Jesus isn’t a little bird trying to fly away from you, He’s a man who is there for you to trust and lean on- a solid rock on which to stand. He’s not fluttering by and have to try to catch Him, He’s standing there with His arms open ready to embrace you.
If you know nothing else about the Bible but the fact that God sent His son to earth as a human baby to be stripped, beaten, spit upon and killed by the people He loves so much; if you know that a man tempted by sin but pure enough not to fall into it died and took the keys out of the devil’s hand and freed the captives from hell and ascended to Heaven, and you know that He is waiting for you to come to Him so Heaven can be yours too, then you know the greatest grace, mercy and miracle in the whole book. He wants you so come to Him.
Category: The Bible
Brave
Jesus was brave. We don’t often use this word for Him, certainly not during Christmas, but He was brave. He was scared, of course He was, but that didn’t stop Him. He was sick with fear at the Garden, He was in agony at the cross, sometimes I wonder if as a crying baby in a manger He was crying for the future and what was coming to pass. Don’t say that a baby couldn’t know those things, that weight was His reason for being here on earth- He was born to die. He knew what was coming yet He spoke anyway, He knew what it would cause yet He healed and prayed for people and loved the rejected, and prepared for what was coming. From the Manger to the cross Jesus was brave. I can only hope that in this dying world that wants to kill off anything that is still alive, that I will be brave too. Just like Jesus.
Fly free souls and know that He is coming again, this world is not ours, this death is not ours, this pain is not ours, because of a baby born under a star in a barn in a small town called Bethlehem. That baby was called Emmanuel, and He is still with us today.
Christmas light
They say we are all hiding or running from darkness. Darkness within us, darkness around us, just the dark in general. They say that is why when winter comes we tend to light candles and plug in our Christmas trees- to drive away some of the darkness. Maybe that is true, maybe not, but the permeating darkness is very real. I like summer. Long days of sunshine, lighting when it rains, full brilliant stars (though are stars these past few winter nights have been pretty amazing), in honesty the Christmas tree lights are about the only thing that keeps me happy in the midst of the darkness of winter. Though I do enjoy the brisk nights when the stars are shining and I’m out with my horse and we are the only living things awake in our yard, that’s a pretty spectacular feeling. The difference is that summer darkness is shorter and it’s warm, where winter darkness is long and cold so it’s not as enjoyable. Sort of like the darkness in our souls. A long- cold darkness. A darkness there since birth. The darkness of being without a savior. They say light brings joy, isn’t it fitting then that our Lord would come to earth in a quiet manger under a brilliant -bright star? And that when the Angels appeared there was a bright light, some Bible translations say it was blinding. When the one who would drive out darkness and give us joy and hope came to earth He was the cause of so much light that the light is still remembered so many years later. We who are striving to flee from darkness already have the hope of a brilliant and blinding light- One that is warm and loving and full of hope- I call Him Jesus, some call Him Emmanuel, others call Him Yeshua, or Rabbi, or Abba, Friend, Teacher. No matter what name He is going by He will always be our Savior and He is here to bring light to our darkness.
Merry Christmas
Stand together
When I was younger and attended youth at camp we sang a lot of Petra. This song was a favorite, slow down and read those words.
Our church has lost something, all churches have lost something, and that is unity. There was a time when if you were a Christian you were a sibling to the other Christians around you, you were family. Then somewhere along the line we became divided, even competitive with one another; and then that devouring, despicable spirit of ‘holier than thou’ clawed its way in and we saw our church as better than other churches and ourselves as better than other believers, then the competitiveness and division turned into an all out cold war. Divided we are destroyed, until we can stand together we are already defeated. Like that old kids game where we stood on our team and held eachother’s hands calling over the other team and daring them to try to break through our ranks, if we are strong enough to hold them from breaking us then they join us, they join our team and fight beside us. Those who the devil has tricked are on the other team, if we stand together as a church, when they come running at us we can stand strong and they might even decide later to join us, but we can’t be divided or we will never be a witness to them.
The Church is not a building or a set of songs we sing, it is a people that follow Jesus, let us seek out other Christians and make sure they know that they are family even if they attend a different church.
Thinking side of your brain
Use the thinking side of your brain.
In the horse world we have a saying, ‘use the thinking side of your brain.’
Horses have two sides of the brain like all animals, but unlike us they have a thinking side and a reacting side. Why do you mount a horse from the left? That’s the thinking side. When you try to train a horse to let you mount from the right side, the reacting side, be prepared for the horse to introduce you to the ground awfully fast a couple of times before you convince him not to kill you.
