Sunday, December 31, 2006

Lena's Discipleship Journalin' to Deuteronomy 11 Today

We have tasted and we have seen the goodness of God in the land of the living. Now think about it. Even if everyday was sheer misery for us in this life now and it was hard to find any “blessings”, God has been good. He sent His Son, to become a man as we are, suffer greatly for our sins, as a scapegoat for us, one who took our places in the punishment we owed God Himself; He did it because of love, willingly. He laid down His own blessed life as a Son on the Throne of God’s power, authority, dominion and glory. God did that so we who would believe in, rely on, and serve Him now, would be with Him forever in the “place” called eternity, which begins when we do, and continues on forever.
This life is literally a vapor, whatever happens here is a puff of wind. The only significant thing is whether we believed, received, and lived for Him here and how many others did we lead towards Him. The rest - the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the backs and forths, the pain or sorrow, or joy, will quickly pass away. The goodness we’ve seen is the greatness of the very feat of God, who came to earth in the form of His Son Jesus. This is all the goodness we need.
We who have revelation, have seen this. It is greater than the parting of the Red Sea! It is greater than any wilderness experience. Jesus Christ the Savior of the World, the Lover of God and man! A miracle has happened, Christ can come live inside of human beings in the form of the spirit of God who takes what was eternally dead and makes it eternally alive! Wow! God is Good. If we never taste of any natural goodness at all, we can see this and it can lead us to obey Him all of our days as a human being.
Now listen though, those who’s loving response is obedience to Him, have a promise for blessing. Many times there is no blessing, because there is no obedience. Obeying one’s self is not obeying God. Obeying what we believe or desire to be God, is also not going to be blessed.
Living long is essential to the obedient- There will be more time to exemplify His love and show a hurting world His praise, demonstrated through righteous obedience. There is more time for the obedient ones to be who they are in Christ around a myriad of others. There is more opportunity for that proven, tested and tried person to show others what is truly important and real.
Please be careful when you read of idolatry as you read a Bible passage. Don’t be so quick to skip over its red flag. An idol is anything that comes first in ranks of priority above God! Any person can be an idol unto themselves. If what I want to do, comes first place above what God wants me to do, that’s idolatry. If any other person in my life takes first place above what God wants me to do, if I spend a heap of time on them, and spend none on Him or His work, I’m serving an idol. If my work, my physical and mental labors take first place above God, I’ve made an idol.
Why would God so bless those who obey? Why would He want them to expect and insist upon their blessings, like long life, abundance without toil, etc? Because of His work. One needs to be healthy to live long well and still have enough of them to do His work. If I go to work, toil in painstaking agony and produce very little, I’ll probably have very little to give if any for what He’s desired me to give to my world, in the form of representation of Him. If working to eat is easy, I’ll have a lot leftover and will share my food etc, thus creating and environments for family and the further demonstration of Him.
Notice when we put work first as an idol, we serve it more and we toil more and have misery. If we feel ourselves toiling, we may want to ask – “Lord, have I put anything else above You?”
This is such a great rundown of How to live this way even while doing necessary things in life. While we do those necessary things (like cleaning house, mowing grass, etc) we speak of the Lord, we include our family members in the help with us and we speak of Him again. Day and night while we do the work we need to do, we demonstrate Him in the work, we speak of Him in the work, We honor Him by working well in the work. He is glorified and He has first place. We do the work as unto Him, we won’t do it instead of Him.
We get to choose blessing or curse. God gave us that right. Be very careful not to blame God for curses. This is immaturity. Maturity takes blame, realizes the mistakes we make are from choices we make, and to change the outcome we learn from the mistaken choice we made, and go on living differently, listening to the Lord, giving Him first place in every decision, obeying Him in the first place.
It is always good to have checkpoints in our daily walk. Honesty evaluations. Am I obeying God? Am I doing what He wants, what He said. Do I love Him more than any other thing I’m involved in? Do I love who He loves on purpose? If I do, I will not offend, or be so easily offended. I must be care-ful to obey. That means I need to purpose to do it, be willing to have it checked on, knowing I’m doing it right, the way He has stated and be willing to change whatever will bring me into further obedient action as a representative of Him.