Too many people who say that they want to break free from fundamentalism abandon the Christian fundamentals about who the living Jesus is and what He did to invite us into an intimate relationship with God. Rejecting the fundamental teachings of Christianity doesn’t “deconstruct” the faith. It denies it. Here’s an example: To say that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead is to deny the faith as recorded and experienced by the earliest Christ-followers.
Without a solid sense of significance, meaning, and purpose, it’s easy to slip into sadness, discouragement and despair. Your life has a purpose. Find it. Pursue it. Fulfill it. If life was without meaning the very concept of meaning would have no meaning to us.
I’m conscious, I care, I have a conscience, I’m aware of good and evil, I analyze, I choose to resist or to obey thoughts, feelings, desires, and even truth; therefore, I exist as more than a material mechanism.
Knowledge can easily replace awe and mystery with the pride of intellect. It often makes people proud of their ponderings and causes them to abandon their wonderings. Unanswered questions are an invitation to awe and wonder, not a threat to your intellect. They encourage us to ponder mystery with an open heart, not just analyze with the mind. The mind can articulate definitions but meaning in discovered with the heart.
Joy is the intoxication of wonder, not the inebriation of liquor. To live like life is meaningless is unbearable. Even materialists attribute meaning to their life and live like it has some significance.
To experience the fuller meaning of life I have to look beyond me. For me insight is much more enjoyable than self-focused diversion. “There’s pleasure in sin for a season,” but it knows nothing of the wisdom that fills the heart with joyful dance.
Connecting heart-to-heart with other people is one of the most significant and lasting things a person can do. A moment of genuine heart-connection can last a lifetime. I’ve been fortunate to have had countless moments of heart connection with multitudes of diverse people. When just one of those moments comes to my memory, I am filled with awe and gratitude. O that Christianity would lay aside formalism and embrace humble heart connection with Christ and with one another.
Too often heart-connection is labeled as emotionalism and looked down on by rationalistic forms of Christianity. How unfortunate that Christianity which should facilitate intimate heart-connection has been turned into a program for passive spectators who mostly protect their heart from each other. The more Christ-followers you make heart-to-heart connections with the more closely you’re connected to the body of Christ. Too many Christians avoid heart connections altogether or make them with only a tiny inner circle.
People avoid heart connections because they fear having their heart exposed, however, Christ-followers have been given the power to overcome that fear. See 1 Timothy 1:6.
Awareness of the presence of the living Jesus makes every moment deeply meaningful. The feeling of meaninglessness is indicative of a loss of focus on “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” If you feel like you’re running on empty you probably are. Let Jesus take over the wheel and fill you with the thrill of His ongoing presence.
Heart connection reveals that finances are a false measure of a person’s net worth. A person’s net value is caught up in the wonder of their existence.
Fix your focus on God’s inner fire in the sky of your heart. Let nothing dim it! The awareness of God will give you a bright outlook. Without Him we’re left with a dim blurred view of what life is about. When people try to dim Christ’s light in you that’s because it’s shinning in a way that’s disturbing the darkness that they’re comfortable with.
Life’s full of light dimmers
That hide our glimpses
Of God’s glorious
Inner glimmers
And replaces the awe
That produces holy tremors
With a machine-like routine
That leaves God’s light
Mostly unseen.
Where’s God?
When your inner light is dim
It’s hard to see Him
Even though nature
Is filled to the brim
With His glory!
Every living stem
Shouts out that
Life is God’s design
Not a just whim.
God wants
To enlighten
And brighten
Your heart
And heighten
Your awareness
Of His presence.
Pride wants
To frighten
You so much
That you flee
From God.
There’s a big difference
Between a belief that God exists
And the awareness of His presence
And conscience reliance
On His daily sustenance!
When it seems
That life’s struggles
Are dimming my dreams,
I look to the beams
Of Christ’s inner light
And He gives me reams
Supernatural delight.
Christianity should never be confined to programmed activities in a church building. Never!
Pride turns down God’s offer of mercy through Christ’s sacrifice and instead blindly demands His justice because it refuses to humbly recognize its own rebellion against God and its huge need for forgiveness.
Mercy me! I’m eternally grateful that God doesn’t give me what I deserve.
We need to always look to God’s mercy. God’s justice will give us what we deserve. We will have to personally pay the penalty (the wages of sin is death) for all the wrong thinking and actions that we have done–even the ones that no one knows about–even the ones we have forgotten–even the ones we thought were no big deal.
However, God’s mercy gives us what we don’t deserve. It presents us with undeserved life, unmerited forgiveness, and a beautiful unearned eternal relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Seek God’s mercy, not His justice, in your relationship with Him. Revival is a result of Christ-followers being willing to be poor in spirit and to embrace 2 Chronicles 7:14 with a humble tender open heart.
