A society that produces people who are so evil that they will murder groups of strangers including children is sick! Lord, have mercy on us!
Perhaps we can agree on this: People who want to kill a lot of people shouldn’t have easy access to guns.
Human life is amazing. From the newest embryo to the oldest centenarian human life is a marvelous mystery that should be handled with care and respect.
When you are being compelled by thoughts, feelings, desires, or habits that you don’t want, you are in bondage to something other than yourself that the Bible calls sin. If you are a slave to big sin or tiny sin, there is good news. Jesus offers freedom and deliverance.
In the Bible Jesus drove out sin-filled spirits of compulsion called demons. Then He offered His followers the authority to do the same. Demons don’t like Jesus. If you want freedom, prepare the way of the Lord. Cast out demons and make room for Jesus to take control of your daily life. The truth will set you free. Courageously open your heart to walk openly in the light with Jesus and His people. No longer hide in and embrace the deeds and desires of darkness. Agree with your conscience and admit all your sin. Continually fight the good fight of faith.
Embrace the 2 Chronicles 7:14 lifestyle. Humble yourself. Pray. Seek God’s presence. Turn from your wicked ways. Drive the influence of demons out of your heart and mind. Give no place in your life to the devil. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Connect heart-to-heart with people of God who are continually pursuing His presence and submit to one another in love and accountability. Compassionately cast demons out of each other so that freedom in Christ can continually grow and spread and the glorious liberty of the children of God break forth.
Offer Christ’s freedom to all — to whosoever will receive it. Offer to pray over people letting “Christ in you” give you the words to say. In Jesus’ name and as His Spirit directs you, command demons to leave people and set them free.
The way to grow is to go in God — to shift from demonic self-focus to Spirit-led obedience to the risen Jesus. It’s vital that contemporary Christ-followers rise up and begin to do the stuff that Jesus and His first followers did as they drove out demons and set the captives free!
When Jesus is really the Head of His body:
When Jesus
Is the Head,
Christians let
“Christ in you”
Tell them what
To say and do.
When Jesus
Is the Head,
Meetings are
Spirit-led
And what is
Done and said
Is prompted
By His presence.
The Bible is like a Jack-in-the-box. When I open it with a humble hungry heart, the risen Jesus pops out and fills me with His presence. Now let’s let Jesus jump out and fill gatherings of His people with His presence and control that overrides human leadership!
Most Christians spend far more time hearing what the world is saying than they do hearing what the Spirit is saying. God makes sense when you’re really listening to Him, but not when you’re running from Him.
Hearing God’s voice is learnable. You learn to hear Him by listening to Him. God is speaking in ways that ordinary people can hear but many people don’t believe that they hear Him when they do because they don’t like what He says.
The voice of Jesus in a human heart isn’t sound based. His voice is multifaceted. He speaks through inner impressions, insights, inspiration, ideas, images, thoughts, promptings, sensations, awareness, and more. If you are one of His sheep, you have the capacity to hear His inner voice. To ignore what the Spirit is saying to you is to miss out on the glory of divine connection!
Conversational prayer, hearing God and not just talking to Him, is amazing! You can hear Jesus here, there, and everywhere! Hearing Jesus is about getting to know Him better. If you want to honor Jesus, listen to and obey what He is saying to you.
Be courageous to hear what God is actually saying to you and not just what you wish He would say. (Few people are willing to hear the risen Jesus say anything that they don’t want Him to say.)
The Bible is God’s gift of a spiritual hearing aid. If you’ll humbly read what God said through prophets, apostles, and others, you’ll begin to hear Him speaking. If you will read the Bible with the desire and intent to listen and obey, you’ll be amazed at what happens in your heart!
When I open the Bible and open my heart while I read it, my inner ears open up and begin to hear what the Spirit is saying to me today. Ancient words from God span the millennia and tune my spirit to God’s contemporary voice speaking within me, releasing rivers of living water and restoring my soul. To me, the Bible is exhilarating! I love reading it and can’t ever get enough of it.
Endlessly listening to lectures isn’t a great to learn to swim or to follow Jesus. Be courageous and listen directly to His voice! Hearing sermons without hearing God’s Spirit is a waste of time. Listen to the risen Jesus talking in your heart.
When you feel like your life is off track, it is. No matter how hard we try no person is ever perfectly aligned with truth and reality.
We can never exert enough self-effort to do everything right. No matter how hard we try, we always fall short of perfection, righteousness, and a pure heart.
To deny or justify your wrongdoing is to embrace deception, alienation, and bondage. Instead of accepting our wrongdoing, corrupt desires, and distorted thinking, we need to admit we’re off track and to seek mercy, forgiveness, and a new heart.
