Spiritcode

The Devil and the Detail

THE DEVIL AND THE DETAIL

There is a lot of speculation and attributing of blame concerning how the Corona virus came into being– was it made in a laboratory and if so where? Or was it transmitted by a bat or some other animal? Some people may even ask whether it was sent by God, and if so, why? Others may believe that it was sent by the devil.
In my humble opinion, which I think I share with many others - the jury is still out on the laboratory and/or the bat, and the exact whereabouts of the bat and the lab. 
I don’t think it was sent by the devil, but I think he is having an eventful and busy time with it.

GOD’S CREATION
Ultimately the virus is simply part of God’s creation, along with other viruses and bacteria and microbes and plants and animals and people - these are now all part of a disordered fallen creation that fell when man and woman fell in the Garden of Eden. The creation was put out of order and into corruption through the sin of Adam and Eve. And after that happened God said to Adam ‘the ground is cursed because of you…it shall bring forth thorns and thistles (and other ugly things - Genesis 3:17). 
The Bible also says that People walk on in darkness, and all the foundations of the earth have been put out of alignment (Psalm 82:5). That follows the fact that humanity is out of alignment with God and because of sin we do harm to ourselves and others and bring disorder into our world. 
But the Bible also says that this curse will only last for a limited time, when God’s plan of redemption is finished in the earth and the Lord returns and we are given new bodies at the Resurrection of the dead.
Romans 8:19-22 … For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing (apokalypsis) of the sons of God… The creation waits with hope to be set free from the bondage of corruption, and that there will be a New heavens and new earth (Isaiah 66, 2Peter 3:10, Revelation 21).

JESUS IN A FALLEN WORLD
The fact is that when Jesus arrived on this planet he lived his life in a fallen world in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. He knew he was not in control of the corruption that was going on around him politically and religiously, but he also knew that his Father was in command of everything, and that things were going according to his Father’s plan. 
Jesus did only what his Father told him. If his father told him to still a raging storm, it would happen, and on the other hand when Pontius Pilate said to Jesus, “Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” Jesus didn’t resist that claim but said to him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. God was in control and he had a purpose for everything and in everything that was going to happen.
Jesus did not come to reform the politics of the day, he came to transform lives.

So this current global pandemic was always going to happen within the purpose and plan of God.

TIMES OF TRIAL
We are living in times of great physical and emotional and spiritual trial in the current global pandemic, in which there is an enormous amount of strain being placed upon nations, governments, communities, corporations, churches, families and individuals. 
The physical and emotional pressure that everybody is under is out in the open for all to see and to be read about and talked about everywhere. 
But there is a spiritual activity of both darkness and light that all nations and all individuals at this present time are under in the unseen world of the spirit and that sits invisibly above everything else, ultimately influencing the feelings, the thinking, and the behavior of people in a far broader spiritual dimension than anyone could imagine.

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
The opposing spirits of darkness and light are both powerfully at work in this hour. The Bible tells us that in intense conflict between darkness and light, God says to his people that his Spirit is far more powerful than the spirit of this world – He says to us;  arise and shine, for your light has come…for darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you, and nations shall come to your light… (Isaiah 60:1)

THE POWERS OF DARKNESS
We will look first at the purpose and strategy of the power of the work of darkness. The purpose and strategy and the activity of darkness lurks behind the different names that darkness is known by – names such as the Devil, and Satan, and Lucifer and the god of this world, and the Prince of the power of the air, and a number of other nasty titles (Abbadon, Beelzebub etc.)

All those different names that are used for the powers of darkness also portray a range of different job descriptions that can be found in those Scriptural titles;
The Devil - Diabolos – to throw or let go of a thing without caring where it falls - to fragment and scatter - to create division.
Satan – Satanas – the accuser and the adversary – to create judgment and vengeance and hostility.
Lucifer –The fallen light giver who became the dark giver who said he would be as the Most High God (Isaiah 14:14) – and as the ‘god of this world’ he blinds the minds of those who do not believe (2Corinthians 4:4)
The prince of the power of the air who tempts the sons of disobedience to live for their own desires (Ephesians 2:2).

THE DETAIL OF DIABOLOS
Most of those dark spiritual activities found in the meanings of the names overlap in some way, such as lying and tempting and accusing, but I would like to feature the detail of the name of the Devil - Diabolos – to throw a thing - to fragment and scatter - to create division.

Diabolos comes from two Greek words, dia which means through, and bolos which means to throw. The word bolos is where we get the word ball from, like throwing a ball. It is also where we get the word ‘ballistic’ from, as in ballistic missile. So we have the picture of the Devil hurling destructive spiritual missiles at us to break and fragment our relationship with God and with one another and within our own souls. Diabolos doesn’t care what he throws as long as it destroys oneness with God and peace with one another.

DIABOLOS AND JESUS
When Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (diabolos - Matthew 4:1). Darkness came at Jesus as the Devil, the missile thrower, and he threw every missile he had at Jesus to tempt him to split off from his Father and show how powerful he could be independent of him. 
The Devil even subtly taunted him with ‘If you are the Son of God turn these stones into bread!’ What a victory if Jesus would have fallen for that and not remained faithful as ‘the Son of God’. Jesus didn’t do anything unless his Father told him, so Jesus was able to hold things together in his heart of faith and truth and love between himself and his Father. He was integrated with his Father and was not going to be disintegrated.

The disintegration of relationships is being hurled at humanity during this time of trial like never before. Jesus prophesied of times like this that would come; He said that nation would rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another, and many false prophets will arise and lead many astray, and lawlessness will increase, and the love of many would grow cold. (Matthew 24:7).

 

So when we look at the kind of behavior going on all over the world at the moment there is a heightened activity of people accusing one another, and violent disagreement over ideologies and medical and lifestyle and political opinions. All of this gets more heightened by the sensationalism of the media and the weird conspiracy theories broadcasted over social media. And it is difficult for people to remain objective in times like this because we often don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are, but we can still discuss and debate without aggression and antagonism.

THE TURNING POINT – LIGHT AND POWER
God does not want us as his Church family in the earth to live in the shadow and darkness of self-opinionated hostility as so many are doing in this world, because it is the devil’s work - Diabolos – to throw missiles of destruction that scatter and create hostility and division about opinions and dogmas and ideologies. That has always caused the church to lose its real power to be a light to the world in bringing God’s healing and transforming of lives. 
It is the work of The Spirit in us to make us one with God and with one another, and to transform lives, and to be his light in the world. 

God’s light in his people can overcome darkness in these days.
There is a swirl of redemptive God activity around you when your light is defeating the darkness in someone else. We wait with the ONE who knows all things, in the midst of an age full of unknowns and opposing views. God is at work in and through us by his Spirit in ways beyond our understanding as he reveals truth, his way, to the hearts of men and women everywhere, through our faithful trust in him. 
Jesus taught against antagonism and hostility to those who were different to us ethnically and culturally and socially and politically. He taught us about who was our neighbour in the parable of the good Samaritan. He taught us to love our enemies;  Matthew 5:44 Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. 

That is a principle of the cross, dying to things like division amongst ourselves as his family, and dying to hostility to others who do not know God, and growing in our faith and trust in God as our Father in Heaven. We know what and who we have faith in when we can name the one in whom we have absolute trust. I am grateful to the Lord for the times when I have found grace to have absolute trust in him in a matter, and to see his goodness come to pass beyond what I would have asked or thought, because I believe in this truth of surrender and in his faithfulness. And yet there are so many times when I think I have absolute trust in him and I find that residue of anxiety still there in my soul, and all I can say is that merciful verse in Mark 9:23 … Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And he remains faithful and we learn to trust even more. Jesus had absolute trust in his Father and he died and came alive again in order to live within us by the Holy Spirit and to impart into our hearts that same absolute trust in the nature of God. 

True transformation means that we sometimes have to pay the price of dying to self by not having our opinion agreed with, or by losing a debate about what civil duty means or by forgiving someone who judges us unjustly. We stay on the journey of dying to ill will between ourselves and others and coming alive in absolute trust in God’s love to bring peace and good will out of division and chaos. This can be how light comes in to darkness and powerfully results in someone finding truth. 

While we face the uncertainty of events in this world, which is God’s appointed way for us at this time in history, we put all fear aside as we live with the certainty of being led and guided by the peace of God in his world of the unseen, the world of faith and hope that is energized by his love to us and through us.
Philippians 2:1 Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life
Shining as lights means having God on display in our lives, not in a pious or religious way, but by simply living in the flow of the powerful love of God. 

1Peter 3:8 Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or insult for insult, but on the contrary, bless, for you were called to this, that you may also obtain a blessing.

The struggles of life

THE STRUGGLES OF LIFE

Life holds many struggles for us and indeed life itself is a struggle, right from the start; we struggle to be born into this world, and then we struggle to overcome the many obstacles to survival and security and satisfaction. There are the natural or outer struggles that we all have to deal with that belong to the outward circumstances of our lives and they are always in front of us every day. And there are the spiritual or inner life struggles that challenge us to grow in faith and trust in God. Our life is a journey in which we learn to know the difference between the outward natural struggles and the inner spiritual struggles, and we learn to choose which are the struggles worth having and which are not. 

Many of the stories in the Bible in the Old Testament were preparing us for the understanding of the New Testament truth of having both the natural and the spiritual natures within us and how spiritual transformation by the work of the Holy Spirit is from the natural self that started with Adam into the Spiritual self that was given to us through Jesus – That is the message of the Gospel – Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith.