God’s recipe for revival: If the people who call themselves Christians will humble themselves (lay down their religious pride) and pray (communicate heart-to-heart with the living God) and seek His face (continually pursue surrender to and intimacy with Him) and turn from their wicked ways (openly admit and fight to stop their wrong thoughts, feelings, desires, and behaviors), then God will forgive them and heal their land. Are you willing to follow God’s recipe today and every day?
“Do not be arrogant, but tremble.” We need a rally of humility that motivates us to remove everything within us that in anyway hinders what Christ wants to do and prepares the way for the Lord to have His way in us. Humility’s worth fighting for!
Pride and entitlement are never the result of grace. Grace produces awe, trembling, and poverty of spirit that comes from the conscious awareness of Christ gloriously living in you.
Grace puts you in the fight of faith. Without it you are powerless. I want to pursue the risen Jesus as the Dove flies by following and obeying the Holy Spirit every day.
If Christ is living in you, it’s by the grace of God’s grafting you into the Vine of His presence. You didn’t (and still don’t) earn or deserve His presence. Now you need keep the free gift that is in you stirred up and continually fight the good fight of faith by always resisting and seeking to remove any thought, feeling, desire, or opinion in you that in any way hampers how Jesus wants to freely flow and have full control within you. A world that looks to human leaders needs to see people who are led by the living Jesus, not by desires, feelings, thoughts, or opinions.
God’s grace
Doesn’t erase
Or replace
Our need
To seek His face.
Lord, make me aware
Of your might.
Give me insight
To resist and fight
Everything in me
That impedes
What you want to do.
Fight to remove everything in you that obstructs your ability to receive God’s grace. Fight words from the Bible that will help you make room for God’s free grace in your life:
When life
Tries to drape
Your heart with discouragement
Don’t play the same tape
Over and over in your mind.
Never stop searching
Until you find
The way of escape.
A closed heart is an escape room. The purpose of an escape room isn’t to make yourself comfortable with it. It’s to get out and to get to safety as soon as possible.
The most important escape room is in your mind. Escape from the fears, fallacies, and fantasies of false feelings, thoughts, and desires. We humans need a rousing inner belief that we will win in order to inspire us to escape from the mental and emotional escape rooms that are holding us in bondage.
When your heart is hard you’re not living in a comfort zone. You’re ignoring the ticking clock of a dangerous, real-life escape room. People take escape room games seriously and give their best to beat the clock, however, when it comes to escaping from their sin they too often sit back and milk it for pleasure and comfort while ignoring its dangers.
The clues about how to escape from the bondage of sin and darkness are found in the Bible. If people would go after those clues the way they race the clock to search for clues in an escape room, they’d be celebrating their freedom every day!
The clock is ticking in the escape room of your heart. If you don’t find the way out of the sin that has shut it down before you die, you’ll be forever trapped in its bondage. Follow the living Jesus into freedom while you still can!
Make more room in your heart and mind for Jesus. Escape from all your inner distractions that hinder His Spirit and hold Him back. The living Jesus is the Light. He’s the Way out of darkness. Escape into heart-to-heart intimacy with Him.
To escape the room
Of self-obsession
Surrender your life
To Christ’s possession.
The hidden issue is cruelty. Abortion isn’t about “reproductive rights.” It’s about prenatal cruelty. Legalized slavery wasn’t about skin color. It was about cold-hearted cruelty. Human life in all of its stages and skin-shades deserves kindness and respect.
The most fundamental right is the freedom of conscience — the right to disagree with and disapprove of other people’s beliefs and behaviors. To call people who disagree with you “haters” or “phobics” is to reject true diversity by demanding compliance to your viewpoint.
Government approval doesn’t make cruelty less cruel. That was true about the cruelty of legalized slavery and it’s still true about legalized prenatal cruelty. If trying to help a human fetus be healthy is called “prenatal care” killing one should be called “prenatal cruelty.”
Two powerful creative joys of sex have been attacked, shoved aside, and slandered by our society:
1) Reproduction–the amazing delight of being a mother or a father!
2) The opportunity to create and maintain a life-long, healing, heart-to-heart, honest, committed, exclusive intimacy with someone of the opposite sex!
Saul of Tarsus, who was a violent persecutor of the first Christians, went from spiritual stupor to a super relationship with the living Jesus! For the rest of His life, he boldly proclaimed that Jesus is alive and wrote much of the New Testament. He was eventually executed for His faith in Christ.
Wake up, sleeper, from your spiritual stupor. Step out of the shadows and let the living Jesus shine on you. Continually soak up His radiance.
Stupor toward God and toward your conscience (unawareness, insensitivity, and unresponsiveness) is sneaky. It makes the living, resurrected Jesus seem like a mere myth, an ancient historical figure, or a being confined to Heaven.
