Soft

P 3209 When your ceiling turns into a waterfall.

/ DVH

“For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised.’ Hebrews 10:36.Sometimes it is the things that we’ve accidentally learnt to rely upon that make us soft! But those things do not teach us to stand and fight when flesh and blood people aren’t around to help us. Instead it can make us sad and wimpy and longing for an exit in the heat of a battle. Like I was recently! BTW the ceiling above is not ours, it is like ours.

Around midnight, on this particular day, I had thoughts like this one: ’Why isn’t God bailing me out? This is too hard.’ However, this kind of thinking does not help me persevere. It encourages me to think of myself as a victim. This war we fight daily will not be won by the fainthearted! HOWEVER, it IS won by those who turn up and hang on to Him. As this New Year rushes at us and we make decisions to watch our weight, exercise more, pray more, or read the bible every day — the only good fight we simply must choose to participate in, is for our faith not to fail. Instead we want it to grow and produce fruit.

What we really believe can hold us steady in the middle of an inner or outer storm. This year hubby and I have had to move out of our bedroom twice. The first time happened when Cyclone Alfred decided to come inside our house and wreck the floor. And the second time a giant hailstorm dinged up the roof right over our bed. I decided to share a bit about our responses, because that’s the best way to uncover our enemy’s highly unoriginal attacks and our responses.

My hubby has a number of disabilities that I won’t go into today, but these problems means he is not in the furniture moving business …at all. Yet he has had to move our furniture three times in this past year, up and down the stairs, so we can have somewhere dry to sleep. Right now we are still waiting for this bedroom to be fixed. Praise God each time our family has helped us. We are blessed with a wonderful family, and great friends – some of them have been through far worse than we have. Hallelujah, this time we found another place where we need endurance! Waiting!! We’ve also had to choose to quieten down the heart-pounding, ghastly thoughts that rush at you in times of crisis. As you know cost is one of them!

The bible tells us: “WHEN we have done the will of God we will receive what is promised.” That’s my paraphrase BTW. To me that means, if I yell ‘uncle’ and want to give in, that does not mean I will instantly escape from my situation. The reality is this, I can probably manage all kinds of things and walk much further than I think I can. At the same time, I can see that I am there, in that hard place, and He has allowed it. While that remark is scary – it is also incredibly reassuring, all-at-the-same-time;  because it means the Lord Himself thinks I can do this. That’s when reality hit me very hard. Maybe I’ve learnt over the years, to quit before I’ve developed my maximum faith potential? 

Now there’s an icky thought maybe…‘I DO have need of endurance!’ The way to stretch my faith is not to just tough-it-out, and pretend I’m OK when I am not. Instead I need to realise He knows my capacity and when trouble arrives, these are times when I need to walk through it holding onto Him. Instead of trying frantically to pray the bad bits away, or figure out an answer all-by-myself. I can remember some people in the bible who simply rushed at Jesus in their times of crisis – yet I don’t remember even ONE of them saying: “Excuse me please Lord, do you have a minute to spare?”  My reactions are normal, it’s my ongoing attitude that needs help!

That thought led me to this question. (I gotta tell you I didn’t much like the question!) Is Jesus my automatic refuge, my ever-present help in time of need? … OR … is prayer the last place I go after I have exhausted everything else I can do? Suddenly my dinged up about-to-be-roofless bedroom panic has dwindled in size. Perspective has hit me. After all the bible says that: “I can do nothing without Him!” Yet, here I am trying to figure out an answer, without even consulting the Lord! Now I am tempted to feel bad about my response!

Immediately the Holy Spirit put this scripture into my head so I don’t have to feel condemned by my mistakes. (Sometimes we need more than just one verse of scripture, we need a chunk!)  Romans 8:35,37-39.  

“Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean He no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? … 

…No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, Who loved us. And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Do I hear an Amen?! Bye. 👋

P 3117 Listen.

/ DVH

“I will graciously give you a new, tender heart and put a new, willing spirit inside you. I will remove your hard heart of stone and give you an obedient, responsive heart instead.” Ezekiel 36:26 TPT. A stony heart is a liability. It does not allow the Word of God to penetrate the surface of our lives and bring about inner growth and change. Plus the birds of the air can easily steal away whatever God wants to reveal to us. We must learn to listen with our hearts as well as our ears. It is our heart that will lead us into acting on what we hear.

Today I want to look at the type of stuff that hardens our hearts and how to collect our new God-given tender heart — by cultivating the willing spirit He gave us – exercising our faith. This message, from Jesus Himself, shows us how important a soft heart is.“Some seed fell on the stony ground. That is like a person who hears the message and right away he is glad to hear it. But it does not go down deep in his heart. He believes it for a short time. When trouble or a hard time comes because of the message, he stops believing.” Matthew 13:20,21.

“As has just been said: “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” Hebrews 3:15. Rebellion will harden our heart faster than we can say hippopotamus! Our enemy hangs around watching for us to fall head-first into set-ups he’s already laid in front of us. he wants us to be disappointed with God, and our lives, and our relationships with others. Rebellion wants its own way. It does not want to bend like bamboo in the wind, it stands like a telephone pole daring someone else to push it over! For this person, their own strength and purpose reigns over everything else. Those attitudes will harden any heart.

Repeated, unrepentant sin can cause our hearts to harden. Sin does not have to be outward, where everyone else can see it, it can fester inside us, like when we mull over other people’s sin in our minds, and we stubbornly refuse to allow gentleness and kindness to prevail. Instead those things are seen as weakness or giving in. We all need to be discerning because that’s one of the Holy Spirit’s gifts, but not to the point of suspicion.

“Love suffers long, hopes all things, believes all things …” A hardened heart ceases to understand the Spirit’s promptings, so when He speaks to us, or even when our Helper acts, this person misses what He says or does. This kind of hardened heart can become spiritually obstinate. Many people refused to believe the time when Jesus fed so many with the loaves and fishes, …”For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened…” Mark 6:52. Truth will slide right off a hardened heart. Miracles are His gift to us, in spite of our  inner attitudes.

We can also harden our hearts because of fear. We can be so fearful of walking into error, that we step away from other people to protect ourselves. God’s definition of Love needs to be at the bottom of everything we do and say. It is not good to have caveats on our love. Like: “If you do that, then I will not forgive you.” If we feel prickly when someone else points out a fault of ours, we revise our response. That perceived blow, merited or not, can help us keep our hearts soft, when we identify what is really going on. One thing that helps me to identify if I am cultivating a hard heart, is whether my response is defensive, judgmental – or willing to learn.This means our hearts need to remain soft and pliable or we will miss what the Lord is going to do next.

At one time Jesus was teaching the disciples, while they were all in a boat together. Jesus says something they don’t understand and they are immediately concerned that they should have brought some actual bread with them. However He is talking about the kind of yeast that comes from Pharisees, because that group think they are the only ones who know … and their attitudes are contagious. The disciples don’t get it because they are focussing on the natural world. A lack of comprehension can mean our heart is hardening, because our eyes are only fixed on what is in the material world, in front of us. But Mark 8:17-18 says: “Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember?”

All of us can easily be sidetracked by the things around us that will pass away and then we miss the spiritual implications of any situation. Being dull of hearing also hardens hearts. Ask questions. Don’t close the door on anything you don’t understand until you have had some revelation. The very best way to soften our hearts is to soak in His Word and His Presence – humility is a key component of a soft heart. Let’s let His Word work on us and in us, because we can’t afford to just agree with it. Jesus needs to be our Lord and Saviour, not just our Saviour. When we live with Him as Lord over our lives that becomes a transformative way to live.. 

Lastly, God Himself says He has given us a new soft heart, and the willingness to walk in Grace. To pick those things up we have to take our old hardened heart to the cross and leave it there. That means we refuse to hate the people we hated before, instead we choose to love, like Jesus did, over any hate. We deliberately make the Holy Spirit the Guardian of our hearts, because He alone knows what God wants to bring out in our lives to be a blessing to others. And then we listen when He speaks to us, even if we don’t like it. Bye. 👋.