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.
Greek cities in the ancient world were governed by open Town Hall Meetings, where any citizen could speak, which they called “The Ekklesia.” When Jesus chose a name for a gathering of His people, He called it My Ekklesia (Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting).
The body of Christ needs to rediscover Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting. It’s a gathering where the living Jesus is free to demonstrate His reality through anyone present.God’s intent is that “now through the ekklesia (Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting) the manifold wisdom of God would be made known.” –Eph. 3:10.
Jesus wants His followers to be living stones that He can use to build His spiritual house–His Town Hall Meeting. –1 Peter 2:4-5.He is calling present day followers to be “built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit.” –Eph. 2:22. Living stones need to be built together on the living Jesus, not on religious programs or organizations.
Christians need to depend on the only unshakable Rock–the living Jesus who is the Cornerstone which religious builders rejected.Jesus wants to demonstrate the kingdom of God by building His Town Hall meeting on that Rock through the supernatural revelation that He is the Messiah–the Christ, the Son of the Living God. –Mt. 16:16-20.
When we gather in Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting to wait for His direct revelation, He gives us the keys to demonstrate the kingdom of God–the government of the living Jesus. –Mt.16:19.Jesus’ Town Hall Meetings manifest the kingdom of God because, unlike the Greek ekklesia, they’re built on sharing Divine revelation, not on free speech.
The buildings where the Greek ekklesia met crumbled. However, Jesus assured His followers that the gates of Hell will not be able to overcome His ekklesia. It’s not a physical building made of stones, but an assembly of “living stones” brought together and led by the living Jesus, Himself.
WiFi is invisible but that doesn’t prevent me from connecting with it. Same with the invisible Jesus.You can’t see the invisible Jesus but you can feel His presence when you let Him live and work in your heart.
People aren’t satisfied to hear a weekly lecture about WiFi. They want to be personally connect to it. That’s the way I feel about Jesus.
Trying to be a Christian while ignoring the invisible Jesus is like trying to post on Facebook while offline. However, when Christians have an ongoing connection with the invisible Jesus, they’re continually spiritually fed by Christ living in them.
The physical Jesus entered God’s supernatural dimension. The invisible Jesus returned to earth with the Holy Spirit.The visible indications of Jesus’ invisible presence are the characteristics that the Bible calls the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22).
The invisible Jesus can’t be contained or monopolized by organizations called churches. Let Him live in and thru you. The invisible Jesus is the essential part of Christianity.
When Christ-followers gather and connect with the invisible Jesus, He moves them around with the gentle breeze of His inner wind.Like touching your phone, if you touch Jesus with your heart, it pulls up invisible connections and enables you to stream His flow.
To gather as Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting allows a group of people to consciously connect with and stream the invisible Jesus together.Spirituality mature believers (elders) serve as overseers (like officials in football) when Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting gathers.Watching the living Jesus invisibly lead His Town Hall Meeting is an incredible experience.
The kingdom of God enables conscious connection with the invisible Jesus and lets Him continually stream inside you.Those who are willing to hear, let them stream what the invisible Jesus is saying to His Town Hall Meeting. (Revelation 2:7.)
Every lie you tell makes truth harder to find. Every twist on truth distorts it. Lies dis honesty. If we humans were as good as we try to make people think that we are, the world would be in much better shape.
Lying doesn’t sugar coat life. It vandalizes it. The truth is the most reliable story and I’m sticking to it.
The truth doesn’t need large numbers of supporters. It is what it is.
Honesty is simple. Lying is complicated. Simplify. Truth is more valuable than money, yet people continually toss truth aside.
Before you say something, give it the lie detector test. Run it by your conscience. To lie is to welcome ongoing fear–the fear that your lies will someday be exposed.
Anytime you open your mouth, or type on a keyboard, you have the opportunity to be honest. If you don’t want to feel guilty, tell the truth.
Beware. Words can express half truths, the whole truth, or no truth. Humans can hide the truth, but we can’t change it.
Second lies are easier to tell than the first. The world needs more peacemakers and fewer pain-makers.
Dishonest people attempt to deny reality. Honest people courageously face it. Truth will outlast lies and one day rise to the surface.
When you see facts As threats You’re in debt To dishonesty.
To disguise The truth Is unwise And full Of lies.
If you embrace deceit You don’t defeat The truth, But you do delete Your self-esteem.
It’s easier to tell A pack of lies Than it is To “single-ize” One solitary lie.