Don’t settle for stupor. God created you to have a super relationship with Him. Religion, without the active and direct presence, reality, and Headship of the risen Jesus, subtly produces a dazed state of spiritual stupor — “a form of godliness but denying the power thereof.”
The living Jesus turned Paul’s stupor into vibrant awareness of His presence and power! If you will continually open your heart to the risen Jesus and begin to daily read the Bible like an intimate love letter written from God to you personally (instead of like a college textbook) Christ’s supernatural presence will banish your stupor with His glorious light.
The Bible is an alarm. It’s a super stupor detector that will wake you up to the supernatural reality of Jesus, if you will humbly listen to it.
Here are some signs of being in a spiritual stupor.
* Most of the time Jesus is off of your radar.
* You rarely if ever read the Bible and when you do you quickly tire of it.
* God seems more like a distant theory than a present reality to you.
* You feel like attending church is all the spirituality that you need.
* People who live like Jesus is alive and present throughout the day annoy you.
* You seldom notice your conscience and when you do you mostly resist it.
* You enjoy entertainment that is contrary to God’s values and principles.
* You think that you’re a good person and that everything’s alright between you and God.
Unless we realize
That our feelings,
Thoughts, and desires
Contain real lies
We’ll be misled
By their false disguise.
No matter how much
We’ve been taught
Until we’ve sought
And bravely fought
To make every thought
Obedient to Christ
We’ll be caught
In deception.
To be led by the Spirit
Is to do what God inspires
By obeying His desires
Instead of your own
And continually resisting
Whatever conspires
To try to compel
You to rebel
Against what God requires.
Christianity is a fight
To live in God’s light,
A life-long race
To run
Empowered by His grace,
A determination
To always seek HIs face
And to ever be in pace
With His Spirit.
The most important spiritual warfare is to continually resist and overcome every thought, feeling, and desire within you that contends against the will of God. It takes a lifetime of courageous ongoing mental, emotional, and spiritual warfare to fight to bring every thought, feeling, and desire within you into obedience to Christ. Never ignore that fight even for a moment. To seek first the kingdom of God (the literal rule, control, and Lordship of the risen Jesus over every moment of your life) you must refute, rebuke, and refuse every thought, feeling, and desire that tries to override Christ’s control within you and attempts to replace His grace with bondage.
Fight to open your heart and keep it wide open to the living Jesus as He speaks in and through your conscience and through the words of the Bible. Resist everything that tries to get you to ignore or disobey Him. Grace doesn’t eliminate your calling and need to resist every tempting thought, tormenting feeling, and demonic desire, but it does offer you free access to Jesus and to His power to help you win your inner battles.
The Bible never presents Christianity as effortless. It challenges Christ-followers to: “seek first the kingdom of God,” “fight the good fight of faith,” “earnestly contend for the faith,” “press toward the mark of the high calling of God,” “draw near to God,” “resist the devil,” “cast out demons,” “run in such a way as to take the prize,” “rejoice in the Lord always,” “repent,” “put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires,” “deny yourself,” “humble yourself,” “consider others better than yourself,” etc.
Heart-level connection with the living Jesus can’t be explained in human words. It must be experienced to be understood.
Simply to learn
Bible information
But not to yearn
To experience
What you learn
Is to neglect
To discern
Your great need
To grow in grace
By following Christ
And letting
Your heart burn
To more closely
Connect with Him
And to turn
Away from
Every distraction.
Log on to Jesus
Remove the many masks
From your heart.
Begin to evade
The charade
That you parade
For others to see.
Let your ego fade.
Openly confess the mistakes
That you’ve made
And humbly step out
Of the dark shade
Into God’s truth and light.
Return from where you’ve strayed.
Let Christ’s presence pervade
Every part
Of your heart!
True Christianity is about experiencing and maintaining heart-to-heart connection with the risen Jesus and with His followers. Modern Christians have been trained to connect with and listen to a pastor but not to Jesus and to His everyday followers. Part-time Christ-followers miss out on much quality time with the risen Jesus.
If you are connected heart-to-heart with Christ, you will be automatically connected at a deep level to others who are connected to Christ. Learn to discover, nurture, and treasure those Spirit-led connections.
Heart-level connection with the living Jesus can’t be explained in human words. It must be experienced to be understood.
Jesus came to heal any disconnection between you and God so that you may overflow with God’s presence, peace, love and joy. If you will set aside everything that’s in between you and God and humbly listen to and obey His voice throughout the day, He will lead you to amazing and joyous connection with Him. A closed heart can’t connect with other hearts or with God’s Comforter (the Holy Spirit) and often feels isolated, alone, troubled and misunderstood.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.” “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness.”
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 