We as human kind have the problem of not having a thinking and reacting side so when we react we stop thinking completely and it over takes us. I can walk up to my horse with a bucket of treats and if I go to the right he will generally take off on me, but if I go to the left he waits to see what’s in the bucket. How often has God come to us with something great but we have reacted and run away because we aren’t sure we trust Him? How much have we missed out on because the thing holding the gift -the bucket- scares us? Unfortunately with people the thing that scares us on our right side usually scares us on our left. We have to let God work in us and calm us down and teach us to trust Him enough that we stop running away and start becoming curious about what is in the bucket.
Walking stick
Walking stick
You know how when you are hiking you generally either bring a walking stick or you pick one up on the road as you go? If you did not bring one with you, at what time in your journey do you generally pick up a stick to use? When the journey starts getting hard, right? When you feel like you need something to support you and to help you carry on, that’s usually when you bend down and pick up a sturdy stick to help you along the way. I know you all know where I’m going with this. God has become too much like our walking stick, we usually tend to leave him behind, and then when the journey starts getting hard return to him again and ask him to help us. Then when the journey becomes easy again we drop him and continue on by ourselves. Why do we do this? I suppose because God and walking sticks have one more thing in common, when the road is easy the’re a lot of work to carry. When the path is flat and you’re not really using the stick anymore and you’re more just carrying it with you it becomes tiresome doesn’t it? So we give up and we drop it, then we hit a rugged part of the road and we go back and get our stick again to help us along the rough part, then it becomes easy again and the stick becomes something we’re just carrying so we put it down again. Praying everyday reading your Bible, even going to church once a week can seem like a lot of work at times, when things are hard we run to these things because they draw us closer to God and God is helping us over the hard times, but then when times become easy and we find ourselves having to do these things we feel like they’re too much work and we don’t want to. But God isn’t a Genie in a Bottle, he’s not there to grant wishes and then to just disappear, God is our father he wants a relationship with us he wants us there with him all the time, so even on the times where you feel like you just don’t feel like going to church, or like you read the Bible so often that you’re just tired of it now, keep going, keep attending Services keep reading your Bible keep praying because these things are drawing you closer to the father. Serving God can be a lot of work at times but it will always be worth it, he will always be worth it. So don’t put him down when the road gets easy and pick him up when the road gets hard cling to him at all times instead and trust him as he Journeys with you.
Pain
Pain
Pain is a word we all know too well. Recently I hurt myself. I have hurt myself many times and this pain that didn’t want to leave is a familiar enemy. Thank God we have an intelligent chiropractor who feels my neck and shoulder and says I have hurt my 3-1 or V-4 or whatever vertebrae and then he puts it back in place and then he rubs it and then I go back again a few times because the injury wants to persist and he needs to keep reminding it where it belongs until it stays.
Let’s break pain down like this:
P- problem occurs
A- attempt to fix problem
I-injury occurs
N- now what?
We are like our pain, and we cause pain to ourselves. We fall out of place, a problem occurs and we try with all our hearts to fix the problem ourselves and we end up hurting ourselves in the process. Our hearts get broken, we cry, we get angry, nothing works so now what?
We look down and there is nothing there, then we slowly look up. Jesus is looking back at us and we lift our hands and give it all to Him. He takes the pain, the sorrow, the need and He heals it all. We cause ourselves more pain by fighting to fix things ourselves, if we give the problem to Jesus He is the one who knows how to fix it with ease.
What are you afraid of?
What are you afraid of?
