Stumbling block

P 3480 More attainable than we think.

/ DVH

It can be hard to adapt to new ways of thinking, doing and being. But when we choose to live this life totally sold out to Jesus, living out His Will, His way, that choice is far more easily attainable than we’ve ever realised. It is worth anything, but it will cost us, comfort-wise. Nowadays, bad stuff happens all the time.

As usual, I have what I hope will be an illustrative story. A couple of years ago, my dear hubby began to develop osteoarthritis in his hands, feet, fingers, toes, back, shoulder etc. and he not only experienced awful pain, he had to have injections for that pain regularly. His ability to do ordinary things easily, just disappeared. It was very traumatic, as you know, we travel a lot. Hubby had just begun to enjoy watercolour painting and he loves to give his paintings away. He paints whatever God tells him to paint and it speaks to the other person.

Because of his lack of dexterity and the awful pain, losing the freedom to paint was very hard. Then the Lord gave me a word of knowledge – the skill to paint does not come from our hands and fingers or their co-ordination.. that skill comes from God and it can’t be taken away. It is a gift. A visual word of knowledge. I passed that on to hubby and suggested he try to paint with his other, non-dominant hand. At first he thought I had gone a bit loopy, but he trusts the LORD, so he began to paint with his other non-dominant hand, which wasn’t as painful. He had never ever done this before.

Lo and behold the pictures he painted with his left hand, were fantastic! Even more full of life than the original ones. The original paintings were beautifully done, but his left hand produced things that were much free-er. Now here’s what I think … hubby could always paint, with his left, or right hand, it didn’t really matter – but using his left hand to paint meant he really had to extend his faith. What we do in faith reaches into God’s kingdom and it creates miracles. Read John 21:6.

Over to my point today. For years the church at large has wandered in the wilderness, trying so hard to please Jesus, and follow Him. But we did not know what to do with the “stuff’ that continued to happen to us, every single day. Everybody wants to cope and remain victorious, but we don’t seem to have the skills to help us to stay away from the very things that were sent by the enemy to drag us down. So we often have no personal victory over sin. We promise God over and over again that we will not gossip, or drink too much, judge others, or watch risqué films  etc. but it seems we have no power to change.

However, because of what Jesus did, now we have inside us the very gift and power we longed for, it just isn’t going to manifest itself according to our knowledge and our rules. God Himself has a WAY to do things. The bible is full of illustrations of what His Way looks like. His way looks like total surrender and confidence in everything Jesus achieved on that cross. It operates in faith and splashes love freely all around it. It knows when to say yes, and when to say no. Now we need to lay aside our coping mechanisms and learn to live this life dead to what we want and think we need, and alive to what Jesus wants for us, every day.

It is easy to say that we want to do everything the Lord asks us to do … until we don’t — because suddenly it seems too hard. Sometimes what Jesus asks us to do, doesn’t suit our plans, or make sense to our natural minds. Acting in faith is not automatic, it is learnt by practising it. Living this way. I know I need to take what the Holy Spirit said in the bible seriously, and continually choose to act on it at every opportunity, even when my flesh is desperately screaming its head off. I do that by returning love for meanness, faith for doubt, exercise real joy because of what Jesus did, no matter what else is going on. As we are following Jesus we continually need to make faith adjustments. We pray – do whatever He tells us to do – and then we follow Him. Human beings  want to escape trials, but the Lord has promised to take us through them.

Humility is one of our greatest strengths, and we get it by humbling ourselves and admitting we need His help to die to what we want, and live for what He wants. When some awful trial or other seems to be much bigger than we are, we have an opportunity to lean on everything Jesus did for us, and learn to trust Him, no matter how it looks. Let’s use our faith to respond to trials differently. This is not a passive thing. We must grab hold of Jesus, just like Peter did when he thought he would drown. 

Jesus once said this to Peter when he began to berate the Lord for talking about His death. “Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” Matthew 16:23. But this man had been following the Lord for over two years! Then Jesus explained what God wants: “…“Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for Me will find it.” Verses 24&25.

