The will of God

P 3513 Eternity minded.  

/ DVH

James 1:2-4: “Dear brothers, is your life full of difficulties and temptations? Then be happy, for when the way is rough, your patience has a chance to grow. So let it grow, and don’t try to squirm out of your problems. For when your patience is finally in full bloom, then you will be ready for anything, strong in character, full and complete.”

As you can see for yourself, God’s idea of Kingdom happiness does not look like this world’s idea of happiness. The whole idea of having the ability to be happy when life is full of difficulties and temptations, seems to be utterly ridiculous. But brother James has a different list of priorities than the ones we think we need to hold onto today! He’s following the way Jesus taught him. James’ mind, heart, emotions are all about what God wants, and he is seeking to grow the kind of graces we need everyday – eternal ones.

This is absolutely pure wisdom from above. Trying to maintain two points of view at the same time can unnecessarily complicate things. We can’t easily follow the Lord when one eye is obsessed with what’s going on and why, and the other is still trying to focus on Jesus. So we will need to learn to contend for our faith. Otherwise we’ll end up cross-eyed and bump into things and other people.

What James is saying is we cannot afford to focus our lives, our families, homes, energy, time and finances on anything else but our participation in God’s kingdom. We need to be singleminded. The Lord will take care of those things. James is teaching us how to live victoriously under horrible circumstances. As we obey Jesus’ instructions we will see, for ourselves, His power working in and through us, everywhere we go. Why? Because now we’ve learnt what faith in action looks like! Now we can identify the will of God in the middle of a storm. God’s kingdom is about how we live, not just ticking boxes.

Religion chokes spirituality – it instructs, orders, pats down, distracts and consumes us. Meanwhile, it’s good to remember that satan loves the word IF – he loves to drag in uncertainty. Father God has told us to do everything from faith and love, so we please Him when we make those two things our priority. He delivered us from the kind of slavery that ties us into knots by making the problem the priority, not love.

James is explaining that when our lives are in step with Jesus – and what He is doing – we will find our faith, our character, our inner man is enabled to stand up under trials or difficulties. Faith focusses on Him, not our circumstances. Jesus is in the eternal, He has an eternal POV. Now let’s take a quick look at Peter … Peter sank when his eyes went off Jesus, and onto his current circumstances. Big waves all around you can be a big distraction … ….huge!! But Peter’s adventure teaches us to keep our focus on the Lord.

Pray: “Help Lord, I’ve lost my focus, help me to get my eyes back on You.” When we stagger off and start looking at what is going wrong around us, that stuff will quickly fill our vision. We won’t be able to see anything else. Then our minds start searching about for solutions, because human beings don’t like feeling uncomfortable. Pray: “help!” That’s what Peter did. Actually that’s the perfectly abbreviated version!

It’s easy to lose sight of the Lord when the things around you get so huge it seems like you can’t see anything else. Change your prayer from “Why is this happening?” to “What are You doing here Lord, please help me to see it.” If the enemy can’t stop us from wanting to live our everyday lives for Jesus’ sake, then he will try to drown us with many problems and difficulties. Jesus has an eternal plan for those difficulties – He will use them to transform our lives. We need to be patient with ourselves, and faithfully turn back to our Source. Remember, we have His empowering life IN us.

We’ve chosen to build our house on the Rock. Remember, it’s harder and slower to build on rock, than it is on sand! But we have the Lord’s word that He will help us. Look at what He did with Peter. The Lord lifted him up when the man began to sink under the weight of his own fear. Then together they completed what Peter began on his own. Ask the Lord for His help.

James 1:5-8: “If you want to know what God wants you to do, ask Him, and He will gladly tell you, for He is always ready to give a bountiful supply of wisdom to all who ask Him;  He will not resent it. But when you ask Him, be sure that you really expect Him to tell you, for a doubtful mind will be as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind;  and every decision you then make will be uncertain, as you turn first this way and then that. If you don’t ask with faith, don’t expect the Lord to give you any solid answer.”

Don’t second guess yourself. What you begin in the Spirit must be completed in the Spirit. Repent if you need to, and return your focus to Him … His goodness, His love for you, His life in you, and what He willingly did and gave up for your sake. Otherwise we can become double-minded. Transformation is an eternal thing, so we need His help to get up and continue. We let go of the stuff we can see going on, and hold fast to Jesus’ faithfulness to get us through.

The saints of old knew about this concept. They used to sing: “Hold, to God’s unchanging hand. Build your hopes on things eternal … hold to God’s unchanging hand.” Nice place to say, bye for now. 👋.