Our natural self struggles with our spiritual self because both of these ‘selves’ have different desires.
Galatians 5:17 the good things we want to do when the Spirit has his way with us are just the opposite of our natural desires. These two forces within us are constantly fighting each other to win control over us, and our wishes are never free from their pressures.

One of these stories that is like a parable of the two selves within, the natural and the spiritual starts in Genesis chapter 25 with a struggle between twin boys, Jacob and Esau, who even at their birth appeared struggling to see who would be the first one to arrive into this world. The Bible says ‘First the natural and then that which is spiritual’ (1Corinthians 15:46). Esau was the first of the boys to be born but at the time of birth Jacob could be seen grasping on to Esau’s heel, as if to say ‘outa my way, I want to be first’. These boys were the sons of Isaac, who was the son Abraham, the father of the Hebrew Nation. Abraham was told by God that his descendants would inherit the Land of Canaan, the Promised land. 
So as tradition had it in those days the firstborn son of Isaac received that Patriarchal blessing, which was revered as the highest of spiritual blessings. Esau was in line for he, and his descendants, to inherit all the Promises given to Abraham, and which is passed on down to us spiritually through Jesus. This inheritance was to be imparted at the end of Isaac’s life and when it was time to pass it on, and while Esau was out hunting at the time, Jacob cheated his blind Father and older brother by dressing in Esau’s clothes in order to smell and feel like his older brother and so fool Isaac into thinking that Jacob was his firstborn son Esau. When Isaac reached out to lay his hands on Jacob to impart the spiritual blessing he thought it was Esau, and this blessing could never be reversed. 

However Esau and Jacob had two very different longings in life. Esau was a man of the natural, the outdoors, who loved to hunt and to acquire the things of this world, and that is what he struggled for, while Jacob had a heart after God and longed to achieve the spiritual blessings of Abraham and that is what he struggled for. In fact, Jacob probably should not have felt too guilty because one day when they were younger, Jacob had even negotiated for Esau to swap his firstborn Patriarchal blessing for some measly red soup of Jacob’s that Esau couldn’t take his eyes off. Their future life choices had already been embedded in their hearts.

But when Esau finally found out that Jacob had actually received the blessing in the way that he did, he was furious and set out to kill him, so Jacob’s next struggle was to escape the wrath of Esau. Isaac stepped in and reassured Jacob that it would all be okay, and sent Jacob away, telling him to head for Haran to visit his Uncle Laban who had two daughters, Rachel and Leah. Soon into the journey he stopped at a place called Bethel and rested. Despite the conniving struggle of Jacob to acquire the blessing God honoured Jacob’s longing heart for that spiritual blessing in a vision where The Lord speaks over him and confirms the blessing of Abraham to him with all of the promises of being a father to all of the Jewish nations. 
Jacob went through further struggles to obtain his two wives Leah and Rachel and to ultimately father the twelve tribes of Israel. 
Much later in his life on his journey back to the region of his inheritance with his wives and families and servants and cattle, his final struggle was his wrestle with God, who appeared in the form of the Angel of The Lord. Jacob told God that he would not let him go nor cease the struggle till God blessed him. Such was his longing for God’s blessing and his holding on that God finished the bout by touching Jacob’s hip and putting it out of its socket, leaving Jacob with a permanent limp. God then renamed Jacob ‘Israel’ which means ‘having power with God and struggling with God and prevailing’. God used those words over Jacob. 

When we compare the struggles of Jacob and Esau we see those two longings struggling within us. They represent the two sides of us, our Jacob self and our Esau self. They each wanted different types of blessings. Esau reached out eagerly to struggle for worldly blessing to fill his life while Jacob reached out eagerly to struggle for spiritual blessing to fill his life. 

OUTER STRUGGLES
Everybody has to deal with the outer struggles of life, and for most people this is the only struggle that counts because it mostly deals with the material things of life that they need and want. These things include physical health and well-being, financial security, leisure and recreation and aspirational goals of personal achievement. We all struggle for many of these things, but they are not our highest order of struggle.

EXPECTATIONS 
Most people try hard and struggle against the challenges to achieve results and they expect to get them and are pleased when they do. They expect challenges and competition and adjust their goals and expectations as they go. We all learn how to manage the world’s systems and some do better than others. Some prosper for the right reasons and others are greedy and still prosper but for the wrong reasons.
In this world of outward struggle there are always disappointments and frustrations and we do our best to learn to live with them. 

These things are all part of the outer struggle of the circumstances of this world and are different to the inner struggle of the spirit. We all have both of these struggles waiting for us to engage with, but most people ignore the inner struggle of the spiritual life that we have been given to live and think that everything depends upon the management of the outer struggle of life, to have what we need or want or demand. 

But the Bible tells us that we have both an outer and an inner struggle, in a natural outer life and in an inner spiritual life. As we read before; ‘These two forces within us are constantly fighting each other to win control over us, and our wishes are never free from their pressures (Galatians 5:17)’.

By the grace of God we come to a time when the Esau nature in us to win the outward struggle yields to the Jacob nature in us to win the inner spiritual struggle.
There are stories in the Bible of this change happening in the lives of people who were challenged to let go of the old life and to take on the new. The parable of the prodigal son shows us how a young man who had given himself to the longing for the things of this world would come to the end of himself and humbly decide to return to his father. 

There is also the story of Saul the Pharisee who was once arrogantly proud of his religious credentials and who was cruelly persecuting the followers of Jesus when he was stopped in his tracks by a blinding light. And he saw a vision of Jesus who spoke to him with words that penetrated his heart, turning his life around to fully follow him.  

And when Jacob struggled with God and had his hip joint put out Jacob’s heart was filled not only with blessing but with a desire to walk with God, and so he did walk with God, and ended up walking with a limp. The limp reminded him that every step he took showed him his own human weakness and his dependence upon God’s strength, and it reminded him of his commitment to go through any struggle to receive the blessing of God in his life, over and above any blessing that the world could offer. 
That is a shadow of the longing of The Holy Spirit to give us that desire to struggle for the blessing of living out from the inner life of Jesus within us. The Holy Spirit shows us that we also walk with the limp of weakness, our humanity, and we struggle to hold on to God as our strength. The struggle to hold on to God also involves the letting go of things of the world. It is hard to hold on to two things at once, like holding on to God and holding on to resentment and other harmful attitudes in the heart. We end of letting go of one or the other.

An excerpt from ‘The Problem of Pain’ by C.S. Lewis

My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happiness’s look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over. I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

So in the world of the outer struggle against the tribulations of this present time of global pandemic, where everything has changed everywhere for everybody at the same time, we are seeing an increase of fear and anxiety in many people concerning the necessary things of life; safety and security and wellbeing. 
This is changing the nature of peoples’ expectations. What and who do people trust?
This brings people to a point of choosing what kind of struggle to take on, and that choice is all about what to hold on to and what to let go of.
Esau’s struggle was to conquer life by holding on to his own strength and not letting go of the things of the world that end up bringing so much stress and anxiety.
The Bible calls Esau a ‘profane’ man which means not having regard to the things of God and it warns us not to go the way of Esau.
Hebrews 12:16 Watch out that no one becomes careless about God as Esau did: he traded his blessing as the oldest son for the pleasure of a single meal

When people are not able to let go of things or are deprived of things they want or demand to have, it brings resentment, and we are seeing much of this in these days in which we live and the reaction is to blame someone. 
Being able to let go of things willingly, brings freedom and peace and the response is to thank someone.
Jacob knew that life was a struggle anyway so why not let holding on to God be the struggle of his life. He learned to be able to let go of anything but never to let go of God.

Christianity is not about avoiding a struggling life; it’s about avoiding a wasted life. 
It will mean holding on to God in times of uncertainty, and times of difficulty, but it also means holding on to a whole lot of faith and a whole lot of hope. We don’t try to make the Esau in us become polite and caring and never get resentful or angry – Esau has to get out of the way for Jacob. It was Jacob who stood toe to toe with God and understood that his weakness was the welcome sign for the strength of God to possess his heart and mind.
If our hope is the same as the hope that the world has, then there is no basis for anyone in the world to ask us the reason for the hope we have.
1Peter 3:15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.
Holding on to God is not a passive waiting around for something to happen but it is holding on to a loving Jesus toe to toe, with a full hope and expectation of God bringing his loving goodness into our lives.

Romans 15:13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Important Thing

THE IMPORTANT THING notes

The important thing is to know what is the most important thing. 
The Bible speaks about Jesus being close friends of a man called Lazarus and his two sisters, Martha and Mary. Jesus would raise Lazarus from the dead and Mary would soon anoint feet of Jesus before his betrayal and his death on the cross. But prior to those events there is a story about Jesus being invited to have a meal in the home of Martha in Luke Chapter 10.
Luke 10:38  Jesus was welcomed to go and enjoy a meal in the house of Martha. But Martha was left to to do all the preparation on her own while her sister Mary sat at Jesus’ feet taking in every word that he said. 
Martha became stressed and upset with her sister Mary, and so she approached Jesus and said, “ Lord, don’t you care (melo – to realize it matters!) that my sister has left me to tend to all this work on my own? So tell her to help me.”
And Jesus answered and said to her, “ Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed (chreia – most important – a must), and Mary has chosen that (most) important thing, and that can never be taken away from her.