When you can’t forgive and remove all guilt from yourself, there is someone who can. Ask Jesus to forgive you, cleanse you, and empower you to follow Him! Inner peace comes when we humbly receive Christ’s mercy, forgiveness, and love, not when we exert our proud self-righteous effort. The more you let Christ live and work in you, the more freedom you have from guilt and sin.
Our conscience tries to warn us that we are engulfed in guilt and need God’s forgiveness so that we can be free from inner voices of hopeless accusation and condemnation. When we refuse to acknowledge our guilt, we alienate ourselves from God’s mercy, forgiveness, and deliverance. Christianity isn’t about being found not guilty. It’s about sincerely and openly pleading guilty and receiving the mercy that Jesus purchased for you by His blood.
Christianity gives the answer as:
God’s mercy, not our merit,
Grace, not achieving first place,
Repentance, not a life-sentence,
Pleading guilty, not self-justification,
God’s forgiveness, not self-righteousness,
Love, not to push and shove,
Brokenness, not will power,
Kindness, not competition,
Self-denial, not self-focus,
Serving, not deserving,
Truth, not deception,
Humility, not pride,
Peace, not anxiety,
Joy, not despair,
Jesus, not religion,
“Christ in you,” not you in charge,
Being Spirit-led, not getting ahead.
Receptivity? You can meet with Jesus anytime and anyplace. How about now, right where you are? Tune in to God’s Spirit. Tune out the distractions. Continual receptivity to the risen Jesus will give you the ride of your life and keep you rejoicing throughout the day!
You can hear about Jesus, read about Jesus, and think about Jesus while ignoring His presence. Try not to do that! Oh, that church would show us how to intimately interact with the living Jesus, not just inform us about Him! Every Sunday Christians are taught to listen to sermons, but we’re seldom taught to listen to the living Jesus.
Be God’s tide receiver. Catch and ride the waves of the Spirit. Improve your receptivity to God’s Spirit. No one on earth is fully attuned to God’s Spirit. Continually seek Him with all your heart!
Hearing talks about Jesus can be boring but experiencing His presence (although sometimes scary) is never boring! If you read the Bible without assumptions, it will deeply touch your heart!
The more self-conscious we are, the less we’re aware of the presence of Jesus. To live consumed by His presence is glorious! When I want an outcome focused on satisfying me, I’m not surrendered to God’s will. When I won’t align my opinions, desires, and feelings with God, they spiral and release many inner tornados.
A prayer to the One who owns it all: Lord, help me be all Yours, willingly surrendered to and nonresistant to Your ownership of me and all that I see. Help me ever be directly led by the inner voice of Your Spirit while rejecting the control my desires.
Make room for Jesus.
Come what may
Listen throughout the day
To what He has to say.
Let’s actively adore
The risen Jesus
And be careful
Not to ignore
His presence.
Let God who opened wide the Red Sea open wide your heart! Dare to make the inner click to load the risen Jesus into your heart giving Him full permission to make His changes within you.
Closed-hearted Christianity is counterfeit. If you don’t keep your heart fully connected to the living Jesus, you’ll drift into nominal Christianity — “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
True Christianity is the call to continually cultivate and grow your connection to the living Jesus. If your heart lacks a hearty hunger for more of the risen Jesus, there’s a spiritual disconnection within you.
Make lots of room for Jesus! Let Jesus take charge. Decrease and let Jesus increase. Let Jesus do what He wants to.
Set self-interest aside so Jesus can be your guide. Be Jesus-led, not self-driven.
Self-focus constantly seeks to distract my attention away from the risen Jesus, hide His presence, and produce spiritual passivity that leads to tormenting anxiety, frustration, and duress. The more I shelf self and take the Bible off the shelf to read and apply it with an open humble heart, the more I shift from being self-led to Spirit-led.
If the risen Jesus doesn’t show up, church is just a religious program. Spectator church meetings that only let people hear the word but allow them no opportunity to do it, ignore this Scripture: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.
If you go to church to be a spectator, you’re going for the wrong reason. Jesus calls His followers together to be Spirit-led participants. To wake up a Sunday morning audience of spectators, open up the mic to Spirit-led participants.
A sincere prayer: Holy Spirit, please touch everyone who reads this with an instant and powerful manifestation of Your presence.
The inner earplugs of pride and self-focus keep us from hearing God’s Spirit. The worst hearing loss is the unwillingness to hear God’s voice.
A Jesus revolution starts with people hearing His voice and surrendering in awe to His presence. You can’t have a relationship with the risen Jesus if you won’t listen to Him. You can learn far more about Jesus by experiencing Him than you can ever learn by hearing a preacher talk about Him!