Recently I went on a tour of an abandoned sanatorium consisting of five buildings. The old site is one of my favorites and I was excited to get to finally go inside. My cousin and I were the only people there and the guide left us to tour the other four buildings on our own and only stayed with us through the first one, which of course everyone says is haunted. Several times the woman stopped and asked us if we were troubled by spirits, because we are about to enter areas that were known to have heavy Spirit activity. My cousin and I informed her that we were Christians so they didn’t bother us, she kind of rolled her eyes at that. She let us go up into a super condemned area of the building, and challenged us to see if we would go all the way to the end of the ‘Haunted Hall,’ my cousin and I looked at each other and grinned of course we would go to the haunted floor with the haunted hall, sounds like fun. We joked with each other a little bit about the ghosts, went to the end of the hall, we’re slightly terrified at the thought of falling through the floorboards, and then returned totally fine. The scariest part was when we got back home and I showed the photos to my father, who has worked in construction for a lot of years, he informed us that the ankle-deep fluffy stuff we were walking through was falling asbestos from the ceiling. As we toured around more there was one-room known for its activity, where people had left a bowl of garlic that had apparently been there for several years. All of this made me think, what are you really afraid of? Isn’t it vampires that garlic keeps away? As Christians we know that evil spirits do exist, and by no means should we take them lightly, but we also need to remember that God gave us Authority in these situations. I don’t know if ghosts actually bother hunting people, I know that coming from a family of pastors that my grandparents and my parents have seen evil spirits be driven out of people, and I am very sure that if there were evil spirits around us they didn’t bother us solely because we are Christians and they knew to avoid placew Jesus is present. Admittedly, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to rebuke any ghosts in the name of Jesus. The fact of the matter is that people give over to these beliefs and then they let these beliefs control them. People say would you stay in a haunted building for $100,000? And I’m like, absolutely, because as Christians there is no reason for us to fear ghosts or spirits. To be honest, with how run-down parts of the buildings were, and the fact that we very easily could have run into some kind of large animal, I did get a little jumpy on that thought, especially when we found a random staircase hidden under another staircase that led down into a basement that had seemingly been untouched for a very long time, because even the owner had admitted to not going into those buildings in several years. But my point was, it’s fun to let yourself be afraid in a silly way, where you’re joking about things that go bump in the night; however we shouldn’t give too much thought or power to these things, because you don’t want to let any opening where the devil could poke through. If I’m being fully truthful there are a lot of children’s ghost stories that when you read them as a Christian you can tell that these aren’t ghosts, or something silly to laugh at but that these are encounters with evil spirits that are real and you should not give that room in your life, and certainly should not let your children be giving room to such things in their minds, which are easily influenced. If you’re wondering why we decided to explore an abandoned sanatorium when we have no interest or fear of ghosts, we did it because the old buildings have an incredible history that lends to our province, and that history makes the building’s interesting. The thing I love the most is that youth for Christ had taken these buildings over at one time, and though Ghost Hunters had broken in and graffitied things on the walls to make it seem like the building was cursed, there were still banners up with scripture verses, there were still Bibles and devotionals in the rooms, pieces of the love of Christ fill those buildings, so I doubt they’re haunted, because what ghost wants to deal with all of that😉
Fear
Fear
Today I want to discuss fear. Why? Because today I was afraid. What I hate is that I had just listened to an amazing sermon on being happy and still my fear took me over. What happened next, I was condescending and rude to the person I was afraid for. I was not at risk of anything but they were and I care about them a lot, so I reacted to my fear for them and have felt sick about it all day. I needed to trust that Jesus had it covered, but instead I rose up and was unkind while trying to protect the person I care about. Love shows itself in many different forms, aggression and anger sometimes being those forms, which actually doesn’t make a lot of sense. When you are afraid you react, and that reaction can cause bad things to occur. What are causes of fear?
Being human.
We know that God has things covered and yet fear grabs us and destroys our rational thinking. Some say of you fear you aren’t a true Christian because it means you don’t trust God. I disagree. Fear can hit us even when we are trusting God because we are still human, yes we should take our fear to God but we should also know that He isn’t angry at us for being afraid. David criticized his own soul for it’s fear and told it to have courage in God, but the fear was still there. Fear is not a sin, how we respond to that fear can be. But God understands, He isn’t angry that you are afraid, He simply wants you to give your fear to Him and to trust Him.
Gift giver
We as people always want to give back. We want to give back to our neighbors, our co-workers, our family, our friends. So of course we want to give back to God. But we can’t. We can repay a cup of coffee with a cup of coffee, or having our grass mowed by baking some cookies or so on… but how do we give back to God?
In giving fully of ourselves. But is that enough? It is to God.
But say In full measurement of the ‘equal gift calculator’ do they add up to the same? No.
Think of it like this.
Your dad buys you a new CD. You’re eight years old and super excited and want to give him something in return, so you run to your room and grab your second favorite Super Star doll and give it to him as a present, what is a grown man going to do with that doll? From anyone else he would probably tell you politely that he doesn’t want it and you should keep it, but you are his child and thus are special, so what does he do? He takes it to work, puts it on his desk and when people ask about it he says with a smile, “my daughter gave it to me”.
We want to give back to God because He gives us so much, we have nothing to give Him that He wants except our hearts, but we still dish out things that we think will make God happy, even though it’s like a little girl giving her dad a doll, God still smiles seeing us trying so hard to give to Him. Our gift will never equal His, it can’t, but the giving we try to do makes Him smile because He loves us.
Carried in the cross 