Thoughts captive

P 2932 The 3 W’s.

/ DVH

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to Me. Get away with Me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with Me and work with Me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with Me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28.MSG

The secret to living like this is in the ‘walking’ and ‘working’ … and …’watching’ thing. Praise God we don’t have to do any of those things by ourselves — we are learning to do it all, every single bit of it, WITH THE REAL VICTOR right there with us! Seriously, we will struggle to win this war if we don’t know how to give into God, and lean on Him. This is where we learn to fight (walk), endure (work) and overcome (watch) – by simply surrendering. And yes, I agree, it sounds nuts. 

But yielding to His wisdom and Grace is leaning on Him so … give up! Tell Him you can’t do whatever it is you feel you should do and then keep on forgiving, if that is necessary. Remember to take your errant angry, or disappointed thoughts captive. If you start thinking about bashing someone up, repent, forgive them again. Go back to the Lord – He understands your disappointment etc. with yourself and others. Ask for His help to practice love in the face of hate. Kindness in the face of cruelty, patience in the face of interminable suffering.

We simply must stop pretending to be what we are not, and … let Him make the difference. Lemme ask this question: do you once see Jesus struggling to be what God sent Him to be? The only struggle the Lord had was with facing the crucifixion and even then He yielded! Even reading about that is a blessing to us. When we struggle with our lives, with really hard things, we are not faithless – we are human. Jesus understands our struggles. 

God does not do things the way we do them. We can’t overcome by gritting our teeth and telling everyone we are ‘fine.’  We do it by acknowledging our weaknesses, because that’s when His strength can be made perfect in us. If someone asks you in the middle of a struggle if you are OK, instead of pasting on a smile and lying, say something like this:‘I’m not OK. But I’m learning to trust that Jesus can do a miracle and make it OK.’ 

Christianity is an upside-down world. We receive by giving. We lose our rights voluntarily. We win by giving in to Him. We rejoice in the face of loss. We forgive by choice, not by our feelings. We learn to give people to God for Him to deal with them. He’s good at it. Read the book! God plays a long game! In today’s sue-them-or-punish-them world all that sounds completely NUTS. But eventually, losing means we win! 

That verse above is a wonderful recipe for walking with Jesus. When everything inside us is shouting:“There is no point in praying. This is the end. You can’t come back from here …things can only get worse!…”  We run like bunny rabbits straight to Jesus and say: “Lord please hide me.” And that’s when the Holy Spirit comes into His own. He’s so-oo good at fixing stuff. And every time you say no to what you want to do… you are growing the fruit of the Spirit in so many ways you won’t be able to count them. It’s HIS fruit, we can’t grow it! His fruit needs to be grown His way.

That person you wish you could avoid, or maybe you actually successfully avoid them, probably IS as difficult as you think they are. You are not lying to yourself. Why would anyone need Grace if someone else is already a nice Godly person? We need His Grace for the people whose aim in this life seems to be about making our life miserable. We must stop using avoidance to bring about an uneasy peace, and start walking with Him, working with Him, and watching how He does it. Most human beings are not nice enough on the inside to maintain a pleasant facade when they are under great pressure. 

Here’s a big thought … and … believe it or not I got it from a TV show – because Christians are too busy claiming this and praying for that … so now the rocks are crying out. “Humility makes a place for new possibilities.” There are things we can’t see when we are in the middle of a terrible struggle …but God can! He doesn’t want wounded warriors, He wants to truly heal us. Everything we meet is an opportunity to see this life from His point of view.

We can be influenced by the bad, hurtful things that have happened in our lives. Every now and then some angry word or action bubbles to the top, and we can’t figure out how it got there. Somebody or some situation reminds us of something that is long gone, but the memory of the pain lingers. However, when we deliberately choose to die to ourselves and we yield, God plants a tree in the place of our hurt and that tree starts to bear fruit. 

The only way through this often difficult life, is to live like He would, if He were you. HE UTTERLY RELIED UPON THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HIS FATHER! Jesus didn’t pretend – He loved people, yet He did not live to please them, He lived to please His Father. And then He accepted the consequences of that decision. He was always delighted to do His Father’s will.  

Walk away from your feelings, work at holding onto Him and watch what He will do. 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. 👋