The living Jesus wants to lead Town Hall Meetings for the kingdom of God. Will we let Him?
Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting (JTHM–“Ekklesia” in Greek) is an assembly of believers, called together to hear and be led by the Spirit.If you’ve never attended Jesus’ Town Hall Meetings, you’ve missed out on amazing demonstrations of His presence and love.
Learn to hear what the Spirit is saying to Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting, the gathered body of Christ.Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting is built on the rock of revelation and Hell’s city gates can’t prevent it from invading human hearts.
Jesus builds His Town Hall Meeting on the rock of revelation. It depends on people having ears to hear what the Spirit is saying.Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting is a gathering where we lay down our opinions and then listen to and do what the Spirit says instead.
When Christ-followers gather as Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting, to listen to and obey the Spirit, Hell is driven out of people’s heart.Unfortunately, Christians have been trained to listen to what the preacher is saying, but not to what the Spirit is saying.
Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting allows ordinary people to share from their heart as they are prompted by the Spirit.The revelation-based, Jesus-led Town Meeting is built around humble, heart-felt interaction with Him and with one another. It is a love fest between the living Jesus and His followers.
A meeting where Christians are passive and unengaged isn’t the revelation-based Town Hall Meeting (Ekklesia) Jesus describes in Matthew 16.Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting is a gathering where His followers meet to listen to the Spirit and then say and/or do what He says.It gathers to give every member of His body the opportunity to share what the Spirit is saying to them.
The living Jesus is the “Head of the body”–His Town Hall Meeting.The “epistles” in the Bible are letters that were written to Jesus’ Town Council Meetings in various cities.
Follow the living Jesus. Be Spirit-led. Where do you go to Jesus’ Town Hall Meeting?Jesus said that He would build His revelation-based Town Hall Meeting, but over the centuries it morphed into church.
Many people want to ignore, hide, or deny the fact that Black lives didn’t matter in much of America’s history. However, ignoring and/or justifying racism in the past or present is divisive. Here are a few historical facts.
Black lives didn’t matter when they were sold to the highest bidder and forcibly separated from their families.
Black lives didn’t matter when the Founding Fathers refused to apply the principles of America’s founding documents to Black people.
Black lives didn’t matter when slaves were whipped or tortured in America for not fully cooperating with the people who were stealing their labor and trafficking them.
Black lives didn’t matter when they were frequently insulted, mocked, and looked down on by White people & in American media.
Black lives didn’t matter when more than 4,000 Black people were lynched by White mobs as courts and law enforcement rarely held anyone accountable.
Black lives didn’t matter when Black people were made to live under the continual threat of violence if they didn’t “stay in their place.”
Black lives didn’t matter when the United States Supreme Court legalized Jim Crow laws that treated Black people as if they didn’t matter.
Black lives didn’t matter when Black people weren’t allowed to testify in court.
Black lives didn’t matter when they were treated differently and denied equal rights because of their skin color.
Black lives didn’t matter when Black people weren’t allowed equal access to jobs and equal pay for equal work.
Black lives don’t matter if the police are more willing to kill an unarmed Black person than an unarmed White person.
Black lives don’t matter when their long history of pain and heartbreak is denied and unheard.
Black lives didn’t matter when they were subjected to race massacres in Tulsa (1921), Chicago (1919), Detroit (1943), New York (1863), Washington (1919), Springfield, MO (1908), East Saint Louis (1917), Memphis (1866), Wilmington, VA (1898), Elaine, AR (1919), Atlanta (1906), Vicksburg, MS (1874), Clinton, MS (1875), Eufaula, MS (1874), Camila, GA (1868), Slocum, TX (1910), Colfax, LA (1873), Opelousas, LA (1868), Thibadox, LA (1867), New Orleans (1876), St. Bernard Parish, LA (1868), Rosewood, FL (1923), Ocoee, FL (1920) and various other places.
Want freedom? When people are free They will disagree And see Things differently.
We have the right to try to persuade others. We don’t have the right to verbally attack, manipulate, or coerce them. Insulting people is not, and never has been, a human right. It’s simply unkindness.
Respecting human rights begins with respecting the right of people to disagree with you.To verbally attack and/or try to intimidate someone for simply disagreeing with you is to assault their right to free speech.My freedom of speech doesn’t give me the right to scorn, insult, or belittle other people.
