I love to express what I feel called to say. Writing helps me to open up my heart and do that. I hope that what I write helps you in some way. I hope it makes you think, encourages you, or inspires you. If it challenges you or if you disagree, I hope you know that I respect your right to have a different point of view.
The more I discern The glory of the Lord The less my self-concern And the more I learn To trust Him.
The more I deny Myself To follow Jesus The more I Learn to rely On Him daily.
The more I lower Myself, The more God’s power Can flow.
The more I hunger To know God better The more He becomes My Pacesetter.
The more I connect Heart-to-heart With Jesus The more I detect My great need For Him.
The more I surrender And let God Make my heart tender The more His splendor Shines in me.
The more I forgive The more joy I have In the way That I live.
The more I’m willing To humble myself The more thrilling It is to follow Jesus.
The more I let Jesus Be my peace The more I let My striving cease.
The more I bless My enemy The less bitterness Can hinder me.
The more I decrease The more Jesus Can increase In me.
The more I pray And lay down my way For God’s way The brighter my day.
The more I’m kind The more kindness That I find Returned to me.
The more I take The low place The more I experience God’s grace.
The more I read The Bible The more I feel it bridle My idol Of self.
The more I Ignore me The clearer I see.
The deeper I wade Into the glory of God The more my desires fade In the healing shade Of His love.
God loves you. Are you basking in His love, ignoring His love, or avoiding His love? To worship is to actively adore and surrender to the living Jesus.
* Jesus loves you the same way that God the Father loves Him.
* To abide is to settle into and continually bask in Christ’s amazing love for you and not get distracted or run away from it.
* Basking in Christ’s love requires that you keep His commandments.
* Truly keeping Christ’s commandments will fill you with His joy. Living to please Jesus by keeping His Commandments is supposed to be a delight, not a burden.
* Jesus raises the standard of love that He calls us to beyond self-love to the greatest kind of love — the lay-down-your-life-love — the sacrificial love that He so clearly demonstrates for you.
* Actively surrendering to the Lordship of Jesus by obeying His commands opens the door to joyous friendship and intimacy with Him.
* Jesus isn’t keeping secrets from you but is revealing to you everything that He learned from the Father. Are you paying attention to Him?
* Jesus’ purpose in choosing you isn’t just to get you into Heaven, but that you bear lasting fruit.
* “Love each other,” isn’t a suggestion. It’s a command to you.
People have fun and enjoy obeying the rules of a video game. Why shouldn’t we do the same obeying God’s rules?
Jesus wants to plug you into His inner power outlet so God’s Spirit can freely flow thru you.Powerless religion proclaims words for the head but doesn’t set the human heart on fire.Instead of cultivating God’s garden in their own heart most Christians have been trained to sit and listen to a pastor try to do it.
Neither the religious leaders nor the political leaders wanted Jesus around. They teamed up to crucify Him. Where to now? Jesus is the Way.
I’m low maintenance on the outside, high maintenance on the inside. I continually and joyfully work on improving my thoughts, feelings. and desires.
God inspires Beautiful creativity. Church requires Religious passivity.
I believed in God from childhood and tried to find Him in religion but all I found there were closed doors. Finally, someone showed me the Door.If you’re a Christ-follower show somebody the Door!
Jesus is the Door who calls me to deny myself and follow Him, but my self-love tells me it’s okay to just sit at the doorstep. When you come to Jesus check your ego at the Door!Are you entering further into His presence or are you headed in the opposite direction?
Church often decorates Jesus the Door with so much religion that people can’t recognize His presence and reality. Darkness tries to hide the Door and to make people feel hopeless.
No one’s a good enough locksmith to open the Door. It took Jesus’ blood for that.
Jesus is the Door. Too many Christians are confident that all it takes to save them is to have a foot in the door. As you look for open doors remember that only one Door is essential. See John 14:6.
Sin is a wall; it will keep you from God. Jesus is the Door; He will connect you with God.
When you’re running from Jesus your back is to the Door. When I approached Jesus the Door, He welcomed me into an amazing life of walking with Him. If you’re hungry for more peace in your life, go through the Door.
Jesus is The open Door. You decide To enter in Or stay outside.
If you hesitate To enter the Door Remember that one day The gate Will be closed.
When I feel lower Than the floor I look up And adore Jesus the Door And let Him pour More and more Of His peace Over me.
Automatic doors Open and close On my life’s journey: Sudden disappointments, And surprise opportunities. Yet some how I know That God runs the show Like He did when Joseph Was wrongfully sent to jail So he could be chosen To rule Egypt for Pharoah.
When God closes a door and you try to climb through a window, that means you’ve messed the message of the closed door. God sometimes shuts doors to help you find Jesus.
When I resist following Jesus through the doors that He opens, my life gets off the hinges.When you try hard but can’t get a door to open, there’s a good chance that God is keeping it shut to protect you.
God’s closed doors are His “Do Not Enter” signs. We need to use discernment to recognize the difference between God’s closed doors and the devil’s hindrance.