There are a number of important things happening here.
Martha thought that what she was doing, in preparing and serving up a meal was an important thing.
Martha also thought that having someone to help her prepare was an important thing.
Jesus would have appreciated the care that Martha had put into the preparation of the dinner and been blessed by that, but he was concerned about Martha’s attitude of resentment and judgment towards her sister Mary and himself that they were not being considerate of her.
Martha thought that Jesus did not think that what she was doing was important, that he didn’t care – that it didn’t really matter. Imagine telling God that he should get his priorities right about what really matters.

Jesus had to address Martha, but not to scold her; He loved her and Mary as sisters, as he loved their brother Lazarus as a brother (John 11:5). He wanted Martha to be healed from anxiety and stress and to enjoy the caring good work she was doing. He was not telling Martha that she should have ordered a takeaway meal and sat on the floor with Jesus and her sister, but to do the good thing she did with grace.
He also knew that Mary needed to choose that time at his feet for the inner healing of her own soul and spirit. The Bible tells us that Mary who anointed the feet of Jesus before his betrayal was a woman whom Jesus healed from deep inner torment (John 12 and Luke 7). 

The point of what I’m wanting to say today is this; We all have some Martha in us and some Mary in us. There is the doing self and the being self, and each one has its time and place. Many of the stories that Jesus told were preparing us for the understanding of the New Testament truth of having both the natural and the spiritual natures within us and how spiritual transformation is from the natural self from Adam into the Spiritual self through Jesus. The Bible doesn’t  tell us that there was anyone else in the room that day a Martha’s house – Lazarus isn’t mentioned and neither is anybody else - There were just three people in the room – and as far as this story goes there are always three people in the room – Jesus and the Martha and the Mary within us.
That busy Martha living in me attacks my soul peace and tells me that I’m not doing enough even when I’m busy doing things that I think are worth doing. 
My inner Mary self allows my soul peace to be restored but still has to learn to not get under condemnation or guilt and to enjoy sitting with Jesus, knowing that it is the best choice at that time and that it is always available.

I felt God saying to me in one of my ‘Mary sitting with Jesus’ times recently to resist the urge to get up and try to do some worthwhile thing, but to wait for something that he would bring before me to respond to - rather than for me to initiate anything. I found it was a challenge but it was a real blessing to be waiting and ready to respond and to come from that place of stillness rather than the place of being ‘distracted with many things’. Then the work that really matters comes from Jesus and not my busy self-effort self.

It is hard for us in our humanity to always strike the right balance but we need to hear the words of love that Jesus was saying to Martha and to Mary as his beloved sisters.
I was reading again how Jesus thought of us as his brothers and sisters and how he also said ‘I now call you friends and not servants’ (John 15).
So I asked Jesus the other day how I should worship him and I felt that he said to me ‘just be my brother and my friend; don’t get too religious. I am here for you and you can be here for me and we can worship the Father together in our spirit, and do the things that please him, the things that really matter’. The BiBle says that he worships his Father along with us and together we will sing his praises (Hebrews 2:12)

So it means that whether busy or quiet, we do it all unto the Lord. Jesus went to that house with healing in his heart. On his journey to his death he was always bringing to us his resurrection power and his healing. I have felt in these Covid times we have been afforded more opportunity to sit quietly with The Lord and to wait for him to arise with healing in his wings. Amen

 

 

Commandment 7 episode 8

There is a generally accepted definition of adultery which is in line with the Scriptures and it is ‘Unlawful sexual intercourse with married people’ – So this now depends upon what ‘Unlawful’ means

 

Lawful can change but what does not change is the spirit of adultery. It was lawful for Sarah to give Hagar to Abraham to have a child because if a woman was barren she could give her handmaid to her husband as a surrogate mother. It is unlawful in most of western society for a man to have two wives – bigamy, but it is not unlawful to commit adultery, but it used to be grounds for divorce in Australia till 1975. There are legal definitions of adultery in the American States of N Carolina, Minnesota and Virginia. And the commandment itself, and the spirit of adultery, or infidelity takes a lot more into account. Jesus once again expanded on this commandment in the sermon on the mount.

 

Jesus once again expanded on this commandment in the sermon on the mount.

Matthew 5:27-28. 'You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not commit adultery." 28. 'But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to desire to have her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

 

From what Jesus said in that Scripture we can see that it deals with the whole sphere of unfaithfulness or infidelity, wrong desires, and excessive self-indulgence.

The self-indulgence part is one of the biggest factors that drives the rest because the commandment is about commitment to another person and their needs.  Excessive self indulgence is about no one else’s needs but our own.

 

DOES PROSTITUTION COME INTO THE CATEGORY OF ADULTERY?

Prostitution more of an expression of the next commandment – number eight, because it is as much about materialism as relational infidelity - It’s the money for the prostitute but the spirit of adultery for the man/woman.

 

IS PORNOGRAPHY PART OF COMMANDMENT SEVEN?

In the sexual area pornography seems to top the list. It is an addictive behavior that allows a person to isolate themselves and be gratified rather than engage meaningfully in fulfilling relationships and be satisfied. Also in the area of sensual gratification and outside of the sexual area are found things like over-eating, and drug abuse which includes alcoholism, and the abuse of prescription drugs, as well as the abuse of narcotics, and stimulants. At first glance, these pursuits and activities might seem to be rather 'private' habits, which do not involve causing harm to other people, but really they destroy themselves, their families and everyone else in their world.

 

Commandment to bless

COMMANDMENT TO BLESS 

There is a story in the Book of Numbers in chapters 20 to 24 which tells of Israel coming to the plains of Moab just east of the Jordan River and opposite Jericho. It was towards the end of the forty years of wandering in the wilderness and just before the death of Moses. They would later cross the Jordan under the leadership of Joshua, but at this time under Moses the Israelites had already defeated two powerful kings in that area of the Jordan - Sihon the king of the Amorites and Og the giant king of Bashan. 

Balak the king of Moab was in great dread of the multitudes of the people of Israel as they marched relentlessly onwards, sending up huge dust clouds that could be seen from afar. Balak had heard of the devastating defeats of the other nations and had heard the reports of the supernatural help that Israel’s God had given to them, and Balak said to his elders, ‘This horde will now lick up all that is around us, as the ox licks up the grass of the field.’ and he sent some of his elders to procure a man called Balaam for him.
Balak had figured that it would take supernatural power to defeat Israel’s supernatural God so he hired Balaam, a non-Israelite who was a notable ‘seer’, with a gift of divination whom he would have calculated was the equivalent of Moses, the prophet leader of Israel. He arranged for Balaam to be given a handsome ‘fee of divination’ by the elders of Moab to curse Israel. He said to Balaam ‘I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed’. It is reported in many Jewish writings that 
Balaam had prophesied that Balak would become the king of Moab.

But God spoke to Balaam and told him not to go with the elders to curse Israel because he had given his blessing to Israel. So Balaam sent the elders back to Balak with the message that God had given him. Balak then sent a greater delegation of even more honourable princes with greater enticement and honour to be bestowed upon Balaam for him to curse Israel. God came again to Balaam and told him that if Balak’s men came to him he should go with them but to resist the offer of Balak and to only say what God put in his mouth to say.

God sent an angel to warn Balaam to not deviate from what God had instructed him. The Bible says that God had seen perversity in the heart of Balaam so he had to warn him again. The angel needed to get Balaam’s attention so he pressed Balaam’s donkey against the wall of a narrow pathway that they had to pass through on his way to make his proclamation over Israel, and the donkey became stuck, whereby Balaam flogged the donkey three times until the donkey had a most extraordinary conversation with Balaam and complained of such harsh treatment after all of his years of faithful donkey service. This strange going on opened the eyes of Balaam to see the angel of The Lord standing in the narrow pathway and it was too much for Balaam, so he said to the angel of the LORD, ‘I have sinned, for I did not know that you stood in the road against me. Now therefore, if it is evil in your sight, I will turn back.’ And the angel of the LORD said to Balaam, “Go with the men, but speak only the word that I tell you.” So Balaam went on with the princes of Balak. 
That conversation that Balaam had with the donkey would win the vote of being the strangest conversation in the Bible. It shows what lengths God will go to in order to get our attention to let us know that he has given commandment for the blessing of his people.

Then the LORD put a word in Balaam's mouth and said, ‘Return to Balak, and this is what you shall speak; 
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?
Behold, I received a command to bless: he has blessed, and I cannot reverse it…
The LORD their God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them.

So Israel went on to become a nation greatly blessed of God and went across the Jordan into the Promised Land and took the territory that God had promised to them through Abraham. But in all the years that they lived under God’s Covenant and under his blessing they were never called to bless those other nations or become ‘evangelical’ by gathering nations to themselves, but rather to stay separate from them. 

This might seem strange considering that God told Abraham that he would bring God’s blessing to all the nations of the earth through his offspring. But the fact is they have brought the greatest blessings to all nations through the seed of Abraham – Jesus. 
It was not the call upon the nation of Israel to bless the nations of the world in their time under their Covenant. It was only through Jesus as the most perfect and complete blessing, that Israel could have bestowed blessing upon mankind, and when Jesus came he bestowed mankind with that blessing of his life to us all.

