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.
When desire overrides reason life is reckless. When reason overcomes desire sanity is restored.
Modeling your message is more powerful than meddling and manipulating. Kindness is more effective at changing a human heart than coercion is.
No matter what your role in life, as life rolls on, be a role model for good behavior, not an example of bad.Disagreeing with something someone does doesn’t mean that you’re judging or meddling in their life.
True love neither insults or attacks a sinner nor approves of or applauds sin.Love the sinner so much that love liberates him from his sin. “Love lifted me.”
Human-powered Christianity crawls in circles. Christ-powered Christianity soars in His Spirit.
God is working in you right now. Are you aware of what He’s doing?If the risen Jesus isn’t real to you every day, calling one day Easter seems to be pointless.
Because of pride, Reality is denied As people hide From truth.
Human nature is to meddle and to try to fix people “fix” people who we believe are broken (or messed up), even if they don’t think they are broken–even when they think we are the ones who are broken. To “fix” someone (to align them when what we believe) requires persuasion. We can’t do it by coercion. That only makes them push back.
Persuasion (salesmanship) requires kindness and logic; unkind debate won’t work. However, even if we “fix” someone by our persuasion, unless they are changed on the inside, their newly persuaded behavior will soon revert back to their old behavior.
Politics and laws and slogans and rules won’t change people. Genuine transformation requires a change of heart and that’s what the living Jesus offers to whosoever will surrender to, listen to, and obey Him. Living in a way that demonstrates Jesus’ presence and lifestyle to other people creates hunger and thirst for righteousness in their hearts and shows them that their hunger can be filled up with peace, healing, joy, and freedom from guilt and inner bondage. Christians need to stop meddling with accusation and begin modeling with love, joy and the rest of the fruit of the Holy Spirit.
Christianity that models Jesus is much more powerful than Christianity that meddles in people’s affairs. Try modeling Jesus’ lifestyle.
It takes courage to refuse to take a side, but rather to expose the flawed beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of both conservatism and progressivism. No human ideology is perfect and even if there was a perfect ideology, we humans would ruin its perfection by our flawed implementation of it. Jesus builds His ekklesia (the Greek word that was the name of the interactive city council in Greek city-states that is translated as church in most English Bibles) on the rock of supernatural revelation from God, independent of human governments and ideologies.
If the kingdom of God (body of Christ–ekklesia) has an ideology, it would be revelationism–individuals being continually led by and obeying the Holy Spirit–not by the flesh (human desires, feelings, and ideologies). That’s the difference between the kingdom of God and the world. People either follow and obey the voice of the living God or we follow and obey our desires, feelings, and ideologies. We can’t consistently do both at the same time.
When the Holy Spirit is allowed to freely lead, carnality recedes. When our carnality begins to recede, it causes both carnal conservatives and carnal progressives to be uncomfortable enough to confront and persecute us. We get it from both sides. But then, Jesus calls that a blessing. Don’t forget to count your uncomfortable blessings today!
To embrace Wrongful desires Is to lay down The resistance It requires To escape them.
No matter what you escape in your circumstances, if you’re still in bondage to your mind, feelings, and desires, you’re not free.When anxiety feels like a life sentence, remember that one uplifting sentence if allowed to penetrate your heart can set you free.
As humans, we need to escape self-focus, not to enable it. We have a greater need to escape from self than to escape to self. The more I flee from self-focus, the freer and happier I am.
To escape from tormenting thoughts, consistently read, repeat, memorize, and saturate yourself with hope-filled thoughts.
Conformity to what’s cool isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It quickly becomes a cage, a cell that crushes inner freedom.
Jesus is the ultimate escape experience. Through Him we can escape the bondage of our own thoughts, opinions, feelings, and desires.
Self-focus isn’t an escape game. It’s a real escape room that holds us in bondage until we embrace Christ’s escape experience.Self is a prison. We can love our prison or leave it to follow Jesus. “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves . . .”
To “prepare the way of the Lord,” we need to get self out of the way. “He must increase, but I must decrease.”Jesus is the way–the escape route thru the rough realities of life, who’ll lead those who follow Him, to inner freedom and peace.
I love to relish the radiance of the risen Jesus–to bask in the beauty of His presence!When Jesus draws me into His presence, He becomes my escape artist and fills me with “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”
A Christ-centered human heart functions differently than a self-dominated heart. Get to know the risen Jesus, not with your intellect, but with your heart and life. As long as commitment to Christ is confined to a particular church, we’re tempted to conform to that church’s culture more than to Jesus.
--The Bible’s Escape Experience--
O taste and see.
Partake of the divine nature.
Come unto Me.
Escape from evil desires!
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” assumes that we already love ourselves. Just look at all the time, attention, and care we humans lavish on ourselves. Jesus used self-love as an example of how to love others, not as a command to focus on self.
Take care of your neighbor’s needs like you take care of your own. Overlook your neighbor’s faults the way you overlook your own. Celebrate your neighbor’s achievements as much as you celebrate your own. The more we focus on helping and loving others, the happier we’ll be.