To be led by the Spirit we need to cultivate our awareness of the Spirit’s inner promptings and the wisdom to confirm them with Scripture.When God closes a door, and the devil tries to make you bitter it’s better not to listen to him.
When Jesus knocks on the door of your heart, it’s best not to leave Him outside knocking.Jesus has an open-door policy. He won’t reject anyone who sincerely and humbly comes to Him.
Jesus is the Vine
The sap in the Vine Flows just fine And the Vine Invites us branches To abide and align With the Divine So that we can dine And consume new wine From God’s Spirit. Yet we the branches Too often confine And limit the sap flow By quenching the Spirit. Let’s repent and incline Our hearts to the Lord So that the Vine Can cause us to shine!
The Gospel (Good News) isn’t that you can love yourself. It’s that God so loved you that He gave His only Son . . .”
Me to me love, From me to me, Stays stuck in me. Lord, help me see And love both My neighbor and My enemy.
Self-love doesn’t go beyond me to anyone else. To love one another we need to embrace neighbor-love.
I continually sense a tender wooing to enter deeper into spontaneous, unforced, and unprogrammed heart-to-heart interaction with the living Jesus. I think guilt, rebellion, and pride are the biggest blockers of our awareness of God’s love for us. Those are overcome by embracing humility, confession, repentance, and the direct, ongoing, and glorious revelation that we are being personally and deeply loved and transformed by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and invited to enter more fully into their intimacy.
Self-love often leads people down the deceptive path of self-gratification, but self-focused desires are never fully gratified.Many of the modern movements away from Christian morality use self-love as their justification.
People who refuse to heed their need for self-control often wind up being caught up in hedonism while calling it self-love.Self-love is often used to justify divorce, drunkenness, adultery, other sexual wrongdoing, and abortion.
Self-love wants to feel good. It grapples around for pleasure, but Christ’s love gives meaning and purpose.Self-love tends to gravitate towards self-focus and pride. Christ’s love for me is based on mercy and grace.
The more I strain To love myself The more I’m caught In a heavy chain. Instead of helping me gain Inner peace, It increases my pain. But when I bask In Jesus’ love for me I’m lifted to another plain.
Trying to love myself Takes lots of work. Accepting Jesus’ love Fills me with joy!
Christ’s love for me Is so amazing And life changing. Seeing what a treasure I am in His eyes Frees me from The back-breaking burden Of trying to love myself.
Christians are sometimes compared to an army — onward Christian soldiers. But no army trains its soldiers to love themselves.
The Second Greatest Commandment wasn’t given to justify self-love but to direct the care and concern you have for yourself toward your neighbor.No amount of self-love that I could ever give myself can even register in my heart compared to Jesus’ great love for me.
Should Christians be self-lovers? A loud voice from Heaven said this about Christ-followers: “They triumphed over him (the devil) by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” Revelation 12:11.
If Jesus wants His followers to love themselves, why did He require self-denial? “Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow Me.” –Matthew 16:24.
Why does the Bible put being “lovers of self” as the first in a list of sins characteristic to the last days? –2 Timothy 3:4.The Bible says: “Join with me in suffering like a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” That sounds like self-sacrifice, not self-love.
The Bible’s “love chapter” says that love isn’t boastful, proud, or self-seeking. A self-love focus seems to contradict that.Self-love can make us forget about our neighbor.
That love, care, and concern you’ve been giving to yourself; give it to your neighbor.I believe that’s why God gave the Second Greatest Commandment.You can “love your neighbor as yourself,” but to “love your enemies” you have to go beyond self-love to God’s supernatural love
Self-love doesn’t like and usually tries to avoid the low place of humility, brokenness, and being “poor in spirit.” Speaking in tongues takes us beyond self-love by sweeping away self-focus and fixing our attention on the risen Jesus.
It’s much more powerful to focus on adoring and obeying the living Jesus than to spend time and effort trying to love yourself.When I speak in tongues, I lose my self-concern as rivers of living water flow out of my innermost being and focus me on Jesus.The more I speak in tongues the more I’m aware of Jesus’ presence and love and the less need I feel to love myself.
When I pray in tongues it’s like I’m spiritually hang-gliding. Jesus is hanging on to me and causing me to gloriously soar with Him.
I believe that every Christian can pray in tongues, but many don’t receive that gift because of reasons like misunderstanding, fear, unbelief, or pride. (I don’t think any person alive on the planet is 100% free of the sins of fear, unbelief, and pride.)
Speaking in tongues is like opening a faucet deep inside you that releases a surging flow of God’s presence as unknown words spontaneously pour out of your mouth. When I speak in tongues, I sense God’s presence and love as if I was in an amazingly anointed agape gathering.
Often, when I wake up in the night, I lay peacefully in bed and pray in tongues silently in my mind. That breaks my self-love-focus and before long I’m asleep.