God’s commandment to bless now comes through Jesus to us. 
Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

No curse of evil will ever reverse that blessing of our inner spiritual life even in times of outward affliction and hardship. God has given commandment to bless us with all spiritual blessings through Jesus, and he will find ways to bless us that we could not even imagine, even within the disorder and disaster of this age in which we now live.
The devil is using his missiles of fear and resentment and anger and violence in today’s world, caught in the middle of a global pandemic, and all of these weapons of darkness add up to a commandment of cursing upon a humanity made in the image of God.
God is pouring out his love and peace and faith and hope into the hearts of his people, also in the midst of the same global affliction, and all of these are God’s arrows fired from his bow of love and they add up to being blessed in Christ with all spiritual blessings.

And not only have we received God’s command OF blessing but we have received God’s commandment TO bless 
God’s blessing to Israel came in the form of territory, the Promised Land of Canaan, but God’s blessing to us and through us is not the physical territory of land but the spiritual territory of the heart. He wins the territory of our hearts by his love and we win the territory of peoples’ hearts in the same way.
God has ordained for his imperfect people through Jesus to release the perfect blessing of Jesus and to bless all the nations of the earth. 

That is why the Bible says to us ‘Be perfect as God in Heaven is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48).
‘Being perfect as he is perfect’ is an act of faith that allows us as imperfect people to relate to a perfect God that we cannot see, where the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit can bless those we know and love, or strangers that God sends our way for him to bless. He has given commandment to bless and he will not reverse it.
Those things are waiting to happen to us all the time wherever we are, and they happen to us unexpectedly and uninvited. And we might not always feel prepared and ready like 
We might find things landing upon us when we would rather get on with what we want to be doing at any particular time, not realizing that Jesus is indeed still really perfect at that moment, ready to do his perfect will in our life and for our life and through our life.  He hasn’t forgotten and become distracted with other weightier matters. 
It becomes a matter of thinking about what is going on between us and God at that moment of time, and that he has not changed.

And we need to reassure ourselves that nothing we do will ever look perfect on the outside. It is not like being an Olympic diving champion and diving a perfect ten off a ten metre-high tower. It is like being an ordinary human being that is trying to stay afloat and swim the distance.

We can turn a simple act of care and good will in what seems like a very ordinary moment, into a moment of God’s perfect spiritual work of goodness and grace, like being kind to an ungrateful person or helping someone who is in need but who maybe really isn’t in need. That has not been a waste of time. It requires awareness and faith and hope. God is there waiting to love someone who doesn’t deserve it like we didn’t deserve it, and he is very patient and eager to endue us with power from on high to be used by him in this way. That is why he sent the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t just for church. 
Jesus didn’t just go to the churchgoers but to the outcasts and sinners who weren’t even allowed in the temple. He met them where they were and the power of The Holy Spirit was released.

Jesus comes to us in these moments disguised as our everyday life. That is why the Bible speaks about Jesus saying on the day of judgment ‘I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…And they replied  when did we see you thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, And the King will answer them, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
Those things we have done in partnership with Jesus through the Holy Spirit will accompany us into the age to come. That is what it means by storing up treasures in Heaven.

I don’t think this is easy and it takes practice to develop a keen awareness that God is with us, because there is so much that we have to process that presses in upon the narrow pathway of our everyday challenges of life that takes over our souls. 
So we can practice how to stop and reflect at that moment of challenge to consider what is really going on in the powerful realm of God’s perfection alongside our imperfection and that makes us rethink about what is going on between us and God – our ordinary life in partnership with his extraordinary life that desires to bless the world and draw them to himself through his people.

We get our minds off our weakness and onto him and his strength, as Paul tells us what God said to him when Paul was becoming weakened under attack from Satan ‘My grace is sufficient for you – My strength is made perfect in weakness’ (2Corinthians 12:8) - and that is what leads to the faith that assures us that God is at work mightily on our behalf.

We are living in days when God is shining a light to our path and bringing light into the darkness, and order into the midst of disorder. He is commanding his blessing in the midst of an outpouring of what could seem like cursing in the way many people are affronting and insulting one another in these contentious times. But no matter how much the enemy wants to spiritually defeat us through all this, God’s will to bless his people and for his people to be his blessing to others will be seen triumphing over those destructive and evil strategies of malevolence and ill will. 

We learn to wait ON God to receive the faith and the peace that he is at work, while we actively seek to bless, but we also learn to wait FOR God and his timing to reveal his supernatural activity, and as we move forward faithfully, waiting for God, with our eyes on the horizon of faith, God appears as a sunrise that rises above that horizon, and reveals what he is doing and what he has done that only he can do as he commands the blessing. Amen

 

God's wrath and reconciliation and Gospel

GOD’S WRATH AND RECONCILIATION AND GOSPEL 

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed (apokalypto – uncovered) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Note; This is present tense)

God’s wrath is an act of love nested in justice and truth as well as in mercy and forgiveness. God’s wrath (orge – intense feeling of indignation) is an expression of his protection of humanity against the destructive effects of sin that we commit against each other.
The main causes of the pain and harm that we inflict upon one another are the corruption of Justice and truth in the misuse of power over each other and our malevolent attitudes towards one another. This protective indignation of God is dealt out through his discipline upon us individually and corporately.
This expression of God’s justice goes hand in hand with God’s offer of his mercy and forgiveness to all the world which brings about his great acts of redemption and reconciliation with all mankind. 
So he exercises his discipline like a loving Father upon us as his children to change our character and very nature to be like his own.
That has to be proclaimed, and that is the reason for the absolute necessity of the Gospel.

The nature of God’s wrath is also that it is revealed (apokolypto), which means that it acts by uncovering the sin of injustice and the suppression of truth that is occurring in the world. 
The Bible shows us how God has acted upon the world throughout history as a loving Father to intervene when we go off track and to bring us back to himself, such as with the flood of Noah’s time and with the judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah in Abraham’s time. These have also been times of God’s gracious intervention and deliverance of those faithful to him, as with Moses bringing God’s people out of Egypt and the time of their entering into the promised Land under Joshua. The greatest of all interventions in a time of injustice and suppression of truth was the Incarnation of Jesus as the living God who came to us to give us his life and his heart of love to the Father through the Holy Spirit.

We are currently living in a time of a rapid escalation of the corruption of justice and truth in our world. The Godly values which used to be a foundation of our society have been replaced in many cases with ideological values and virtues that compete with one another for a place of influence and political power.

God is allowing many areas of injustice and suppression of truth to be uncovered (apocolypto) and to come under his hand of discipline, and in a widespread communal crisis like a pandemic where people do not know what to trust or who to trust anymore that uncertainty becomes a crisis of anxiety concerning the future. It also becomes a crisis of anxiety concerning a scarcity of outward things that were once expected to be on hand but are now often not even within reach.
In an environment like that suspicion and blame and resentment is out there, and it is at times like this where God counters all of that negative activity with a Gospel of hope and an abundance of grace where God is always within reach and peace can abound in our inner lives. 

God created us to be at one with him – that is, to be at peace with him (Eirene – peace – oneness). And even more than that, to be sharing in his divine nature.
God lived in perfect oneness and harmony as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where there was perfect love and perfect agreement. There was no need for forgiveness there because there was no sin of selfishness from one against the other, so there was no wrath because there was no sin, and there was no temptation because perfect love cannot be tempted. That was the perfect way to live in a perfect relationship. 

So what happened? Why couldn’t God create us as very nice people who loved one another with the same love that Father and Son and Holy Spirit have?
Because only God is perfect and anyone and anything he creates is not perfect, and even the angels who are spirit beings are not perfect, and as we know, they are able to be tempted, like Lucifer. He was deceived into thinking he could have what he wanted without God, and so he became proud and independent and rebelled against God. And he deceived mankind into thinking the same way.

It is obvious really - We believe a lie about who God is and what he is like and then we believe a lie about who we are as an independent self with a right to have certain things, and then we rebel against the authority that stops us getting what we want, and then we become disobedient and miss the mark of staying close to God and then we sin, and sin runs the show from there, causing harm to our own soul and to the people around us.

God hates sin because it separates us from him AND it destroys our soul.
Isaiah 59:1 But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear.
Only he can do something about that. Left to themselves people wander off track.
So what does God do?’

He uncovers all the disorder and corruption that is waiting to be exposed for his purpose of shaking and converting the minds and hearts of people who have resisted him.

God’s love feels the grief of the hostility of his children against him, and the pain and destruction that that hostility brings upon them. And that is all because our human independent mindset of a lie about what God is like robs us of the truth of his loving heart of goodness and blessing towards us. 

His heart is constantly seeking to subdue or overcome that hostility and soften our hearts and to make us aware of his love. 
How much would his love delight in there being a heart of love in the earth that loved him back as much as is humanly possible (like Jesus). 

 

 

Also nested in his love is God’s offer of forgiveness and mercy.
We need this change of heart to get out of the ‘sin cycle’. We have to be rescued from the law of sin and death and receive his Spirit of life in Jesus. God has forgiven sin AND he does change the desire of our hearts to love him more than sin, and yet we still see the hostility of humanity against him happening in our human hearts.

Only God can do something about that – we can’t. 
He cancelled out the sin factor of humanity that separated us from him and that allows us to be close to him and to love him back.

RECONCILIATION
God had to bring about reconciliation because our distrust towards God was too great an obstacle for our hearts to reach out to him. 
So if God wanted peace and oneness only he could put away this estrangement between man and God. It had to be all his work. 
And he was already perfect so he couldn’t make himself become more perfect. 
So what was he to do?
Instead of remaining in his perfection of Heavenly Being who could not be tempted, he entered into our weakness as a human being who could be tempted. He came down as Jesus and so Father in Heaven had a Son in the Earth who was indwelt by his Spirit, and who could and would love him totally on behalf of all of us.
But how does this change the rest of us, because we are still human beings who still can’t trust God because we never have?

