered with those who persecuted Him, but He did not excuse their behaviour. Mercy is no-one’s free ticket to punish someone else.

Our God is full of mercy:  “… that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s sins against them [but canceling them]. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation [that is, restoration to favour with God].”2 Corinthians 5:19. If you want to know more about what His mercy looks like in action – read the book. Bye for today, 👋.

ps For those who have asked about our trip: on this trip we gave away— nearly a hundred blankets. Plus donated tinned food, toothpaste, deodorants, baby clothes, baby bottles, nappies, toys, handmade bags, children’s books, bookmarks, pens, paintings, thank you cards, blocks of chocolate for the maids, prophetic words, plus nearly 300 bibles. That’s approx. 678 things in 8 days. We could have given away so much more, but our car was stuffed full, and we tied more to the roof! We had countless conversations talking about what we believe – many of the people we spoke to, wept. 

There are governmental agencies doing their best, but the funds are incredibly low for the sheer volume of misplaced, abused and over-looked people out here in the country. We met a worker in Nanango who had been a police officer for years. She had to give it up because of post-traumatic stress disorder. She looked at us with eyes filled with tears and said:“I couldn’t take the dead and abused children anymore. It nearly finished me. I couldn’t even talk to my husband about it for a year.”  Please pray for her, now she helps the homeless – you cannot stop a mercy gift and she has one!

The church needs the kind of mercy that stops seeing broken people as just someone we are meant to harvest for God’s kingdom and purposes, and simply see suffering human beings instead. 🙏

P 2993 Holy Spirit breathing – in and out.

/ DVH

“For athletic training only benefits you for a short season, but righteousness brings lasting benefit in everything; for righteousness contains the promise of life, for time and eternity.”1 Timothy 4:8 TPT.

One of the things that I love about this verse is anyone can do it.  You don’t have to be physically fit or train for 5 hours a day. Being trained by righteousness simply takes faith and dedication. The only thing that will stop any of us from living this way, are the choices we make. However, if we continually make the wrong choices it is like sticking our fingers in our ears and ignoring what the Lord is saying to us.

This option for spiritual fitness is available to all of us, because of what Jesus did for us. Ignoring the Holy Spirit is dangerous – so we need to train ourselves to listen to Him. When I don’t want to do whatever He asks me to do, I ask for His help to do it, then I do it anyway, using my faith. My job is to let God live in me and through me, just like Jesus did and the Lord Jesus gave us His own ability to do whatever God wants from us.

Romans 5:15-17: “Yet the rescuing gift is not exactly parallel to the death-dealing sin. If one man’s sin put crowds of people at the dead-end abyss of separation from God, just think what God’s gift poured through one man, Jesus Christ, will do! There’s no comparison between that death-dealing sin and this generous, life-giving gift. The verdict on that one sin was the death sentence; the verdict on the many sins that followed was this wonderful life sentence. If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, absolute life, in those who grasp with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?” 

We need to grab hold of what the Lord has already given us with both hands and not let go, using our faith. Instead of believing we are ‘not good’ at spiritual things, and keeping a record of our failures – or the disappointments we’ve experienced when we’ve prayed and the answer we wanted did not come. To increase our faith we meditate on Who He is, what He gave us, plus things we’ve seen Him do through us and in us. This is how we train ourselves to walk in faith with Him – we take note to encourage our hearts.

We all know Jesus succeeded in what He set out to do, so that’s where we look – not at our failures… but at His victory! He was perfectly righteous with God and His death and resurrection gave us the power and right to:“act in accord with God’s divine law.”  So any sin is to be owned, repented from and walked away from. The very word repent means ‘turn around and walk in the other direction.’ Our aim is to maintain God Himself living within us – just like Jesus did. Then, by actively choosing to live in His Grace – His way of acting and thinking – our response to this world will be unconditional LOVE.

Training yourself to live in a Godly fashion takes dedication to living aware of Him. However, our continuing response to God’s faithfulness can also deliver us from all kinds of evil. Dying to self, and living for Him means we choose to value Him above everything else. We lean on what He has given us. Jesus died and gave us His ability to live differently, we enter into that gift by using our faith. Just like we expect the bank to have our money when we make a withdrawal, we make faith withdrawals by ignoring our feelings and inclinations and obeying Him instead. We will encourage huge spiritual deposits into our lives by spending time with Him.  

Athletes train for years, to achieve goals, they employ self-discipline, plus a singular focus to achieve what they want. We also need to have just one focus, pleasing Him! If we live our ordinary everyday lives putting to death those things that will only give us temporary relief or pleasure, in favour of making Him Lord, then our joy increases. The more we want what He wants, the more He will give us opportunities to use our faith, and choose His Ways over our own. It seems impossible simply because we are so used to indulging our flesh. 

The Lord loves the secret place. He does not want us to see time spent with Him as a duty, rather it is a privilege and provision that Jesus willingly paid for, to give us an incredible kind of togetherness. An athlete rehearses their skill to improve it, but instead, we practice looking to Him daily to be our ever-present help — all day every day. This hones our focus, our total faith-driven reliance upon Him to be there and help us. 

Knowing what the Lord likes and wants, occurs as we read the book, then we do what it says, and use our faith to obey what we’ve read. As time passes we begin to carry His secret place within us, everywhere we go.  It’s like breathing: valuing Him and spending time with Him is IN… and going out and sharing what He gives us is breathing OUT. Athletes need good breathing as well as fitness … so do Christians! We also need active faith. As we learn to hear His voice and do whatever He asks us to do, we will learn Holy Spirit breathing. Bye 👋