I want God to ignite my words with a match made in Heaven so that they burn in the heart of everyone who reads them or hears them, making them a furnace that spreads God’s warmth and light around the world.
Every day You pick Your own bouquet, Weeds That plant The seeds Of misery, Or flowers Of kindness And hope.
Filling your mind With bouquets of weeds Only succeeds In making you miserable.
Everyday Gather good thoughts Into a fragrant And beautiful bouquet Of inner peace And make it The centerpiece Of your mind.
In a balanced bouquet All the flowers Contribute to the beauty. One big sunflower, Towering over a crowd Of little pansies, Is an ineffective way To make a bouquet. May all God’s people Be allowed to share The beauty of their testimony When the body of Christ Gathers in His name.
True mental wealth Isn’t information that The mind has memorized, But a mindset Overflowing with inner peace.
Too much analysis can deconstruct awe and wonder and make you feel like your life’s just a blunder.Spiritual blindness may be humanity’s biggest problem. The ordinary-izing of the wonders of everyday life hardens our heart to the spectacular world that we live in and to the actions of God that occur both within us and around us, until God sightings become extremely rare.
Breathing the air of arrogance can seem aromatic, but it’s very toxic.Instead of deconstructing the Bible with my analysis, I read the Bible to deconstruct my pride.When my mind and heart are being bombarded by tormenting belligerence, I shelter with the risen Jesus.
God’s touch on a human heart is as tangible as a gentle touch on the skin. Religion without personally experiencing God is like a baby’s pacifier. It offers comfort but no nourishment. Listen-to-a-lovely-little-lesson Christianity falls far short of the inner transformation and daily interaction that the living Jesus offers!
God wants to show you scenes that eye hasn’t seen. Then you can look at eternal things that are unseen and behold His glory! (See 1 Corinthians 2:9 and 10, 2 Corinthians 3:18, 2 Corinthians 4:18, Hebrews 11:27.
After a tormenting night, I was laying on my couch, trying to get some more sleep while praying and resisting the worry that was trying to overcome me. Suddenly, the sun was in my eyes annoying me, so I got up and noticed the scene in this picture on my pillow. (I had never noticed it before.) Then the words came to my mind, “Trust in My promises.”
When church focuses On intellect, Christians neglect To connect Heart-to-heart With Jesus.
Let all the Christians (Including the preachers) On a certain Sunday In a particular town Ask God to send them To a church other than The one they normally attend And when they gather Say and do Whatever the risen Jesus Tells them to. Would that be chaos or glory? I believe that the Holy Spirit Would take control And the glory of God Would flood that town With rivers of living water.
When church is always presented as a 1-man presentation, there’s no room for anyone else to manifest the gifts of the Spirit.
–Creativity– In the stillness of quiet Sounds of silence Gather together And arrange themselves To compose this poem, Words that I didn’t hear With my physical ear. From what source Did they appear In my mind? Ancient Greeks said The silent inner sounds Of inspirational creativity Come from goddesses That they called muses. The early Christians believed That inspiration flows From Christ in you And taught how Not to quench God’s Spirit.
Let me explain a new word I coined–explan-actions. It means “to show and demonstrate your faith with your actions, not just to proclaim them with your words–to go beyond making plans and having good intentions and to begin to implement a daily lifestyle of caring about and serving other people.”
Modern Christianity is desperately lacking in explan-actions–actual demonstrations of the presence and power of the living Jesus, instead of merely presenting lectures and ceremonies about religious plans and ideas. Churches give too many explanations of theology and far too few explan-actions that demonstrate the reality of the risen Jesus. They consistently ignore the Bible verse that declares: “Faith without works is dead,” and settle for one-man Sunday talks instead.
According to the Bible, the body of Christ is made up of many parts, not two parts–a preacher giving religious explanations and a congregation passively listening to the preacher’s presentation (clergy and laity). When the body of Christ is set up to be 1% mouth and 99% ears, it vastly veers away from many Bible verses.
All Christians need to be engaging in explan-actions, not just while attending church, but in every area of life. We all need to demonstrate the reality of Jesus with explicit actions that convince people of God’s presence and kindness. We need to do more than to passively hope that people will somehow absorb it implicitly.
Here are a few examples of explan-actions:
Doing unexpected acts of kindness.
Considering other people’s needs and feelings before your own.
Asking someone you have offended to forgive you.
Refusing to cooperate with evil.
Sacrificing to serve someone.
Offering to pray with someone who is hurting.
Openly humbling yourself.
Refusing to lie or be dishonest.
Giving money to someone who needs help.
Peacemaking.
Showing mercy by forgiving all who have offended you.
Loving your enemies.
Blessing those who curse you.
Pursuing justice for all.
When the Gospel of Christ is demonstrated by consistent explan-actions, it unites people by leading us out of darkness into the light of Christ and transforming our heart so that we can see the truth that sets us free from the deceptions that cause divisiveness. When we see the truth that all people are loved by God and created in His image, we will embrace them as fellow human beings, regardless of our differences. By the power and presence of Christ living inside us, we will even obey Jesus’ command to love and to bless our enemies through explan-actions.
Christ-bearers have a special kinship as brothers and sisters in the Lord. Even if they’ve never met (and come from different backgrounds and racial groups), they recognize an inner, spiritual relationship when they encounter each other in the Spirit. I wrote a book about how God has often connected me heart-to-heart with people who look and think differently than I do. It’s called: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color Kind. Search for it on Amazon.
The transfiguration of Christ Isn’t theology to figure out But a calling to live out. We can learn to be still And listen to Jesus, Ignoring our own impulsive and Self-motivated marching orders That satisfy our desire To build monuments. Then Christ’s inner presence Can release a movement Of living water That continually flows And ever-grows Within and around us! Instead, church has listened to And built like Peter, (Even building three chapels On Mt. Tabor Where it is believed that Jesus’ transfiguration occurred.) It’s time to learn To listen to and follow The inner promptings Of the Son of God As we relish the words Of the law and the prophets And the holy writings Of the first Christians Until we’re transfigured From within And our faces shine With the light of the Son.
Jesus offers inner rivers Of flowing water, Not stale puddles Muddied by routine.
For the calm of your life Let Jesus’ pure And peaceful stillness Undisturbed by desires Replace your inner storm With calm contentment.
Life is not designed To be dominated, Driven and defined By desire.
Instead, be still and go With God’s gentle Inner flow, Then you will know And grow With Jesus.
Jesus is like sunshine Radiating in human hearts For all to see.
Few people want To sit indoors and hear Weekly lectures About the sun. They’d rather Be in the sun’s presence Basking in and absorbing Its beautiful brightness. That’s how I feel About the Son of God!
Jesus shines With glorious radiance, As sunlight Beaming in my soul!
Ceremonies and sermons Can describe God’s Light, Like a scientist describing the sun, But until Jesus enlightens our eyes Faith hasn’t fully begun.
Spiritual awakening happens When the light of the risen Jesus Breaks through the shadows Of religion’s tanning beds.
Like the sun shinning In the atmosphere, Let Jesus shine In your inner sphere.
There’s no need to settle For a tanning bed When real sunlight abounds. There’s no need to settle For programmed religion When the living Jesus Is brightly shinning As the Light of the world!
Look! Amazing grace Let’s you behold The glorious face Of God’s Son.
Clouds try to block Jesus’ sunshine From my heart But when their storms Quench His light, I watch and wait Until His brightness Breaks through their night.
Remove the shades of sin So the light of Christ Can freely shine in within.
You don’t have to Sit in a church yard To experience the sunshine And you don’t have to Sit thru a church service To experience the Son of God.
When Jesus prayed, “Your kingdom come,” He wasn’t talking About Christendom Where church and state Compelled all to hum In obligatory Unison.
Finding passionate, heart-felt, Spirit-led Christianity is sometimes like finding Waldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “Where in Christendom is the Christian?”
To call the world today “post-Christian” is a misnomer. The world has never been Christian. Jesus told His followers, “You do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world.”
The world of Christendom was never a “Christian world.” It was a world of compulsion and coercion that was full of obligatory religious acts. It frequently persecuted people who seriously tried to follow and obey the risen Jesus.
When Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world, He turned them down. Christendom, however, embraced and glorified political power.Christendom, religious authoritarianism set in motion by Emperor Constantine’s use of Christianity for political purposes, is a great Christian heresy that binds church and state together.
When you examine history, you see that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was not the Lord of Christendom and its compulsion, conflicts, cruelty, wars, and authoritarianism. When setting Christendom into motion, Constantine declared the Cross a sign of military conquest, not the act of God’s love.
Christendom tried to prevent people from having direct access to Scripture. We continue to see the remnants of that today when church members are trained to spend more time listening to sermons than reading the Bible for themselves.
For more than a thousand years, people born in church-and-state lands, were baptized as infants and declared Christians by birth.I grew up in the final days of Christendom when people were still assumed to be Christians because of their nationality.
In the aftermath of Christendom, the concept of church has splintered into thousands of divisions pointing out each other’s errors. Martin Luther set in motion a centuries-long process of fracturing and dismantling the authoritarian control of Christendom, that continues to this day and is clearing the way for Spirit-led Christianity.
For many centuries Christendom replaced early Christianity. It still lingers today.The body of Christ urgently needs to be an alternative town hall meeting, with God’s eternal perspective, not a partner in human government and manipulative control.
Having a relationship with the living Jesus is eternal. Church attendance only last about an hour.