A simplistic way to see the heart of reconciliation is this;
Two friends who have fallen out decide to try and make up and bury the hatchet. Then one of them who has a very generous heart says ‘look I care deeply about our friendship and I want you to know that anything you might have done to offend me I forgive you for’. He then goes on to say ‘so are we good?’ and the other one replies ‘yes we’re good - thanks’ 
That is reconciliation – it’s not a blame game.

That is where the miracle of God’s supernatural reconciliation comes to pass. He not only changed himself into one of us, he changed us into one of him. He died like a seed going into the ground and he rose like a plant springing up from the ground, a resurrected tree of life that bore fruit which was us as a New Creation humanity. We have his resurrected life sent from Heaven as the Holy Spirit who joins our spirit to the Spirit of God. We can now have Jesus’ heart of love for his Father. That is reconciliation.

The word reconciliation in the Bible is katalasso – that means a mutual change of two things to make one new thing. The supernatural miracle of God’s act of reconciliation for us is that he caused both himself and us to experience a change of being. God became one of us – forever – as the risen Christ in Heaven, and he has made us one with him because the Bible says we are ‘partakers of his divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world through sinful desires’ (2Peter 1:4)
That is the Gospel of Peace – oneness – that is what Paul preached.
Paul was not told to tell the world to make peace with God, but to tell the world that God has made peace with them. 
2 Corinthians 5:19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting men's sins against them but blotting them out. This is the wonderful message he has given us to tell others…
That is the message of the Gospel – Accept the forgiveness of God through Jesus and begin to walk in a new way.

There are examples of Jesus demonstrating both God’s wrath and his reconciliation as he walked among the people and ministered to them. There is the story of the Jewish elders who approached Jesus and brought forward a woman who had been caught in adultery, and they placed her in front of Jesus and told him that the Law of Moses commanded them to stone such women. They asked Jesus what he had to say about that. The wrath of God was revealed (apocalypto – uncovered) upon these men as Jesus began to write in the sand, uncovering their sins before all that were there watching. Each of the men walked off in shame and guilt. Then Jesus turned to the woman and the reconciliation of God was ordained upon her as her sins were not charged to her but were forgiven.
In a similar way in the Gospel of John chapter 4, Jesus was sitting by a well and a Samarian woman came to draw water and Jesus asked her to please draw some water for him to drink as he was thirsty. On this occasion God’s wrath was nested in his love as a most effective tough love wake-up call about her disordered life. When Jesus said to her ‘you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband’ the woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet’. But Jesus did not berate her or condemn her. Jesus had just told her that he could give her more than just the water from the well, and that he could give her the living water of the Holy Spirit that would spring up within her, and she had said ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty’. 
So in that story we have both tough love wake-up call of God’s wrath uncovering her moral disorder, and the magnanimous bestowal of reconciliation in the promise of her being filled with the living water of the life of God. Her human weakness was her thirst 
for love which she could never emotionally gratify, and that was satiated not only emotionally but now spiritually by God’s love flowing within. 

If you begin to search you will find many examples of God’s wrath and God’s reconciliation coming forth through the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels. A clear case of God’s wrath is seen in Jesus overturning the money changers’ tables in the temple uncovering the corruption and injustice of the Jewish stewards by overcharging the poor people and making a profit from the sale of the birds and animals required by law for the temple sacrifices for sin. He was expressing his Father’s indignation against this corrupt abuse of power over the people in this holy place of prayer. 
Notice how often the wrath is tempered by love and sadness. For example in the story of Jesus uncovering the sin of the rich young ruler’s love of money, there was great sadness as he walked away from the offer to follow Jesus. There is also the beautiful example of both wrath and reconciliation in the story of the prodigal son. 
Let me read this beautiful Scripture  from Romans where all that I have been sharing is encapsulated.
Romans 5:8 God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us … having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him, for if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. 
That solves the problem of God’s wrath from his side – and now it is up to us to believe and to trust in that every moment of our lives. 
That is the faith that saves our soul.

THE GOSPEL
Because of God’s love, his wrath is a significant reality, and the very reason from God’s point of view for making the Gospel so necessary and powerful. He hates the bad news of what sin does to people so he has good news about what forgiveness and reconciliation does for people.

That is why there has to be a Gospel – both for those who wilfully do harm and for the poor people who get harmed. The good news is that there is forgiveness and the further good news is that there is the gift of the life of Jesus within. He gives us a new spirit - he gives us his Spirit and he gives us a new heart.

People need to be told they are forgiven, and that they need no longer be separated because of the feelings of guilt and shame about their sinful behaviour, which makes them hide from God and cover up in front of each other. They need to have a new mindset – metanoia – which means repentance. The new mindset acknowledges that God is not at odds with them and they no longer need to be at odds with him. They are reconciled. They cannot have everything that they want, but they can receive every good thing that God wants for them. They are now able to have God’s peace. They are now able to trust God. They can now know what it means to be saved. And they also need to know that God holds us to account to not neglect such a great salvation.

Sometimes people need a wakeup call, and God is giving the world a wakeup call right now. It is like the story of the prodigal son who had to have things go so bad for him that he came to his senses and said ‘I will go home and return to my father’. He decided to settle the score with his conscience and to return to his father before the consequences of his life brought him complete ruin.

I believe that in these days God wants to grow his Church as his loving and caring family that will find its voice to proclaim a loving and forgiving God who desires to turn the heart of  the world to himself - all of his sons and daughters, created in his image .
Lost sheep will be found and prodigal sons and daughters will come home. The healing rain of the Holy Spirit will fall upon the hearts of men and women and grace will abound. People will call on the name of The Lord and be saved. They will receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation of the knowledge of God. He will strengthen us with power through his Spirit in our inner being. He will do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power of his life that he has placed within us. Amen

God's Love and Blessing and Wrath

GOD’S LOVE AND BLESSING AND WRATH

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God after being tempted by Lucifer the first thing they did was to hide from God in the garden, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. That was the beginning of a mistaken mindset of hiding from a God whom they thought was angry and was now going to punish them for doing wrong. The fig leaves were a useless way of covering up their shame and guilt for doing wrong. That was not God’s way of thinking, and he needed to change that mistaken mindset.
God told Adam to come out into the open and talk to him. He was going to cover Adam with the skin of an animal (lamb, ram, sheep, goat?) to replace the useless fig leaves. 
So God shed blood and covered Adam.
This is a prophetic picture for us of God providing Jesus as a blood sacrifice for the sins of humanity. This blood sacrifice covers the shame and guilt we all experience as sinful human beings, and the fig leaves represent our futile attempts to cover our shame of exposure by covering up for ourselves instead of letting God’s mercy cover our shame.

Without a mindset of faith and trust in God for this, we will always live at a distance from God and hide like Adam because of shame and guilt instead of coming close to him through his loving mercy and forgiveness.
That was the beginning of a lesson from God to us, that he does not want us to hide from whom we think is an angry God that wants to punish us. He wants us to know that we do not have to hide who we really are with our weak and frail humanity but to let him redeem us with his sacrificial love - the sacrificial lifeblood that he shed for us then and always. 

God used another prophetic picture of sacrificial lifeblood for us when he told Abraham to offer his only son Isaac on an altar. God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of countless children and in him all the families in the earth would be blessed. Abraham had to wait 25 years for the promise of a son to be fulfilled and then he was told to offer him as a sacrifice (It is believed that Isaac was a teenager at the time). Abraham was about to plunge the knife into Isaac when God at the last moment stopped him and provided a ram (lamb?) for a sacrifice. 
But this time he added the dimension of faith, where Abraham had to trust God to the utmost limit, that he would provide the sacrifice. 
Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, was in the act of offering up his only son … He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, in a manner of speaking, he did receive him back.
This was a different lesson for us. This is the lesson of faith in the promise of God through Jesus to bring to pass the promise of his resurrection life to us when we take up our cross and trust in him by surrendering our will to his will.
Without a mindset of faith and trust in God for this, we will always live at a distance from God instead of coming close to him in hope and expectation of his goodness to us.

In the first three hundred years after Jesus the early Church Fathers like Athanasius and Irenaeus spoke powerfully about this redeeming and lifegiving work of God through Jesus which restores close heart-to-heart and trusting fellowship between us and the Father. Then soon after that, Augustine, who was in fact a devoted heart-to-heart disciple of Jesus, began to use Greek philosophical language to describe God in terms of his ‘essence’. Then came further well-meaning descriptions of God’s exalted attributes like Omnipotence and Omniscience, which mean ‘all powerful’ and ‘all knowing’, and it is inspiring to realize these awesome qualities. However if these attributes are all we are told about who God is we could perceive him as distant and judgmental and non-relational instead of intimate and loving and forgiving.

The Roman Catholic and Judaistic legal mindset and the Greek philosophical style of thinking inadvertently allowed there to develop from all of that a tendency for many people to see God as an all-powerful God that was waiting to punish us if we disobeyed his set of rules. 

When this kind of thinking is taken to its extreme it gets lived out as legalistic Christianity, and this extreme has influenced Christianity throughout the centuries.
It oppresses God’s people through a misuse of authority and power.