In other words we have to be prepared to put down our own ideas, and agendas, and pick up the things of God, that are eternal. Returning love for hate. Faith for passive resignation. When we were born again eternity entered our hearts. Let’s begin to rely upon His ability to know what we can and can’t do and trust the Lord to get us through it. We can get through things we have never ever dreamt about because we have God’s Spirit in us, with us, to guide us. Just like my little illustration, we can paint with our left hand even though we can barely write with it! This new way of living is more attainable because of His Grace, than we realise. Bye. 👋.

P 2964 Offence.

/ DVH

Offence puts a fence between us, other people, and the Lord. That fence often means that we’ve gone back to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and taken a bite out of that life-killing fruit again. Someone has hurt us, and now we are pushing them away so we don’t have to deal with how we feel. Offence is about indulging and expressing the old self, our flesh.

Bless the Lord, because of Jesus, we don’t have to live like that now. You and I have access to the tree of life! ALL THE TIME. The fruit on that tree nourishes us, and our spiritual lives. This means as we talk to the Lord, (in prayer), and read and apply His book (the bible) into our lives, we major on what is really important. Things like: Doing what it says! … Offence can also rear its ugly head because someone has pointed out something we were hoping nobody else saw, and we feel our mistakes have been uncovered. Actually, this means we’ve lost or not valued our LOVE covering. Jesus loves us and that love covers our lives. His Love is our all purpose, everyday garment.

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” 1 Peter 4:8.“He has brought me to His banqueting place, And His banner over me is love [waving overhead to protect and comfort me].” Song of songs 2:4. 

“Beyond all these things put on and wrap yourselves in [unselfish] love, which is the perfect bond of unity [for everything is bound together in agreement when each one seeks the best for others].”Colossians 3:14.

Without living under, and releasing His love to others, we will quickly go back to eating the wrong fruit from the wrong tree, resulting in judging others and their actions. We can call it discernment, to make it sound better – but that is actually a lie. Real insight stands between the accused and the accuser – Jesus showed us that..We can’t possibly know why someone else did what they did – only God knows their hearts. Meanwhile, I must say from my own experience, that at least some of the time WE don’t even know why we do what we do and say what we say!

Remember, that human judgment began with Eve’s bad decision, she made a terrible judgment call. She trusted her own eyes and her understanding. And let’s not leave out that snake! She deliberately defied the Lord’s specific instructions.We can easily do this ourselves, when we can’t be bothered to ask the Lord about something. Maybe we don’t have time to pray. (How hard is it to say: ‘help?!’) Maybe we excuse ourselves because this decision is not all that important — after all God gave us a brain and He means for us to use it! Actually, He means for us to be obedient to the Holy Spirit because Jesus sent HIM back to help us – right here, right now! 

At the same time human beings can get offended with God. This can happen when He doesn’t answer our prayers the way we thought He should. We quote this verse and that situation and demand that the Lord meet our expectations. Prayer can be bold, but it also needs to be humble. Almighty God is the Greater One, and He deserves our reverent respect. Otherwise we can get offended with Him when we think we know the answer better than He does. There are times when things get difficult, because He is doing something else.

Sadly there are also times that we analyse the advantages for us in a situation, and decide ‘this will be good for me,’ OR even: ‘this is NOT good for me.’ Often we do that from our own unrenewed mind. That’s called ‘leaning on our own understanding.’ The way to lean on His understanding is to read the book, and then OBEY what we read, whether it is convenient, expedient or not!

I ask Him while I’m reading the bible: ‘Do I do this?’ I don’t want to excuse myself, because I value my relationship with Him over everything else. Plus I don’t trust my own understanding – my understanding can be my flesh protecting itself. Sometimes my mind is guaranteed to try to find some loop-hole or other, so I can continue to distance myself from difficult situations and stay comfortable. 