P 3256 Make a decision to be thankful.

/ DVH

Obviously after yesterday, you can see I have so much to be thankful for! But I want to talk about the reason I   made this decision… Life has a way of whizzing by us, day by day by day. In fact, bad things or good things are often an interruption to the ordinariness of life. The problem with living an ordinary life is that you think you are ordinary, and you don’t matter… we become passive, not active.

Almighty God has made us His house! Whether we feel like it or not. That’s not ordinary. It seems to me that we think like this because we have come to believe there is another breed of Christians, a special, elite, gifted group. Super saints, people who have ministries and gifts and hoopla surrounding them. Spiritual gifts are not just for a selective group. We all have them!  Maybe you just haven’t found yours yet? 

In Ephesians 4:8: “Therefore it says,“When HE ascended on high, HE led captivity captive, And HE bestowed gifts on men.” and in Ephesians 4:11-13: “Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do His work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ.”

Spiritual gifts are given to build up the body. We have often put an emphasis on this kind of verse in the wrong place. GOD has given gifts to men, so we will become mature in Christ. It is the Giver that matters, not the gifts or the men or women! These gifts have His purposes on them. It is never good to elevate the people God has given them to. Because of these gifts in our own lives, we can see the Lord’s incredible generosity toward all of us and be thankful!.He knows maturity is beyond human beings, so He has given people all over the Body of Christ supernatural gifts to help us move from the natural, to the supernatural, and from the mundane, into the heavenly realms.

Almighty God gave and we receive. Who is greater? The Giver or the receiver? You do the sum. The Body of Christ seems firmly stuck on the gifts, or the ‘ministry.’ He gives gifts to ordinary people to showcase His own extraordinariness! Once He made a donkey talk, and the donkey made good sense! We are not all that — HE is all that! That’s the POV we need to cling to. Mankind is not equipped to handle the kind of fame that can be slathered all over those who are famous. 

By elevating the gift over the Lord, we have put undue attention and pressure on those people who do have a gift. All Peter did when he prayed for the lame man was give what he had, He didn’t say “I have the gift of healing and a word of knowledge for you” He gave what he already had. It came from His relationship with Jesus! When we give thanks we put God back into His rightful place in our lives. He’s our King, brother, Saviour. (James 1:17)

It’’s the Lord that we need to thank, not the men and women who He has gifted! When I hear someone or other did something incredibly dumb, and they are famous, I feel compassion and pity for them. Fame goes to people’s heads – only God can bear it. That’s why the bible tells us: “to make HIS Name famous!” (Psalm 45:17) Anything else can cause chaos, God is always our first thought, not man. Thank HIM for HIS gift, and praise Him for helping us through others.

Thankfulness is a way of life – we can learn it. Step by step. The way into that life is to acknowledge that “without Him we can do nothing permanent.” (John 15:5)  Jesus Himself said that! At the same time we need to live with the reality that we too have been given gifts to benefit the Body, so whatever happens to us has His hand on it. We know we have been blessed because He is a generous God. Giving up the right to approval by man, comes under the heading of complete submission to God, and it won’t always give us a happy ride. There are so many things we can learn through difficulties and hardship, including the fact that the Lord Himself is not fazed by them! That’s why we give thanks.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:18 it says: “In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” We are told to give thanks in every thing…if we want to know God’s will for us, here is a big fat clue… GIVE THANKS to Him, no matter what happens. Yeah, I know, it sounds upside down, but ‘God’s ways aren’t our ways…’  (Isaiah 55:8-9.) And faith would not be faith if it was something we could be certain about! Giving thanks changes gears. We stop looking at the problem, and start wondering how the Lord is going to get us out of this one! Sometimes hard things just fade away … sometimes we see a clear solution … that bit doesn’t matter. Giving thanks for all He is and what He is doing right now … changes gears.

It shifts our perspective from earth to heaven because the bible says: “we are seated in heavenly places with Christ.” Ephesians 2:6. Again, this scripture is something the Body of Christ has seen as a bragging point, rather than seeing it as a gift! When what Jesus did for us, was so complete, it seated us with Him! We didn’t climb up there, or earn that place, it was given to us, no matter how spiritual we seem to others. If we continue to read the bible with the accent only on what’s in it to benefit me – we won’t comprehend what He has given us, that we don’t deserve.  We will overlook the opportunity we have to make a decision to be thankful. Bye. 👋

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. 👋