The other extreme is that God is an easy-going person who wants to gratify his needy children with whatever personal comfort and spiritual accessories that would help make life on this earth more bearable, until we can have a nice mansion in Heaven. 

In between these two extremes of legalism and self-gratification sits the weighty reality of God’s wrath. God’s wrath is a profound expression of God’s protective love towards his children – it is his intense indignation against sin and its harmful destructive effect upon humanity (like a mother bear defending her cub).

The beginning of God’s wrath
Satan is the classic example of the extremes of both of the two bad postures of legalism and sinful self-serving gratification. 
Lucifer abused his place of authority as a covering angel (Ezekiel 28:14) and brought temptation into humanity’s appetite to gratify itself by offering Adam and Eve a taste of independent self-serving autonomy and causing them to despise God’s goodness towards them. In doing this he brought deathly oppression upon all of humanity.

What indignation would this cause God’s heart, to see such deadly sinister deception cause so much harm and destruction to his sons and daughters!
The wrath of God plays out in the awful consequences of harmful and destructive sin, missing the mark of oneness with God – all starting with deception, rebellion and pride.
Can you imagine from God’ point of view, giving us the gift of life and watching it turn against him as he has to let it play out in repulsive and offensive and destructive behaviour.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed (apokalypto – uncovered) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Note; This is present tense)

God’s wrath is being revealed or put on display around us in the world, in the harmful and destructive personal and political and ideological conflicts that are shredding peoples’ souls and causing such grief and loss and misery and pain. History has repeated itself over and over and we find ourselves in this day and age in a suffering world separated for the most part in mind and heart from God, but he still remains faithful. 
Romans 5:8 But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.

Wrath only came into existence because of sin, and sin is going on all the time.

Paul shows us the way of freedom – a way of living with sin, but above sin.
Paul realised he had a problem and he said ‘It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I find that evil is present within me. Now if I am doing what I don't want to, it is plain where the trouble is: sin still has me in its evil grasp. Who will ever get me out of this death trap?’ (Romans 7:20). 
Paul here is describing the ‘law of sin and death’ which is what we all live under.
This law made him feel stuck in a pattern of wanting to do the right thing but ending up doing the wrong thing and then feeling guilty and cut off from God and his peace. His mind was full of all the mistakes and failures and this made him dread the consequences – what would God think and what would people think – he felt trapped and just wanted to hide. This is what the law of sin and death does. He and we want to hide from God, like Adam did.

That law of sin and death was like the law of gravity. It doesn’t matter how hard you try to jump up in the air to get higher, gravity pulls you down with a thud.
Paul knew he couldn’t kid himself that he wasn’t a failure in his own natural strength, even though he achieved much as a legalistic Pharisee – he knew that didn’t count any more. He knew that as natural human being we are all failures as far as being spiritually perfect. He knew he had sin within him even when he wanted to do good!
He knew he couldn’t pat himself on the back for being spiritual, and if he did he’d better watch out and not think more highly of himself than he ought to or he would come down with a thud. What a paradox.
The Holy Spirit had given him the wonderful revelation of another law of the Spirit which overcame that law of sin and death. 
Romans 8:2 For the powerful law of the Spirit of Christ Jesus has freed me from the law of sin and death.
Paul saw that the experience of being set free was not the absence of sin in him but the presence of God in him. 

So there was only one thing to do - just hang on for dear life to the only perfect one and get lifted into a higher way, like having another natural law that could overcome the law of gravity, so that if you went up in the air you didn’t come down with a thud – you stayed up there. This is how the law of aerodynamics operates. When we fly in an aeroplane, we overcome the law of gravity, and in order to do that the plane must use two things, first, an enormous thrust from the engine and secondly, lift with the wings. The Holy Spirit gave Paul the wonderful revelation of another law of the Spirit which overcomes that law of sin and death, just like the law of aerodynamics overcomes the law of gravity.
We need a different kind of power that we could ever humanly muster for the thrust, and we need wings that keep us in the air, like an eagle. An eagle was created to fly, and when we talk about a higher spiritual way for ourselves, we too were created to mount up with wings and fly like an eagle.
So we have the thrust of the Holy Spirit combining with the spiritual aerodynamics of the wings of an eagle and we can live above the law of sin and death. God doesn’t motivate by fear or outside pressure but by inside inspiration from the Holy Spirit.
So how do we live in this law of the Spirit of life and escape the law of sin and death.
The Bible says that ‘they that wait upon the Lord will exchange their strength with his strength, they will rise up with wings of an eagle.

It is when we wait upon The Lord that we exchange our strength with his strength. We have our heart-to-heart conversation with him about what is going on inside of us. We bring him our confusion or distress or pain from the past, or our anxiety for the future, and we sit with all of this in his presence, and we do not hide from our feelings of shame and guilt, as much as we would like to run away from them and escape them if we could. 

How does this make the problems lose their power over us? They simply have to move over because we are not focussing upon them but upon the greatest reality, which is that he desires a close relationship with us despite our weaknesses and failures, and he knows that our shame and guilt about those things make us feel separated from him.

A life hemmed in by the closed horizon of ourselves and our problems is too dismal to give our lives real meaning. Once we welcome the present moment which contains a present Jesus and give him that place in our minds and hearts, we understand what reality is all about. Instead of talking to ourselves in our lostness, we do the heart-to-heart talking with God and become found in him. Jesus is always seeking and finding and restoring with deep compassion all that is lost and broken in our lives and in the lives of those around us. Amen.

 

 

Facing a New Future

FACING A NEW FUTURE 

Facing the future is usually based on expecting things to keep on happening the same way that they have happened before. There is a consistent routine and we have a level of confidence and competence to manage that. If we have some worthwhile goal ahead, we can divert some extra energy away from some of the routine for that goal.
But there are times like the strange times we are now in when the routine gets out of routine so much that we don’t know what to expect any more. Something bigger than our personal routine has taken over our circumstances so that it is difficult to make things happen that we did quite normally before. 
We have to know how to face a new future.

In normal times if something disruptive happens just to us personally, we seek help from those we can trust and we are grateful when help is given. We can have faith in God and look to the Lord for wisdom and guidance about how to see the challenge through so that we can recover and get our life back on track. 
But when something disruptive happens to everyone at the same time it is a different matter. A global pandemic is currently happening to everybody at once and there is no single answer we can get for ourselves to solve all the problems by simply asking someone to sort it out for us. There are thousands of different opinions and thousands of different reasons for them.
We find that we no longer have the personal freedom to just sort out our own situation because something bigger than our personal set of circumstances has been disrupted. 
God alone has the answer for each one of us personally to find the way forward, and he has allowed this circumstance to happen for a reason – and notwithstanding all that, our praying for one another never fails. 
But the fact remains;

We are living at a time when we are each personally facing a new future. 
We are living at a time when the World is facing a new future.

This current time we are living in is marked by certain realities;
A time of affliction and suffering has plunged our world into a weakened state.
A spiritual attack from Satan is provoking reaction and confusion and division in peoples’ hearts.  
An uncertainty and a sense of hopelessness is in the air regarding the future. 
And in all this God’s people are being challenged to hear from him regarding how to face this new future.

There have been times in history where the World has entered a new era, a new eon (Grk. Aion – age). 
These times are significant for God’s people because they are primarily about what he wants to do through his people.

The birth of Jesus began a new eon (or age) for humanity. It was an appointed time of God in history. 
His death on the cross was also an appointed time of God for humanity, just as was his resurrection, and just as was his ascension into heaven, and just as was his sending the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. 

Any appointed time of God in history is called a Kairos time, as opposed to chronos time which in simple terms has the meaning of ‘clock time’. Kairos time defines a time for God’s appointed purpose on the Earth.
There would have been many Kairos times in your life when you knew that God was doing something unique for you or speaking something special to you.
I believe we are in one of those unique times at the moment – 

In this kairos time of God we are being shown how to come through an intense time of testing of our faith into a new future of hope and promise, while the whole World is in a weakened state.
When God chooses HIS times to take us into a new future, Satan chooses that time to intensify his spiritual attack upon God’s people to stop us moving forward. Satan uses the times of our weakness to attack us in our weakened state and to try and get us to give up on God or deny him or reject him. 

But Satan gets it wrong. 

Satan gets it wrong even when it seems he has gained a victory. 
God knows that Satan’s pride and deception makes him think he can target our weaknesses to stop God’s purpose from happening in our lives. But God uses Satan’s strategy of attacking our weaknesses as an opportunity to turn our human weakness into his strength.
Paul writes that when he was being buffeted by Satan in the times of his own weakness. He learned to find God’s strength and turn it into victory. (2Corinthians 12:8).

JESUS FACES THE FUTURE FOR GOD’S PEOPLE

Jesus went through the most grueling experience in his life and was at his physically weakest point after being led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness and fasting for forty days and nights (a ‘number forty’ experience – a time of trial and testing – Moses and Elijah and Jesus all fasted for forty days and Israel went through forty years of testing in the wilderness).
Jesus battled against the prince of darkness in a series of tormenting temptations as in, asking him why he didn’t just turn stones into bread and not go hungry, and why not prove his claim of being the Son of God by leaping off a cliff and letting the angels save him. Jesus won a mighty victory for himself and for all of us against this onslaught of Satan, who in the Bible is called ‘the god of this world’. This false god finally took Jesus onto the top of a high mountain and arrogantly offered him the rule over all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for Jesus falling down and worshipping him. His pride and deception had blinded Satan to the fact that Jesus was the heir of all the kingdoms in Heaven and Earth from before the beginning of time. Jesus dismissed the false god and put him in his place.

