Lena's Discipleship Journalin' to Acts 7 Today

From yesterday, Is there enough evidence to convict you as a follower of the LORD Jesus Christ? (That means He has His way in your daily life and walk, that means you are under command and in lines of submitted freewill authority) If through being convicted of being one who is like Christ is in the earth, you are persecuted, challenged, hated, spoken evil of…Do you take the opportunity, as Stephen did, to preach anyway?
Truth is truth, the word of God is eternal seed. No matter what the responses seem to be and even if one’s life is given to give it out, it will not go out void.
When I say one may give his life for the word, I’m not speaking of one being arrogant and losing his head over arrogance and prideful delivery of the word of God. Pride and arrogance come against the very character of God’s words, and if they are involved, there is an element of death mixed with His words spoken.
The best way to lay down your life is to give it freely each day in submission to God and to others in the spirit of His word. It is deference to another’s desires, plans and schedules. That is a demonstration of the death of self life, which is what “taking up our crosses daily” means to God.
It may actually be harder for us to relate with other people and lay down our desires and ways of accomplishing the same things, than it would be to lay down and disappear in death.
How much value does God’s word hold for us? Are we willing to risk the presentation of ourselves to the world to deliver its lifesaving power to others?
This makes me think of a few scenarios. Maybe you work a job where you feel you’ve been witnessing for years now. No one there seems to respond to your “words from God”, you are tired of it, feel it doesn’t work, etc.
God’s word is powerful and does work. It is our witness of His word that makes it alive in us or not. Think about it. God gave you that field of daily opportunity to shine His light and life. It is Your Harvest Field. If you never say a word from the written pages of the Bible, your daily life is His word in demonstration, or it can be. The more you obey God’s spirit and do His will, especially in fruit of the spirit character development and in the exercise of unconditional love walk development, the more your daily co-workers see a living resurrected Christ! If they are not seeing Christ at all, questions must be asked and changes made.
The question is,” Is it worth the laying down of your life everyday to make these needed changes willingly?” Or is it just easier to stay just the way you are? I mean God made you the way you are, loves you the way you are, right? Shouldn’t THEY be the ones who wholeheartedly and unconditionally love you?
Who said this walk of faith was on the Easy Road? Who told you that? I die daily, we say as Christians!
Do you love and accept the people involved in our daily lives enough to change our very character for them? Do we love them enough to show Christ’s unconditional love? Do we love them in the spirit enough to not be impatient and angry, just to name a few combatants to the very character of His word? This is the laying down of one’s life that is being spoken about in taking up a “cross” daily, and dying to self daily. How much we truly love God will show up in how much we are willing to be corrected instructed and how much we do towards changing into His very image and likeness. Christ- like, that’s what Christians are. Without change in us personally there is no witness of His work in us.
I’ve seen so many people not want to work jobs where they are around the people thing much. If it’s a constant influx of people they do good, but with the same people, they struggle. There is a root issue there that needs dealt with. I’ve also seen people gung-ho about going away for missions work, To go away and serve God, while at home they can’t be like Christ. One reason doors to the nations may not be opening is because he who is faith-filled in little will be a ruler over much. Get It at home take it out to nations, it’s that kind of thing.
Home is the proving ground. We must be proven, especially in character, before we are exported. People get frustrated that no one listens to their words as they “witness”, they get frustrated because they don’t get to go away as they’ve seen in a spiritual picture given them by God. That spiritual picture was a goal to lead you towards step A which leads to step Z. There are many more steps in between and all of them have to be taken to reach the God vision and goal. Not one step can be skipped over, all must be satisfied.
Abraham had a large promise a far off, which was dependant upon his own faithfulness and change. He had to obey God, love God, follow God or the promise would never come to pass. If it did not come to pass, it would not have been God’s fault! He said it, how much did Abraham, or us for that matter, believe it? Enough to do some changing to get it?
How valuable is the promise to us? I mean if someone told you there was gold in your backyard, and you went out back and did not see it, what would you do? If they told you it is large nuggets and it is buried, probably worth about a million dollars. What would you do? Walk back inside the house, get frustrated and give up, blaming the person who told you? No silly, dig, dig deep, keep digging, everyday, until you find every piece of it, right?
