Opening Doors

The verse today is "Not by might nor power but by My Spirit says the Lord". And again I am noticing what is happening. He is up to stuff and I have to go alone with it. But I think I may have noticed a key here!
Ever since I have decided not to blog anything that is detrimental to anyone and to make sure my thoughts as I write are purer, to clean up the "airwaves", it has made me have to think more "purely" about things, about people, about life.

Again there has been another door opened. I got to share some motivational gifts/personality stuff with a group of guys from Genesis Trust who come together to learn about getting back to work. Man, it was challenging and I had to be really on my toes. One of the guys was very anti God and the fact that most of the stuff I use has come from a Christian perspective it was a challenge. And the fact that he was as far the opposite motivation as I was as was possible we did great.
I could just feel through the whole thing God tugging on my heart and just leading my tongue. And I want more of that. I did slip up at one point where I shared some stuff about my childhood, and realised I had lost the plot but God in His graciousness gave me the courage to come back to it, to explain how I had moved on, had forgiven and how we all need to grow up and not blame our parents for stuff. So hopefully I did retrieve this for God, though I think it was Him who did the stuff.

Again too I am finding in conversation that I can just talk about God more, talk about Jesus more, and that it is become a more natural thing. But again this is a heart thing. And as I sort my heart He can open more doors for me!

John 3:27

John 3:27 "A man cannot receive anything unless it has been given from heaven" has really been speaking to me.

I get easily confused about how I can push at certain doors and they remain firmly closed and yet others just fly open. I would love to be more involved with prayer and prophecy in my congregation but the doors there seem to be very sticky, even though I am gaining an amazing relationship with the people involved in leading these things, but it just seems a slog to go further. And then out of the blue God suggests about encouraging a prayer group here in the town where I live, about 8 miles from where we do church. I chat with the pastor, apparently miss out on the welcome they wanted to give me and turn up a week after they had been expecting me, and then get the amazing pleasure of Ian and I being able to meet with the woman who heads things up at the moment with the prayer, praying for her, encouraging her and prophecying over the town and over her. Amazing! And this is what God said - that this time was what He has given us from heaven. And I do think that He has loads of people in the congregation we are at who do what we were blessed in doing with this lady.

Other things happen like that all the time and it is amazing. And what I think He said to me was about always having an open heart and an open spirit to go where He leads but to not get dispondent when He doesn't take me where I think I would like to go.

I was even thinking of how 10 years ago, after my marriage had split up and I moved back to somewhere I felt safe, that I had the job of praying for my neighbour's marriage and they are still together now. And yet if my own marriage hadn't failed then I wouldn't have been there to pray for them. I know God could've sent someone else but it was very odd to be able to do that from the place I was at the time.

I am going to learn more though of how to keep my eyes open to know what God has in heaven for me and to make sure my heart stays in a pure place of being able to receive that.

Jesus loves me this I know .........................................

I had an edited version of this published in our congregation's weekly magazine so thought I would share the whole of it with a wider audience -

I was doing a lot of thinking after Stephen Wood spoke on Sunday 5^th Oct. And really believing unless we totally get our heads round that whole thing that God is good all the time and that He loves us all the time then we have very little to offer the world.

It was interesting that it was the tree of knowledge that Satan tempted Adam and Eve and we are still being tempted with the whole desire for knowledge ever since. We cannot believe it unless we know! (Read Rick Joyner’s book Two Trees in the Garden for more on the why of this and where it has led us.)

Once we can truly say that God is good all the time and that He loves us all the time then the rest of the things will flow from that place.

I remember when I first became a Christian, maybe I was a wee bit naive, but when someone told me that as a Christian I needed to read the Bible every day I did. I read it so much, as I hadn’t got caught up with the whole thing about specific quiet times that I read it through at least four times in the first 2 years I was a Christian, and also devoured multitudes of other Christian books. Couldn’t get enough of it! And I believed what it said.