Matthew 4:8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.”
Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministering to him. 

Jesus then quietly rested from his ordeal on that mountain top and received comfort from the angels. Not only was he now set to begin his ministry of three and a half years of overcoming the darkness in the kingdoms of this world, but he was about to begin establishing the Kingdom of Heaven in the hearts of mankind, from that time on and into eternity. 
And after he was rested he moved his mind from that forty days of trial and affliction and he turned to face the future.
The Bible tells us that as he set off to walk the journey home to his family in Galilee he came across the poor and the sick by the side of the road, as people were healed of blindness and infirmity and other diseases. His Father was unfolding his future before him step by step along the way.

Jesus showed us what to do.   
He stood against the deceptive affronts of Satan in his time of weakened strength and he overcame Satan through speaking God’s Word of truth concerning himself.  
He then sat and rested and became refreshed.
He walked away from that season of trial and faced the new future that awaited him.
The future presented itself to him, as he walked step by step along the way.

JOSHUA FACES A NEW FUTURE FOR GOD’S PEOPLE
Joshua was also a man who had a ‘number forty’ experience His was not forty days but a long hard trial of endurance in Israel’s journey out of Egypt that took forty years – a generation. Joshua kept faith throughout those forty years under Moses and when Moses died God gave Joshua the leadership of the Nation of Israel. 

When Joshua came to the Jordan River he ordered the priests to carry the Ark of the Covenant into the water and just as Joshua had witnessed the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea under Moses, the waters miraculously divided so that all of Israel could pass over and finally enter into the promised Land. Just as the Ark represented the presence of God for Israel, so Jesus is the presence of God for us. 

Joshua 3:1 And they came to the Jordan, he and all the people of Israel, and lodged there before they passed over. At the end of three days the officers went through the camp and commanded the people, “As soon as you see the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God being carried by the Levitical priests, then you shall set out from your place and follow it. Yet there shall be a distance between you and it, about 2,000 cubits in length. Do not come near it, in order that you may know the way you shall go, for you have not passed this way before.”
They were facing a new future and the wilderness was behind them. The promise of God for their lives was now before them. A ‘number forty’ experience is not just a time of the testing of our faith, it is the time of preparation for the facing of a new future. It is the same for us today, as we are also in a number forty experience of trial and testing and    need to heed the words of Joshua to Israel when he told them to follow the Ark, the presence of God ‘that you may know the way you shall go, for you have not passed this way before.’

It is important to know that the devil did not set up the forty days of wilderness testing for Jesus. The Bible tells us that the Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tested – it was God’s doing. But Satan used that time of Jesus being pushed to the limits of endurance to try to break his spirit, and Satan failed. It was the same for Israel going through the forty years of testing in the wilderness – that was God’s doing, and Satan tried to prevent them entering the promised land, but a new generation under Joshua brought them into a new future of promise for their lives.
It is the same with us – going through a global pandemic and being pushed to the limits of endurance. It is like a ‘number forty’ experience of trial and testing, and of promise! And God has allowed that and Satan jumps at the opportunity to break our spirit. But our struggle is more than just for survival. We are overcoming through a renewing of our strength into a new future in the will of God for our lives, and the future may present itself to us in unexpected ways as we walk forward step by step trusting in God. 

Jesus did not complain once throughout his forty-day experience of his trials in the wilderness, but Israel did not stop complaining for the entire forty years of their trials, because of their unbelief. 
If we want to overcome in our time of trial and face a new future that God has for us, we need to know how to manage our emotional reactions to the new and unfamiliar disruptions that are happening to us – different to how our life usually unfolds. Being exposed to emotionally charged comments and opinions by opportunistic politicians, TV commentators, and the media (especially social media), can cause us to attach negative emotions of anxiety or disappointment or resentment to our thoughts on the matter. 
And while there is certainly a place for strong emotions to motivate creative and constructive activity, those negative and unhelpful emotions can rob us of our peace and throw us back into the Israel wilderness experience of unbelief. I find that when this happens to me I have to get my mind on God straightaway, because those negative emotions disappear in the presence of faith. 
We can live amongst the commotion and find peace, because like Jesus in his number forty experience, we have the Holy Spirit with us and the Word of God in us and we can be assured that he is at work on our behalf to guide us each step of the way.

We can be confident that we will hear God’s voice clearly amidst the many voices and personal opinions that seem to shout over and contradict one another in these days. 
Observe the things that come across your path directly – maybe small things or maybe big things - and ask God what you should do or think regarding that thing. It may be more important than you think, as different as it may seem from past practice – why is this interruption or intrusion happening at the moment? And as we pause at that time and still our hearts and give that moment and what is happening, to God, it could be that God will do something in our lives he has not done before. He presents a new future to us as he did with Jesus.
And if that way that looks good for us to walk in seems to get blocked, we can ask God to part the waters in front of us while we keep our eyes upon him, as he goes before us. 
As Joshua said to the people ‘you have not passed this way before’.

Thankyou Lord, for leading us into a new future of victory, out of the times of trial and into the times of faith in Jesus name – Amen.

MEDITATIONS

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31)

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. (Isaiah 43:2)

Do not be afraid for I am your shield and your everlasting reward (Genesis 15:1)

It is no longer I that live but it is Christ who is living in me (Galatians 2:20)

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Philippians 4:13)

I am with you always even till the end of the age (Matthew 28:20)

Be anxious for nothing but in everything let your prayers and requests be made known to God; and you will receive the peace of God (Philippians 4:4)

Be strong and of good courage, do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go (Joshua 1:9)

Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid – My peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you (John 14:27)

All things are working together for good for those who love God (Romans 8:28)

I know the thoughts I have towards you for good and not for evil – to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11)

My presence shall go with you and I will give you rest for you have found grace in my sight and I know you by name  (Exodus 33:14)

The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord (Psalm 37:23)

I have loved you with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3)

You will keep them in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you (Isaiah 26:3)

My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness (2Corinthians 12:9).

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard · Nor has it entered into the heart of man · The things which God has prepared for those who love Him. (1Corinthans 2:9)

 

 

 

Commandment 6 episode 7

 

This Commandment is about much more than murder or killing – It is about the killing of relationships through anger and lack of emotional control.

 

This commandment speaks about more than just the act of taking of life in general, but is concerned with the heart attitude of malice, which can start with frustration, then resentment, then even vengeance or letting hatred or some other hurtful intention harm another person. Jesus enlarged on this commandment in the sermon on the mount.

Matthew 5:21-24 It has been written in the commandment, "You shall not kill." And whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment. 22. 'But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment…'Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, 24. 'Leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.   

 

The transformational aspect of this Commandment is in forgiveness and reconciliation. And it also talks about bringing your gift to the altar, so it also looks like it involves an attitude towards God as well.

 

There is always the redemptive process of God on the positive side to transform us like all the commandments. This is in the context of people getting offended and angry – and that kills relationships and the remedy for that is this process of forgiveness and reconciliation.

 

The attitudes of relationship in Commandment five were about trust and care and that ties in with this Commandment. It is this the link between five and six.

 

In the last commandment (Number five) , which is about our relationship with authority, we saw that the problem with people, was the inability to trust another person to influence or direct their life – it started with parents and children This was because of self-determination, so that they could have their own way. And now we see that the person who has a mistrust of authority, will act out this mistrust with other people generally, and, still determined to have their own way, will behave in a way that is destructive of all relationships – so they get angry.

 

What are some of our defence mechanisms and how effective are they?

And what about our self -made relational or emotional defence mechanisms?

 

The most subtle and dangerous of our defense mechanisms are those negative relational ones that we use as weapons or as shields against other people – and there are three interesting ones like withdrawal, resistance, and aggression.

 

With the heart man believes

WITH THE HEART MAN BELIEVES

There is a lot of speculation these days about what faith really is, especially among Evangelical Bible believing Christians - What to pray and how to pray, what to hope for and what to expect. Many things are being claimed by faith and do not come to pass and many get disappointed, and some think that God has forgotten them or didn’t hear their prayers. Is there something that maybe needs to change in our thinking about our faith? 
What in fact IS OUR faith? What do we believe and how do we believe?

The Bible says that with the heart man believes’ (Romans 10:10) so I would like to discuss today the matter of believing with the heart. I will start by saying that I personally have a very simple and straightforward approach to believing with my heart.
There is an ongoing dialogue with God on a schedule of prayer concerns that sit in my heart and are being placed before him. I also believe that the Father knows what the cry of my heart is in any personal situations of my own and that Jesus will intercede on my behalf to the Father and that his will shall be done in my life for them. That way I am confident that God is doing the supernatural work and I try to stay at rest in my soul, ready to do what work The Holy Spirit prompts me to.

Our deepest beliefs and values and desires reside in our heart and flow out of our heart as the real issues of our life. The heart conveys who we are and what we do.
Proverbs 4:23 Guard your heart with all diligence; for It is the outflowing of your life. 

So how do those beliefs and values and desires get into the heart?
Our heart is informed by our mind as to what it acknowledges as being true and of highest value to us and therefore worth living for.

However we will be discussing today the difference between what our natural rational mind informs our heart of in contrast to what our renewed ‘spiritual mind’ informs our heart of.

