Holy Spirit

– Divine Helper

Under what moon can we expect people who are holding their noses against what faith brings to increase in it?  

The moon of hasty devotions and unfinished studies.  

The following is a daily devotional belonging to the type that does no study but tries to tack on Jesus at the end. The title itself betrays the author’s plan to reverse the writer’s intention. Faith is not sight, just as surely as what we hope for is not ours. Faith works when sight is ineffective. It is a doubting and unbelieving crew that holds to videre est credere, seeing is believing.  My comments are in red.

Believing is Seeing

“By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”

In this next paragraph the writer asserts that many people live far below God’s ideal, leaving us to as assume perhaps that he and others live above or in line with God’s ideal. Still there is no reference to the Saviour.  As is typical of people who have little relationship with the actual words of the Bible the devotional author sets sight on creation.   No-one ever got saved by believing that God reated the universe.

You were created by Almighty God to live a blessed and fulfilled life. But so many people live far below the level of what God truly intends for them simply because they don’t see how it could happen. The truth is that you have to believe before you’re ever going to see something take place in the natural. You have to look with your eyes of faith because the provision, healing and miracle that you need is already available in the supernatural realm.

Where does a person get eyes of faith?

You might say, “Well, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to look with my eyes of faith.” The way you open your eyes of faith is by reading and meditating on the Word of God. His Word deposits strength and faith inside of you and illuminates your heart. His Word causes your faith to grow so you can believe His promises. And when you believe it, then you will see it because all things are possible for those who believe!

“Seeing in the natural” is irrelevant. Faith is the substance (the audio, video, tangible component of what we are hoping for).  Nothing has been said in this devotional about the great salvation or the resultant relationship, so this exhortation remains in the realm of the general.  The following paragraph therefore changes the scope by addressing the feeding of one’s faith.

Today, feed your faith by meditating on His Word. Declare His promises over your life. Keep moving forward with an attitude of expectancy knowing that He has victory in store for your future!

Faith that makes people well was not found anywhere in Israel, among the people who were surrounded with God’s written instructions.  It was the law of the land for thousands of years.   Under what moon can we expect people who are holding their noses against what faith brings to increase in it?

“Father, thank You for Your sweet and precious promises. I choose to open the eyes of my heart so that I can see and receive the good things You have for me. Help me to be a blessing to others and keep my mind stayed on You in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

All of the “IN JESUS’ NAME” tacked on to the end of what we say or do does not make a thing happen, be attractive or true.

I have been compiling observations about a few statements that seem to hang around like a night-time trial of an innocent citizen. Sometimes we can be accused of having one eye closed but the things that I am observing include many that look more like having both eyes gouged out. Attitudes are so full of self (esteem, effort, and expression) that God and Christ are truly absentee landlords. Some of us have decided that drinking the bottle will give the advantage over just drinking the wine. Others find solace in monotony, repetition, insularity, elitism, relabelling things we do not own, clinging to sweet-smelling flowers, in a clear obsession with fading glory.

All flesh is grass, but God’s word endures.

All created things perish.

The biggie of fading flowers

There is no point to trying to comply with everything God ever said. Some things have become irrelevant and there are vistas of kingdom life that were kept under wraps until the Word became flesh and lived among men 2000 years. He revealed himself as the way to life.

That revelation was not in the law or the prophets or the writings. That revelation was reserved for the lips of God’s anointed.

If latching onto the ten commandments is said to be required them someone is trying to get away with spiritual adultery (see Romans 7).

Eden is a starting point

If we can imagine God giving the ten Commandments to Adam and Eve we can also imagine Christ saying “Keep the whole law and be saved”. Who buys that and for how long?

Moses glitter

• God’s promises eclipse the Mosaic tradition (Galatians 3)
• Christ distances himself from all of Israel’s caretakers, and calls them thieves and robbers. (John 10:8)

Kingdom glitter

• Kingdom law needs a king. There was no king at Sinai and it took three magi to bring the King’s birth to Jewish attention. (James 1, Matthew 2:1-2)

The older conventions are easy to claim: the vast majority are about festivals, food and drink, and bodily functions. All are elementary and juvenile, now faded into no glory by comparison with the Light of the world.

There is no evidence that people of ancient times living under Moses’ economy had even the common impartiality, justice, and respect for other people. Yet they had instruction on the disposal of human waste.

Denying that God changes things he said in antiquity in order to bring his eternal plan to light is to deny Christ and to conspire with murderers and thieves.

Who said love your neighbour as yourself was a lifeline or a life-sign? No one of note ever said that. So why is it is such a rage 2019 when love in its purest and fullest showing is no longer a mystery? We are confusing the way of life with the way to life.

All the recommended and idealistic behaviors of the human history are not the way to life. There is only one way to life and it does not include our performance.

No one is doing the critical thinking when the flesh of a animal that dies naturally is an abomination for me but that same flesh can be put on sale for my neighbour. It is likely that we do not have the heart to admit that neighbours are unavoidable and of equal value to God. It is obvious that heart was not one of the things Yahweh was willing to hand out wholesale in antiquity.

Individuals who refuse to commit to Christ without reservation are lost, and some who carry the name living creature are really dead. Only God knows the subject completely. In the blink of an eye the dead come to life. The way to life remains mysterious.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

The Democrats must respond with a robust denunciation of the package of lies and innuendo being squeezed out of the historically criminally besieged chief consorter with tyrants and bullies.

After the most complicated and exhaustive biblical research projects (that includes the simplest word studies) the results have to be simple and final. Much of the insecurity surrounding the quest for peace and stability comes from keeping alive senseless and distracting clichés and maxims. Public legislation and the principles of the kingdom of God are never going to be married, and even with the demise of all the great powers on record and the decadence of the rising powers our leaders do not know when to quit.

Many shocking surprises

The number of public figures who are secretly racist, misogynist, or just plain corrupt is alarming. All the vacuous statements about patriotism, diversity and security do not amout to a spoonful of milk. The number of Canadians and Americans who have never renounced the bigotry learned from their parents is a crucial question. May you never have to deal with the fact that the spiritual leader of your faith community is a shallow, poorly educated bigot.

Showing off the locks and not the door

Apparently, shameful lying about what one has and knows does not register on the sensors of some holy individuals. God is not looking the other way while the supposedly guys scrape away the last layer of decency and intelligence and date to call their plagiarism and majoring in minors ‘excellence’. There is still a steady stream of definitions of God that stretch imagination of Christ’s disciples, fouling up the air with a chain of childish things and an unvarnished malice towards those for whom Christ died. When there is more prison and death than liberty and life on one’s mind quitting time cannot be far off.

But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. Matthew 23:13-15