Freedom and rights are not the same thing. As humans we have the freedom to do wrong, but that doesn’t make doing wrong a right. Just because you are free to do something doesn’t mean you have a right to do it. If you claim something as a right, but doing it bothers your conscience, it’s probably a sin, not a right.
If you claim something as a human right, you have no right to deny that right to other people.The American Declaration of Independence proclaims that rights are God-given & inalienable, not that they are earned or deserved.
If you’re on social media, watch TV, or follow politics, then you know that the right to not be offended doesn’t exist.We all have the right to disagree with other people’s opinions and/or beliefs, but we don’t have to be mean about it.
Too often people surrender the most basic human right: The right to think original thoughts.
A closed heart never grows into a big heart. A closed heart suffers alone but an open heart flourishes with joyful and inspiring insights.
Life is a mixture of pain and joy. When you close your heart to pain, you also close it to joy.Trying to protect yourself from having a caring heart is like trying to protect yourself from the oxygen in the air.
When you sit down and have an open, one-to-one conversation with anyone on the planet, you discover that they’re a lot like you. Human differences are paltry. Human similarities are profound.
If you’re afraid of opening up your heart, be courageous. Open your heart like an unfolding flower and you’ll experience the warmth of being human. Closed hearts are stagnant and need to open up to fresh air.
Love that last requires a heart that refuses to be shut down by pain. A closed heart stays overcrowded with worries, pain, and anxiety, because it has no outlets.When we hear a person’s words but don’t hear their heart, we mistakenly believe that we’ve listened to them.
An open heart allows love to freely flow. A closed heart shuts it down.When we open our heart, we forget about self and begin to flow with growing compassion for others. An open heart loses its self-focus in the joy of encouraging others.
When you open your heart to understanding, you’ll begin to know more than you can ever figure out with your mind.A broken heart is like a broken coconut shell. It gives you free access to the milk of life.
You weren’t created to be a secret agent. Bond! Open your heart and bond with other people. Pride is the greatest obstacle to an open heart. You control the door to your heart. No one can open it without your permission.
Have an adventure today. Find someone you think is different than you and listen to them with an open heart.A closed heart tries to hide itself from hurt, but an open heart gives hurt no place to hide.
People who are courageous enough to open their heart find that other people will follow their lead.A tender, open heart is the greatest treasure there is. It’s the pearl of great price. A hard heart and a hard conscience make for a hard life.
Open your heart and people will follow. Compassion is contagious. A closed heart is a blind heart. If you train your heart to stay open to people, compassion will continually flow from within you. Trying to protect your heart by keeping it closed is like trying to protect your phone by keeping it shut down.
Closing your heart minimizes your capacity to care and imprisons you behind the cold, hard bars of hurt, anger, and resentment.A closed heart is easily deceived by desires and feelings. It is continually alienated from true self-awareness. The more you let your heart care, the more of life’s joy you will share.
Live trees dance with the wind. Dead trees resist it ’til it breaks them. Take a chance and let your heart flow with joyful dancing. To truly experience inner harmony, you need to train your heart to sing on key. A closed heart is deficient in joy receptors.
When you close your heart in response to pain, you don’t heal it; you lock it in. When you let pain shut down your heart, temporary pain becomes permanent bitterness.
People connect when they’re honest about their brokenness. They collide when they protect their pride.If you listen without analysis or defensiveness, you’ll soon begin to hear someone’s heart.The shortest distance between two conflicting viewpoints is an open heart willing to see both sides. Closed hearts collide. Open hearts connect.
An open heart so overflows with light that there’s no place for darkness to hide.A closed heart has accepted being fake and doesn’t want anybody to shake it up or wake it up.
The more you analyze people, the less you are able to connect with them heart-to-heart. When love is kept shut up in the heart, it fossilizes. Freely show and express it!
When a broken heart collapses inwardly, it withers in pain. When it opens up, it heals and connects with other human hearts. A closed heart stays ensnared in its own feelings and desires.
When you open your heart to people, you discover that they are truly amazing.A closed heart projects fantasies onto people. An open heart wants to hear what people think and feel. It learns to see thru other people’s eyes and hear thru their ears.
A closed heart has learned to encounter people superficially and to ignore their needs and concerns.Your heart doesn’t need to be protected from transparency and trust. Those are the things that heal it! When walls are welcomed by the mind, they soon surround the heart.
Rigid thinking and a closed heart will create much misunderstanding and conflict in your life. The more you close and hide your heart the more you’ll open up to lying and dishonesty.