Self-love is an example of how to love others, not a command to focus on self. Self-love is lot more popular than self-denial.
The more we focus on self, the more likely we are to make self a personal idol. Self-love too often leads to self-deification causing people to replace God with self.
Self-love’s a sign of the last days. “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves.” 2 Timothy 3:1. When self-love is unchecked by loving your neighbor, it leads to selfism.
Jesus assumes that people already love themselves. Instead of commanding self-love, I think Jesus meant: Give your neighbor some of the focus and concern that you have for yourself.
As humans, we are naturally self-centered beings. Perhaps we don’t need to learn to love ourselves more, but to deny ourselves.Selfism teaches that people are basically good, but the Bible states, “There is no one righteous, not even one.”
True self-care isn’t self-pampering. It’s striving to align your desires, emotions, and behaviors with God.
Which will we choose–God’s love or self-love? God’s love isn’t quantifiable–at least not by me. Isaiah said it best: “I am undone.” To get a glimpse of the greatness of God’s love we need to see our sin as the horrific rebellion against God that it is and not deny it or trivialize it. Seeing my sin from God’s perspective leaves me undone, like Isaiah in chapter six. Then when love covers my sin with mercy, grace, and the blood of Jesus, I experience undeserved and unquantifiable pardon, peace, purpose, power, and provision and all my heart can do is to continually praise and thank the living, resurrected Jesus!
When Christians watch, read, listen to, talk, text or post carnality, they’re welcoming demons into their life. If Christianity will decentralize from church focus, it can reestablish Christ focus.
Jesus invites us to come as we are. He never invites us to stay as we are. You can’t be a self-follower and be a Christ-follower at the same time.
As long as church builds institutions instead of training and releasing Christ-following disciples, it won’t have much power.
My heart is waking up to a deeper longing to “be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” and it’s a shocker! The “fullness of God” doesn’t allow me room for self-love. I’m learning that self-love and neighbor-love can’t coexist. Jesus put it this way: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Me.”
To love is to lose yourself through focusing on showing compassion, caring, and kindness to other people. Jesus quoted Leviticus 19:18; “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That verse doesn’t say to love your neighbor “along with yourself.” It says, “as” yourself. I believe it means “as a replacement for yourself.”
Because my will and my neighbor’s will are never perfectly aligned, my self-love becomes a hindrance to neighbor-love, and I have to choose between the two. Loving myself distracts me from loving my neighbor. The only way to truly love my neighbor as myself is to love my neighbor instead of myself–to shift the love and focus I have for myself to my neighbor. Self-love puts self ahead of neighbors. Since neighbor-love puts neighbors ahead of self it calls for intentional self-denial.
Turn your attention away from self-love and focus on neighbor-love. As Paul put it: “Consider others better than yourself.” Jesus showed us how to “love your neighbor as yourself” when He denied Himself, prayed “not My will, but Yours be done,” and then freely surrendered His life to die for others.
You can’t express deep adoration for Jesus if you’re not intensely aware of His presence, power, and majesty.If your heart isn’t overflowing with adoration for Jesus, maybe you’ve only heard about Him, but haven’t actually encountered Him.
If you will ponder God with your heart, you’ll gradually become aware of His presence. Then adoration will begin to flow from within you.
Adoration is to be so captivated by the presence of God that you abandon personal preferences in order to worship and obey Him.Genuine restoration with God produces passionate, ongoing adoration for Him.
We can admire Jesus while we do our own thing, but once we begin to adore Him, we’re forever changed from deep within. Any attempt to formalize, ritualize, and script adoration stifles its free expression.
If you’re not passionately in love with Jesus now, you’d probably be pretty bored with Heaven’s ongoing, adoring focus on Him. Without active adoration worship is rote. When adoration becomes a duty, it’s no longer adoration.
The more you accommodate The living Jesus, The more you’ll radiate His presence.
Rather than giving Jesus Passionate adoration, Church tends to become A mere oration.
Instead of cultivating
An atmosphere
Of actively adoring
The risen Jesus,
Church can settle for
Being boring.
This is my prayer and hope for Christians from Ukraine, Russia, and around the world:
May the body of Christ around the world begin to boldly and brightly be “the light of the world,” “a city set on a hill” that “cannot be hidden.” May we gather in open town meetings led by God’s Inner Light, the heart-igniting “Flame of God’s Love” called the Holy Spirit, who releases the presence and power of the living, resurrected Jesus Christ. May God’s city councils come out of the darkness of “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof” and become golden lampstands with the risen Jesus standing among them, like the ones in the book of Revelation.
(The Greek word translated as church in most English Bibles {ekklesia} is the name of the city council/town meeting in ancient Greek city-states. By losing that ancient truth contemporary Christianity has missed out on much of who we are and what is supposed to happen when we gather in Jesus’ name. May God bless, guide, and manifest His Living Word in world-wide ekklesias as Christ-follower learn to gather in Jesus’ name, and be empowered by entering into full obedience to His, direction, and presence.)
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 