Our Natural mind
As far as our natural rational mind is concerned, on the one hand it can certainly be convinced of high moral standards and virtues and aspire to those values and convince and persuade the heart so that there is an outflow of civility and decency in that person’s life. On the other hand the natural rational mind can be deceived into accepting corrupt or hurtful attitudes as being the most rewarding things to convince and persuade the heart of and they will become a destructive outflowing of that person’s life. 
We see the panorama of all of those states of the heart (including our own) being played out in the world around us (Mark 7:21. Jeremiah 17:9)
The natural human mind is a wonder of God’s creative genius and it has brought into this world both great good and great evil. We can’t live without our natural rational mind but we also can’t let it run our lives when it comes to our inner being, our ‘God with us’ spiritual life of faith. We need another kind of mind with a higher order of knowing and understanding truth than just the natural rational mind.

Our renewed spiritual mind

When Paul wrote to the churches (ALL of them) he instructed the newly converted non-Jewish Christians about not being conformed to the rational natural mind of the world. This was a huge and fundamental change of thinking for these novel disciples that Paul saw was vital for them in the new Kingdom age of the life of God within us. (Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians, Philippians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus)
The heart of faith gets informed of spiritual truth by the spiritually renewed mind, and that renewed mind finds its home in the new heart that is part of God’s Promise to us (Ezekiel 36:26 a new heart I will give you). That new heart is the place where faith dwells. 

Paul wrote to ALL the churches that were in his care about the spiritual renewing of the mind. He spoke to them about how to know God by faith and how to be known OF God by faith. But he also taught them how to see themselves as being part of the life of God. This was a revolution of thinking - and it still is!

When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church (1Corinthians 2:14) he was writing to people who had lived within their Greek philosophical and religious culture and had been steeped in all those customs and behaviours in their natural minds. 
He told them that their natural rational minds (psychikos – soulish mind) could not receive the things of the Spirit of God because those Spiritual things were irrational (m??ros; absurd) to them; and that they couldn’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned, and that only those who were spiritually minded (pnematikos) could discern those things.

Paul finished that topic about having a spiritual mindset by writing to the Corinthians that they could have the mind of Christ. This does not mean that we know the all the content of what Christ knows, but that we can think like Jesus thinks! And we can know what he reveals to our hearts by the Holy Spirit! Paul also wrote to the Philippian church and entreated them to have this mind in you which was also in Christ (Philippians 2:5).

When Paul writes to the Ephesian church (Ephesians 4:17-20) he tells them that they needed to think differently and to live differently from all the gentile unbelievers around them, who didn’t know the Ten Commandments and who had all kinds of ideas about what religion or morality was (similar to what we see around us today). He spoke about those unbelieving people as being ignorant of God and resistant in their hearts to God. They were alienated from the life of God because of an uninformed mindset of separation from God. He goes on to say to the church ‘But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught the truth concerning him as it is in Jesus. 
Paul had taught them of the gift of the life of Jesus within them that changes their old self life with its natural mindset and natural desires of the heart into a new self in Christ with a new mindset and with new Spiritual desires in the heart. 

He says to them ‘put off your old self, which belongs to your former wayward way of life and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God.
This is not just a different thing to think but it is also a different way to think. 

This is actually what REPENTANCE is! 
But isn’t repentance about turning away from sin? Yes – but how do you do that? 
Do we simply tell people to make a resolution to use more will power and stop sinning?
The word repentance (metanoia) means ‘A change of mind’ a 180 degrees turnaround!
Only our renewed mind understands the Spiritual reality of a life of putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God. Our renewed spiritual mind informs our heart of that truth and that becomes believed upon in our new heart and that becomes a new way of living. That is the only way we can live above sin (1John 3:9). That is the repentance that leads to faith, and this is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, sent to convince the WORLD of sin, because of their unbelief.

This putting off the old self and being renewed in the spirit of the mind and putting on the new self is to be an everyday activity for us all! We move in and out of our natural rational mindset and have to re-engage with our renewed Spiritual mindset a lot of the time.

The best that a person could obtain in the Old Testament as far as a pure mind is concerned was to revere the Ten Commandments that God gave Israel. This is what David did, and he shares his love for God’s Commandments throughout the Psalms and speaks about how they restored his soul and enlightened his eyes (Psalm 19).
And Psalm 119 contains 176 verses speaking about nothing else except David’s love of God’s Law. We see the effect of this upon David in that he was a person of faith and was called ‘A man after God’s own heart’.
  
But Paul was offering those gentile churches a Gospel of a totally new measure of truth and grace and faith through Jesus Christ that was above and beyond the Old Testament faith experience or comprehension. This was a New Word, with a New Voice, the Voice of Jesus.

Just one Voice

Hebrews 1:1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;

The voice of God’s Son is better than the voice of the prophets. This was the motive of the epistle, the purpose of the letter, and the heart of the message of the Book of Hebrews. When Paul comes to the faith chapter (Ch.11), he shows us the faith of the patriarchs and prophets, from Abel, and Noah and Abraham through Moses and Gideon and David which were counted to them as faith – It was the faith for that time. Then Paul tells us that the faith of Jesus in comparison to those works and words was something far greater. He closes that faith chapter with the words, “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.” 
In other words, their excellent faith for those days was waiting to be completed by the new kind of faith imparted by God himself through Jesus to our hearts.
And he begins the next chapter (12) by saying that Jesus is the author and finisher of OUR faith.

Looking to Jesus

We look to Jesus who is the Author and Finisher of our faith. In other words, all true faith now begins and ends in Him. 
Hebrews 12:2 looking unto Jesus, the author (archegos – primary bringer of) and finisher (telei??t??s –final goal achiever) of our faith…

When faith is needed, it will not be withheld. We can always be assured that Jesus is interceding for us to the Father for his will to be done in our lives.

Our faith comes from the heart of Jesus into our heart.

If someone tells me that they have received real faith for a situation I would sincerely assume that they received it from Jesus, and that they heard him (I don’t mean audibly). That is what Paul wrote; Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word (rhema – utterance) of God. (Romans 10:17) 

But can’t we just read a Scripture and say we will receive it if we believe it and just claim it? To that kind of question Jesus said;
John 5:39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
So our spiritually renewed mind can go to the Scriptures to receive truth about Jesus, but our heart needs to go to Jesus and wait for him to speak his truth to us.
That way you read truth with your renewed mind, and you hear Jesus in your heart, and you will see his supernatural work on your behalf. 

To believe in healing or any other supernatural work of God is one thing; but to have faith for it is altogether something else. 

If you receive healing or any other supernatural work of God, it will be because of the impartation of His faith; it will be because Faith has flowed out of His heart into yours; and that is the only faith that brings about the work of God. 
And you can have it; for He does give it! Then you will know that your faith, your ‘shared with Jesus’ faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8).

The wonder of the gift of God lies in the fact that faith for any supernatural work of God is frequently imparted to us as a gift when we feel the least deserving of it. It is not always the product of our loyal ‘exercise of Godliness’ and our faithful waiting upon him, for God hears the cry of our human heart when we can’t even put a prayer together in our heads. God says he dwells in a high and holy place, and with the humble in spirit, to restore the spirit of the lowly and revive the aching heart (Isaiah 57:15)

And even when we are faithfully being ‘exercised in Godliness’ and seeking after God from our hearts we will not always feel that we’ve received faith from Jesus for some particular request. 
But we can always know that we do have Jesus! 
So our faith is never far away because Jesus is at work on our behalf in the world of the unseen. We can remember the words of our Lord, ‘Without me you can do nothing’ and be comforted that being ‘with him’ in our heart is certainly the best place to be.

Pray and ask anyway

When we bring a prayer request before God, be it for guidance or spiritual understanding or healing or any other spiritual or material need we can wait on God for the witness of the Spirit – for the faith OF Jesus. If we receive that then it is a gift from Jesus. In the meantime we have made our request with sincerity of heart and we surrender the request from our heart to God’s heart. That is the most and the best we can do. We then leave it in God’s hands and trust the Holy Spirit, and Jesus, who is the one who intercedes for us according to the will of God (Hebrews 7:25. Romans 8:27). Then that peace of God that surpasses all understanding can be ours. The following Scripture tells us that both our heart AND our mind is being guarded or protected from fear and anxiety through Jesus Christ
Philippians 4:6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

So how do I know I’m believing from the heart and not my natural mind?

When we are genuinely seeking to believe God and yet somehow realize we are still functioning in our natural minds we become more aware of the way our emotions get attached to our thoughts. The anxiety digs in and the doubts line up waiting for our attention and our sense of God’s peace seems to vaporize. That doesn’t have to be a problem as long as we become aware that we need to make the shift of bringing our mind into the heart. We recall to mind his love for us and cast our cares upon him.  
All things are possible to those that believe, but it is important to know how you believe.

The imperative from Jesus has always been ‘seek first the Kingdom of God’ That is why the emphasis is on the surrender of the natural to the spiritual and being aware of our human shortcomings as well as God’s gracious provision for us. Then we can know that Jesus will be to us all he has promised to be, first spiritually, and then physically and materially. This is the renewing of the mind, aligning our minds with the mind of Jesus who emptied himself from his ‘me-self’. 
The pathways of the mind into the heart are being formed each time we let go of one direction of the mind and move into the other, continually returning to ‘God with us”
Amen!