In 1 Corinthians Paul says “I would you all speak in tongues . . .” He goes on to say he would rather that we prophesy, but that doesn’t negate that he wants all to speak in tongues. Speaking in tongues is like walking on water. In both cases we of our own accord take the action. We walk in faith and God keeps us from sinking. We move our lips in faith and do the speaking and God releases tongues the moment we begin to speak (not before). If Peter had passively waited in the boat until he saw the water become solid, he would have never walked on water.
The most powerful tools in my Christian life are: 1) Hearing and obeying God’s inner promptings, 2) Daily Bible reading with an open heart, 3) Frequently praying in tongues, 4) Praying and basking in the Spirit with other people, and 5) Being quick to confess, turn away from, and avoid sin.
According to the Bible’s “love chapter” I’m not very good at love. I need to rely on God’s supernatural love, not on my self-love.Self-love makes us want to hide our sins like Adam and Eve did. God’s love empowers us to confess, turn away from and avoid sins.
According to the dictionary you can’t have a love relationship with yourself. A relationship is ‘the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected.'”
If you feel like you’re overgrown with emotional, mental, and spiritual weeds, you’ve been ignoring your soul’s soil.If Christians sought the spiritual fruit of self-control as much as we try to love ourselves, we’d experience more inner healing.
O that Christ’s people Would regularly Come together In agape gatherings And let God’s love Freely flow from Their innermost being To pour out on Jesus And on each another Until the whole world Says in astonishment, “Look how they love One another!” (That’s ekklesia!)
On Monday morning Sunday’s gone And church has faded From the rear-view mirror. That’s the time to move To the passenger seat And let the living Jesus Drive you to all The destinations That He has planned For you during the week.
Any gathering that doesn’t lavishly overflow with God’s agape love falls far short of the New Testament ekklesia. Ekklesia sets Christianity free from religious organization and control!People who respond to sincere criticism of church with denial or defensiveness are on the wrong side of history’s Reformation.
Church isn’t the primary time or place to focus on Jesus. Daily life is! Throughout the day let the risen continually saturate your mind and your heart with His presence, power, and love. Let “Christ in you” gloriously surge in and through you in all you say and do.
To pastor is to train and empower people to follow and obey the alive Jesus with God’s agape love. It’s not about giving them lots of religious lectures.
E. Stanley Jones who was an American Methodist missionary to India wrote: “This is the central weakness of organized Christianity—it preaches salvation through Christ, but not salvation in Christ.” He also wrote that it is an amazing discovery that people “. . . may have Jesus without the system that has been built up around Him in the West.”
Organized Christianity and Spirit-led Christianity rarely work together. Organized Christianity tends to hinder the freedom of the Holy Spirit. I believe that Jesus wants to set Christianity free from the domination of human organization.
Organized Christianity, Like a closed retail store, Keeps people Stuck at the door. It doesn’t train them To enter in And to begin To actively adore And fully surrender To the risen Jesus 24/7/365.
Life’s a trip That will trip You up. Don’t stay down. Let Jesus Lift you up.
We can’t Plead the fifth And receive God’s mercy At the same time. Mercy begins When we confess Our sins.
Have appreciation For God’s creation And adoration For the Creator.
Jesus is the vine. We are the branches. It’s time to thrive And be really alive Hang with Jesus 24/7/365.
Self-forgiveness and self-love are based on things that you try to do. God’s forgiveness and God’s love are based on what God has done for you. Rely on God working in you, not on your own self-effort.
An older woman who was in love with Jesus confessed something to me that she had been trying to forgive herself for over many decades. She wept as she told me how as a young adult, she had helped a boyfriend sink the body of a man who he had murdered. I was weeping with her. Suddenly I found myself saying in a bold, firm voice, something like: “You’re forgiven! The blood of Jesus has washed you clean.” I repeated it several times. Her mouth fell open and in a moment of revelation her tears changed from great remorse to great relief. The great sin that she couldn’t forgive herself for was washed away by faith in the blood and finished work of Jesus.
Too many people are using self-effort trying to forgive themselves and failing over and over again, when all they need is to accept, receive, and truly rely on Christ’s forgiveness. If you have confessed any sin with sincere remorse and repentance, I say unto you: “You are forgiven! The blood of Jesus has washed you clean!”
Your being loved and forgiven can’t be based on your feelings and self-effort. Self-love and self-forgiveness are built on the shaky foundation self, not on the solid rock of the risen Jesus. Don’t focus on whether you feel forgiven and loved. Focus on the fact that you are forgiven and loved!
Still having trouble forgiving and/or loving yourself? Apostle Paul’s statement, “I consider my life worth nothing to me,” sounds like he wasn’t good at it either.However, awe-fully basking in God’s love and forgiveness for you is so fulfilling that it will relieve any need you feel to love and forgive yourself.
Self-love and self-forgiveness are like trying to use your own power and effort to remove a logjam one log at a time. However, it’s much more effective to open wide the floodgates of your heart and let God’s love and forgiveness come roaring in and wash your logjam away in an instant.
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 