Read the Psalms, many of the Psalmists are having a really hard time of life and are being really open in what they think and feel. They have a very open relationship with God, but never do they say “If you loved me you would take this away”. No, they do often say “I don’t know how I can cope with this but even in all this I will praise you”.

Some great books on this are from Mervyn Caruthers, for example “Prison to Praise”. We need to know our Bibles more and then we will know that God is in total control. He is in charge and He does what He does because He is God.

Here is a quote from Pelagius, a Celtic saint: “There is no follower of Christ who is not at times perplexed by the suffering of good men and women. When we see a bad person suffer, we can interpret it as punishment for sin. So if an evil person contracts a painful and fatal illness whilst still young, if their house burns to the ground, if they lose their wealth in some dishonest transaction, we feel that justice is being done. But if a good person falls fatally ill in their youth, if an honest hardworking person becomes destitute, we are indignant. We cannot understand how God can permit such injustice.

Our indignation arises from superficial knowledge. We look at pain and pleasure, sorrow and joy, in shallow material terms. Yet a good person, even if undergoing great physical distress, still senses the serene peace of God deep within their soul. The loyal disciple of Christ who is compelled to live in poverty knows that they are sharing the poverty of Christ. And the Scripture assures us that in poverty and in agony of the soul Christ knew the heavenly joy of God”

And I think some of it is we want to share in the good things of Jesus but not in His suffering. We forget that Jesus was abused and misunderstood by most people for most of His life, from conception to crucifixion. But then if we knew and read our Bible then we would know that.

We do also need to know some of the deeper stuff because that is the meat which will also change our lives. If we know why God put the things in the tabernacle and why then we would understand so much more. We do need to get into the whole thing of why certain things are in the Bible and why certain things aren’t. But we need to do all this in the light of God is good all the time and He loves me all the time.

It has been prophesied many years ago that true revival will come when the Spirit and the Word are in unison, so let us start reading our Bibles more and hearing from God through them more and more and not keep waiting for the guy at the front to spoon feed us milk.

Hey let’s go for a revolution and break out of being fed and really get on with what Jesus commissioned us all to do – Go and make disciples of all nations!! – which we can only do when we know totally in our hearts that God is good all the time and God is love all the time, and also some of the deeper things, the meat that is in there. It says there will come a time when you will not need a teacher, but the Holy Spirit will teach you all you need to know. Well I am afraid that will only come about when we start reading the word as well as resting in the Sprit!

Exciting Confirmation

Well I am just checking my emails and Emerge update starts with the Bible verse that I have put at the top of my blog and Justin goes on to say about wanting to redeem the airwaves. Now I know this isn't an airwave but it is still something that drifts around in cyberspace - you can see I don't understand much about the intricacies of all this web stuff - but I do feel that God has confirm this morning what I was challenged on by a friend yesterday and confirmed by God in the early hours of this morning.
He is just so good.

A positive start

I have decided to start a new blog and to keep it very much on a positive front. Someone challenged me yesterday about some frustrated blog I had done and it got me thinking , so here I am at 6.30am up and writing
I think she was right too. Very much what I wrote was a frustration of the time but it should've been shared with the people concerned or just taken to God. I know I have used webspace often to have a go, to vent my frustrations and I do wonder what I have lost through it.
So now the plan is to really think through what I am saying. There is so much negativity out there that I really shouldn't be adding to it. And esp as a Christian I should be showing the hope I have inside, which I do know and believe in and if you talk to me it comes out, but what I have been showing of myself has been very negative at times.
I know I will still have frustrations of being a small voice in a big pond, where I use to be a big voice in a small pond. I will have all the time frustrations of the demands that this stage of home educating has on me, what with the degree of what Tabi is doing now, her ease at distraction and the number of miles we have to travel to get anywhere and do anything. I will still have that frustration of learning how to cope with being married to a man, lovely though he is, but they are very different from women!!!
But I am going to work through those things with friends, with my journal and with God. I am going to keep to the verse I have put on my header and let you, my readers, only see what is good, pure, noble, true and admirable. And if you, esp my friends, see anything that doesnt stick to this I give you the right to challenge me.