Unity doesn’t come from agreement or logic. It happens when people open their heart to care about one another.
A closed heart blocks out God’s whisperings. It falsely believes that He’s not speaking. A closed heart in unaware of miracles.
A closed heart is blind And can easily find Excuses to be unkind.
Unkindness is weakness. It takes no strength to be cruel. To be unkind to people is to invite them to be unkind to you.
Unkind words publicly display a lack of the courage to care. Unkindness is egotistical and selfish. It’s often used as an attempt to hide personal weakness.If you want people to earn and/or deserve your kindness, then you’re not really being very kind.
If you can’t express your views without being unkind, your views are more emotional than rational. Unkindness reveals a lack of confidence in what you’re saying.
Unkindness snowballs. Try not to add to people’s pain. Dare to be unkindness-free. If you train yourself to ignore and forget unkind words, you’ll be much happier!
The English language has such a huge vocabulary that nothing needs to be expressed in unkind words.Profanity consists of unkind words.
My heroes excel at kindness and gracefully speaking the truth. I want to do that, too. The best cure for conflict is unkind words left unsaid.When you respond in kind to unkind words, you put the idea in people’s mind that those words might be true about you.
The Bible says, “Be kind to one another.” (Ephesians 4:32.) Unkindness is a sin! When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” He meant, “Be kind to unkind people.” (The ability to be kind to unkind people is true maturity.)
A living water drought Will drown your heart In doubt Unless Jesus’ rivers Are allowed to flow out.
When the songs are sung And the sermon’s done, How much do you Flow with God’s Son?
Anything less than daily hearing and obeying the living Jesus falls short of biblical Christianity.A religion people control is not the faith presented in the Bible.
To pray for God’s will to be done and then to do what you want to do is to contradict your prayer.The kingdom of God begins to happen anyplace where people are surrendering to King Jesus’ direct control.
Christian leaders should prepare the way and create an environment where the living Jesus is free to take control.We have the freedom to disrupt God’s control–to reject His will by follow our feelings and desires instead.
It’s much easier to give a talk about Jesus than it is to surrender a church service to His control.If you (or some other person) is controlling a meeting, the living Jesus isn’t.
Grace doesn’t replace God’s commandments. It restores our relationship with Him so He can do His will by living in and overflowing thru us.
Religion can be a vaccine that tricks us into believing we already have all of Jesus we need and should resist His working in us. Try not to let religion vaccinate you and give you immunity to hearing the voice of God for yourself.
Church tries to change people from the outside, but the living Jesus and the Bible change people from the inside out.Church is seen as the delivery system of Christianity, but when I read the Bible it looks like the living Jesus delivers it. We need to be infected by Jesus. Perhaps church needs the attitude of John the Baptist: “He (Jesus) must increase but I must decrease.”
The more Christianity
Is systematized
And analyzed,
The more it is
Anesthetized.
It needs to be
Revitalized.
When the living Jesus Is allowed to be In control, The kingdom of God Shows up.
To pray Is not just What you say. It’s how you hear And obey Jesus Every day.
Multitudes of Christians have been trained to be more dependent on the organization called church than on the living Jesus.Christianity’s been systematized into the passive, weekly attendance of a highly organized “service,” but it’s much more than that. Christians are supposed to be led (shaped, directed, guided) by the Spirit, not by a religious system. Romans 8:14.
When Christianity is limited to commemorating what Jesus did in the past, it’s incomplete. He wants to demonstrate His presence now! Direct connection with Jesus is much more powerful than informative talks about Him.
You can’t (and don’t want to) “go to church” 24/7/365, but you can continually interact with the living Jesus. Try it!If Christians would focus on and listen to the living Jesus, as much as we do preachers, it would revolutionize our life. Jesus wants to speak directly to your heart and also thru the Bible. The Bible isn’t a complex system known as systematic theology. It is powerful words that set humble human hearts on fire!
If you’re having trouble getting your conscience to forgive your sins, the living Jesus can help.The living Jesus wants to train you to make your nervous system your friend instead of your enemy.The goal of church should be to inspire people to actively and passionately pursue their own relationship with the living Jesus.
To repent is to continually get closer to the living Jesus. It’s a lifestyle, not a once and done thing.Too many Christians live like they are indifferent to Jesus instead of being passionate about Him.
Breathe better. Wholesome laughter is great exercise for your respiratory system. “The joy of the Lord is our strength.”
Free Gas for Your Think Tank -- Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement 