Spirit-filled life

P 3419 Keep on… keeping on!

/ DVH

“My beloved ones, just like you’ve always listened to everything I’ve taught you in the past, I’m asking you now to keep following my instructions as though I were right there with you. Now you must continue to make this new life fully manifested as you live in the holy awe of God—which brings you trembling into His presence. God will continually revitalise you, implanting within you the passion to do what pleases Him. Live a cheerful life, without complaining or division among yourselves. For then you will be seen as innocent, faultless, and pure children of God, even though you live in the midst of a brutal and perverse culture. For you will appear among them as shining lights in the universe,” Philippians 2:12-15 TPT.

It’s important to look at the things we end up focusing on day by day. If we constantly and consistently focus on the immediate, we will more easily lose sight of the eternal. These verses make it clear that there is only one way to live. In AWE of God Himself. Ignoring what He says won’t help me – instead I will be presuming upon His grace.

I think that most of us have absolutely no idea what our Father is like … or we would all live differently. God has withheld revealing His glory to us, for our benefit.  When Jesus revealed His glory once, Peter started babbling on about building shrines. He was in the middle of something awesome, yet this man was so overcome by what he saw, he wanted to memorialise the event, instead of worshipping Jesus. It’s one thing to know in our minds Who He is, and totally another to be confronted by His reality!

The fear of God is a real thing, and we all need it. A whole-hearted reverential respect for the Lord and what He says, plus following His ways, just might save our lives one day. Paul is saying here that we need a deeper passion for the things of God. I’m a big believer in grace so if I know I don’t have it, then I ask for it! Jesus is so kind, He will give us His kind of passion as a gift. So if I am to serve and worshipfully love and honour my Father in the way Paul mentions in Romans, I will need to accept that the Grace we’ve been freely given to approach our Father, is way out of proportion to who we really are. We can’t earn anything!

However, we are sadly mistaken if we think that the Lord doesn’t require our actions to match what we say. Change is not optional, it is essential. God wants to protect our hearts from the stuff that is coming next in our lives. It’s our choice and we have to exercise it, and live a new way – the way of faith. Let’s seize every opportunity to deal with our flesh. Our Heavenly Father loves faith, and He wants us to respond to Him in good times and bad, by believing in His goodness. Faith can’t be an optional extra.

I think most believers really want to do what pleases our Heavenly Father, they just can’t come up with the goods by themselves. Like Paul says in Romans 7:24, 25: “Wretched and miserable man that I am! Who will [rescue me and] set me free from this body of death [this corrupt, mortal existence]?” As believers we need to move past the diagnosis of our lack, into the arena of continuing to use our faith in His amazing goodness toward us, despite our shortcomings. God really is THAT good! Jesus has done the work for me. I just need to appropriate the GRACE He daily gives me, by using my faith and following His Ways now – “…not my will be done … THY will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

This is how Paul follows up Chapter 7 … in Romans 8, he says: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” What Paul is saying is that we might fall over as we are learning to live a life of faith, but we are to no longer to live believing we have to mess up, it’s inevitable. God Himself has already provided for everything because of what Jesus did.The Lord Jesus’ death and resurrection is utterly complete. What He did for each one of us is like paying 2 trillion dollars for a 1 cent stamp. He overpaid.

Plus when Jesus died, I died. Dead people don’t sin, they don’t even want to, they are dead, they want nothing. When I chose to live this life dead to what I want, and live it for His glory, then I am free to live my life the way Jesus taught me to live it. I will always need to rely upon His Grace, love, mercy etc. to get me through my days, deliberately going after these things for myself, and then I freely give them out to others.

I live my life with Him in mind … which means I am learning to live my life in Christ Jesus. Believing and acting on what we’ve been told to do, is our outward expression of inward faith. This does not mean life is going to be easy. It simply means we know He will help us through things step by step, growing our faith all the way. The bible helps us remember whenever we forget, and we have the Holy Spirit, Who never ever forgets anything.

Now I live this life, here and now, attached to Him, obeying His ways, looking to Him to start and finish growing my faith as I learn to exercise it. We must keep on, keeping on. It is our God-given destiny to get the hang of the Spirit-filled life, loving what He loves, doing what Jesus would do. Our new life has been already bought and paid for, and we need to move our old thinking out of the way, and start thinking like He does. Bye 👋.

P 3169 Tests-4-me.