If you’ll take out your inner earplugs and listen to the Spirit, you’ll hear the voice of Jesus calling you come to Him for healing and peace. A Jesus revolution overthrows religion and replaces it with ongoing heart intimacy with the living Jesus.
If you aren’t hearing God’s voice, it’s not because He’s not speaking to you. It’s because you’re not listening. Dare to remove your earplugs today! A Jesus revolution exchanges the earplugs that close down our heart for God’s inner earbuds that tune us in to His voice.
The Bible is like earbuds. When I read it with an open heart, I hear the voice of God’s Spirit speaking in my inner ears. A Jesus revolution removes the earplugs from human hearts so that people begin to hear and obey His voice.
To listen to your conscience is to begin to open up to the inner voice of God’s Spirit. If you’re unwilling to see and turn away from your sins, you will strive to ignore and drown out the voice of God’s Spirit inside you. Dare to remove the inner earplugs that keep your heart cold by keeping you from hearing what the Spirit is saying.
The truth is that we too often fear to hear God’s Spirit because we don’t want Him to draw near to us. It takes much less courage to passively listen to a man lecture about God than it does to actually hear and obey what God’s Spirit is saying in your heart.
Now hear Jesus. If you want to be free and whole, the sound of God’s inner voice is the sweetest sound there is.
Unless we humbly open our heart and remove the earplugs from our inner ears, we’ll be unaware of the sound of God’s Spirit. If you don’t go to church to hear God speak in your heart and obey His voice, you might as well stay home. When the voice of a man crowds out the voice of the living Jesus, the Holy Spirit is quenched.
A true Jesus revolution breaks people’s dependency on a pastor and connects them directly to the risen Jesus. Preaching should empower and release people to hear God’s voice, not make them lifetime prisoners to the voice of a pastor. Instead of quoting preachers and sharing secondhand thoughts, tell what God’s Spirit is saying to you.
When preaching distracts people’s attention away from the actual presence of the risen Jesus, it has gone way off track. Now is the time to beyond human teachers. Train your inner ears to listen to what God’s Spirit is telling you moment by moment. Let your heart freely flow with and bask in the current of Christ’s rivers of living water.
Open your heart to hear what Christ in you is saying and do what His Spirit tells you to. Let Him daily teach you, lead you, and remind you.
All humans worship: What directs your heart is what you worship. A heart directed by the mind worships intellect; a heart controlled by emotions worships feelings; a heart driven by desires worships pleasure; but a heart led by the Spirit worships God. To worship anything other than God is to be caught up in the devil’s deception called idolatry.
To focus on intellect And mostly neglect The personal and direct Leading of God's Spirit Has the effect Of producing Lukewarm Christians. Now hear Jesus!
Avoid spiritual identity theft. The Bible says: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.” (Romans 8:14.) Go God’s route. Be Spirit-led!
To be led by the Spirit as a child of God is to walk away from self-sufficiency and to rely on and obey God’s inner promptings instead of leaning on human understanding and ego. It’s easy to self-identify as a child of God, but it takes much grace and humility to be led by God’s Spirit.
If you’re led by the Spirit your identity is as a child of God. If you’re led by your own understanding and desires, your identity is conflicted. When you ignore the leading of the Spirit, your identity as a child of God experiences identity theft and you feel alone and alienated.
When we are led by God’s Spirit we begin to behave like Jesus as He works inside us to train and empower us to live a lifestyle that daily demonstrates the fruit and gifts of the Spirit. Being led by the Spirit requires that we hear and do what the Spirit is saying by humbly abandoning our desires and our self-reliance.
Anything that hinders you from being Spirit-led damages your relationship with Jesus. Christians need spiritual trainers and coaches, not religious lecturers and manipulators. Are you being trained and released to hear and obey God’s Spirit?
When a human being takes control of a Christian gathering, the liberty of the Spirit is quickly shut down and participants are turned into spectators. When churches shut down people who are being led by the Spirit, they silence the children of God. Churches are too often programmed lecture rooms instead of Spirit-led training camps.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.” Churches too often operate by human control instead of by setting people free to be led by God’s Spirit.
You don’t learn to do God’s word by sermon-hearing. You learn to do it by doing it. “Be doers of the word, not hearers only.” If you haven’t learned to do what you’ve learned, you haven’t really learned it.
I long to see church become a gathering of Spirit-led participants instead of an audience of platform-controlled spectators. When a church service requires people to be spectators it does them a disservice by training them to be hearers of the word but not doers. It’s time for church services to empower and release people to be Spirit-led participants, not passive spectators.
Life will go better if you avoid being without the Beatitudes and the fruit of the Spirit! Open your life up to them today!
Some desires need to be resisted. Others need to be cultivated. Wisdom knows the difference.
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 