At the same time, I’ve learnt that it does not profit any of my relationships when I offer conditional apologies, and say things like “IF I have offended you then I am so sorry, please forgive me”- “IF” implies doubt. Um …if the person in front of you is angry, then there is no doubt at all that you have offended them! Duh! Whether it is a misunderstanding or not, it needs to be sweetly and gently sorted out, with the other person – with His wisdom and humility as our guide. Who knows? You might learn something, about yourself and each other.

Offence separates people – sometimes whole families. It breaks friendships, and it can destroy churches and start wars. It can mean we are not prepared to let the other person tell their story, because we have hurt feelings or we have been physically hurt. So now we want to stay mad as some sort of protection against that person hurting us again. Offence is always a stumbling block to learning love the offender. Bye 👋

P 2841 Real RAW power.

/ DVH

I mentioned this parable a few of days ago, and almost immediately after I talked about it – I was tested on my response to someone else’s apparent debt toward me. 🙄 

Matthew 18:23-35: “Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt. At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.

“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’ “But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened. “Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’  In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

It is obvious to me in this life, that forgiveness is meant to be a supernatural act!  We are to freely give forgiveness to others because we are aware that Jesus has already given it to us. But there is nothing like a nasty argument to wreck our memory! By ourselves, we don’t have it within ourselves to forgive someone else, because sin is UGLY, it fills our perception and it definitely distorts our view of other people. But we took in the seed of the Holy Spirit when we said “yes” to Jesus, and He lives inside us now. That seed wants to grow as we walk with Him. Because we have been freely given forgiveness, we already have forgiveness on the inside of us – so now we can give it away using our faith. 

The reason this can sometimes seem difficult is because we don’t feel like we can forgive the other person. Our feelings are hurt, they betrayed us, they did something unforgivable etc.etc. Sadly then we are no longer looking at someone else’s sin through spiritual eyes, instead we are choosing to see it through injured ones. Have you ever noticed that what they did seems much bigger and badder than what you did? Yeah, me too.

However, our new lives are designed to be lived in the Spirit, we must not be guided by the flesh. The flesh has nothing profitable in it. It will come to nothing but dust one day, but the things of the Holy Spirit last forever. So now I must personally make the choice to obey, or to hold on to my hurt feelings. The thing is, I need to die daily to what I feel, or want, or like, and deliberately yield to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. 

Recently somebody pushed hard on a button I didn’t know I had inside, and my flesh had a whole lot of junk to say that profited nobody. I came to, when I realised I was so mad I wanted to  … quote: choke the life out of the person who was annoying me! Figuratively of course. I’m too much of a coward to be literal about it! 

That’s when the Lord reminded me of all the stuff I’ve written on this blog. So, through gritted teeth, I obeyed the word and let the other person off the hook, I accepted their apology and kept taking those nasty little irritable thoughts captive – whether the other person deserve it or not. God’s ways are not our ways! To be totally honest it was like stripping my skin off a centimetre at a time! I had a list of reasons as long as my arm as to why I shouldn’t have to do it … and then I did it anyway. 

However, my ‘hurt’ feelings kept jumping up and down, and they kept right on doing it. Learning to love when you feel wounded is very difficult, as I am sure we all know from experience. The thing that helps, is to focus on how much He has forgiven us – until our thoughts are taken captive and we go back to being grateful. Otherwise our memory of the offence – which can often be carefully coloured in, so WE look like the injured one – blocks out everything else. It really is a choice to renew our mind, and to deliberately push all thoughts about whatever has happened out, and focus on obeying the Lord instead. 

Holding a grudge needs to be addressed because that is also a stumbling block. And yes, I understand that the other person keeps on doing whatever it is, despite your pleas for mercy! The thing is, we cannot know what is in someone else’s heart, and mind, and perhaps they think they are right too. We can all think we are totally right and be totally wrong … all at the same time.

Meanwhile our obedience to His word despite our feelings, is the best way I know to prove HIS power! The more we practice the things Jesus told us to do, the quicker we are released from being tossed about by our emotions and mind. Having power over your own feelings is REAL RAW POWER.  Bye. 👋