/ DVH

Hubby said this to me yesterday: “I don’t live for me anymore because I’m dead! I have no rights, because dead people have no rights.” That’s all news to me BTW – I distinctly saw him climb out of bed this morning. He was a bit creaky but still living! Yeah OK, he’s right, I get it. And that sentence is the actual pointy bit in Christianity – the bit nobody likes that was drowned when we were baptised. Today, we are the people who choose to live fulfilling Christ’s law of LOVE. We came up out of death into a new life.  And we live to bless each other. Since when did that become such a hardship?

The beauty of the scriptures, is that they say different things at different times, but those things always fit together to make a much bigger picture…“…don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death? We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Romans 6:3&4. Baptism is our declaration of our intention to live a new life for His glory, from now on.

Our new life of living in love depends on us prayerfully acting on the fact that we are minute by minute, choosing to be dead!  There’s an oxymoron if ever there was one! Now we live a life of obedient faith that says: ‘when Jesus died – I died! That’s the essence of the Spirit-filled life. A life where we live to serve Him and others. Not a life filled with what we think or hope we need, but a life that is voluntarily laid down for His kingdom’s sake.

We may not feel any differently when we come up out of the water of baptism, but the bible says that baptism is our access into this new life in Christ. It may be symbolic, but it is designed to become a reality in each of our lives. That’s because baptism is the stated gateway into our new life of submission to His will, His way. That choice means we’ve deliberately decided to leave our old way of thinking, being and interacting with others behind us, and we have begun to live our lives relying upon His wisdom, power and strength.

As our life of faith continues to grow, we begin to see this world differently – now we do what He has told us to do, using our faith to obey Him. We have everything we need to grow, in His book, when we treat it like instructions. For example, we don’t need to be told how to interact with other people, it’s all in the book. And repentance is not just a great occasional idea – we do that all the time! God’s book, as my dear friend Harold Hill liked to say: is the manufacturer’s handbook! Just like you get a book to tell you how to operate your new stove or motor-mower, people also come with a book of instructions, lovingly crafted by their Maker.

And this book has no exceptions, or exemptions – you can be fat, short, a bit dim, a clever clogs, thin, talkative, silent, energetic or even worn out. So long as we read what He said carefully, prayerfully looking for things to do. Then we act on the things  we are reading. This means we are exercising our faith and dying daily and living for Him now. God’s ways are so incredible and intricately designed for each one of us, we can obey Him every day for a billion years and still come up with something new we haven’t seen or done before.  

I love to invite the book’s Author, the Holy Spirit, to watch over my shoulder, as I read. I read and I listen for Him to reveal to me something I need to do – I don’t argue with it, or excuse myself. If it says repent I say “what do I need to repent from, please Lord?” The Gospels are our example. They show us over and over again, how our faith works. In those five books we have a human example, right in front of our eyes. Jesus Himself shows us that nothing is impossible – including transformation. Plenty of testimonies in there!

BTW, I always include Acts with the Gospels, because I think we all need to be acquainted with the how, when, where, what and why of the power of God when it invaded other people’s lives. The Holy Spirit fell on people in seemingly random situations, but at the same time His power broke down religious strongholds that separated one group of people from another. Acts is a marvellous book to watch the Holy Spirit in action. It stirs our faith.

The bible always has a word in season about real people and real situations. We have details about our heavenly Father interacting with all kinds of men and women right throughout their lives – from lepers to Kings. Their tests included fighting “without number,” “fiery furnaces” and “being covered in boils!” And they ended in tremendous testimonies even though they weren’t any fun for the participant. The Old Testament has become a glorious table He has already prepared for us to eat from – even in the presence of our enemies. It shows us what the Lord likes, and what He doesn’t like. I love reading about these people who respected and admired the Lord so much – they took risks!  Our new life in Christ means so we will too.

On the other hand I also enjoy reading what Paul and the other disciples said in the Epistles. Those books have clear and great instructions about how our faith works and why. They teach us so much about how to die to self. What is written in the Epistles are not suggestions, they are a map of how our faith grows and what hinders it. The power of God dealt swiftly with Ananias and Sapphira — and interacted and discerned inner motivations in Simon the magician. Our faith is not for people who want to use Him for their own purposes.

Finally – looking for things to do will help anyone grow and have their own testimonies. Inactive, lukewarm people don’t do very well with their faith and they have bupkis when it comes to testimonies. That’s because we don’t really know anything about this NEW LIFE until we actually physically participate in it! Like the people in the Old and New Testaments! Our new life in Christ means that if we want a real testimony for His glory – we will need to participate in a test-4-me!  Bye. 👋