That what God’s words to us are if we treasure them, because we treasure Him. Oh I have to change to see the promise of my loved ones being saved and walking in obedience? Yes, you absolutely do have to change or they may never see Him in visible form. Ok, let’s do it!
Stephen got his opportunity to be listened to, by being a Christian with such evidence, he was convicted. Others saw he was like Christ and said so.
Have we lost heart? We’d better gather it all up and bring it before His throne if we have. Have we given up through impatience and misunderstanding of His words? Have we given up on our eternal walk with Him, saying we’re tired and can’t do it this way anymore? Have we at all turned back to our old ways, to idol worship, or mis-prioritization of our time and spending our energies frivolously? Have we given what belongs to God to others, or to ourselves? Do we ease our own pains, and solve our own concerns with human wisdom? Do we turn to the world for advise? Do we fix our own finances and miss fellowship or prayer times to do so? Are we still tithing, or can we not add it all up? Do we spend our money and time as though it belongs to us alone?
Do you live knowing you are NOT your own, you’ve been bought with a price, you are purchased with the precious blood of Jesus Christ? Saved or unsaved, you do not belong to your independent self, You are God’s property.
It may be time to take down the sacred pillars of man-centered worship, and the strongholds of wrong mindsets. Time to break the stone edifices we’ve erected with our opinions of God and His word and the outcome we thought it should have. It is time to declare Him Lord as never before, and change. Lives are in the balance! Eternal life and death awaits someone in our sphere of influence, someone in our own field of harvest. What are we harvesting? Good or evil? Death or life?
This is a time as never before (don’t know if it is that grace is running out or what) to accept and receive the Holy Spirit. To resist Him is dangerous business. A large part of the church has accepted God the Father as their Creator and Jesus the Son as their Savior, but we must also receive the very gift and power of God. The very part of God that makes us complete and the part Jesus commanded us to receive. Without Him we are nothing and are unable to be changed into the image of Christ Jesus our Lord. Stubbornness needs to be broken, brought to nothing, for it does not serve the purposes of God. Having the 2 parts of God is not enough. We have to live and breathe in His spirit. All of Him in all of Me, I’m all in. All of God, All in all, All the way. Not part. Part is as though there is none at all. We have to wake up and see our great need for Him, alive and active on a daily basis in us. Dependant upon His voice in us.
What’s resisting the Holy Spirit like? Let’s be honest here, It’s things like saying, you don’t need to speak in tongues. It’s like disobeying the still small voice of God, or reinterpreting the word of God delivered you by your local pastor or leaders, with excuses. It’s excusing God’s words to you as though they are nothing, mere words of men, most of whom you don’t really care for or like their personal delivery of.
The Lord may have told you to be faithful in a local body of believers, but whenever it is time to assemble, and the pastors call for the whole body to show up for prayer or regular assemblies, you have other things to do, or you are too tired or whatever. When asked to serve you have excuse after excuse. If you do not overcome these excuses, you’ll not obey God’s original word to you, He said, “be faithful”, you’ve disobeyed Him.
He takes it very seriously, and He forgives those who repent, not the ones that are just sorry, they didn’t choose what He asked them to choose. When we think of that it should make us feel badly, but only to the point of getting back on the right road quickly.
Repent, means go back to what God said to do and just do it! Be faithful, don’t make an excuse. Change your lifestyle, subtract some things out, trust Him and live as He’s deemed through the words of followers to live. Even if a leader is NOT just on the target, or it could be done a different way, be a follower. The mere godly principle of following after and being under cannot be cursed by God. Your are following the principles of God’s own kingdom and you’ll be blessed in what you do, and for the stubbornness that you leave behind.
When we gave our lives To Christ, we decided to follow others who follow Christ. We decided to have our lifestyles changed, our schedules reworked for us by God and His loving people.
No one who lives in led by the flesh nature initially love hearing the truth. Stephen told religious people that they resist the very God they say they serve! They did not like hearing that from an unscholared one, but it is /was truth. Truth shows up and we have our opportunity. If my flesh nature rises up, I usually know it is God who is speaking. Because if there’s a resistance in me I know there’s something in me that needs to die today to self life. The Pharisee in me, needs to surrender to the truth of Christ Jesus! I can decide to stone the truth bearer. (Think and talk badly about them or their rotten delivery), or I can love Truth as a person, embrace it and change. I either buy it or I don’t, it is my personal prerogative. I have that freedom, but do I TAKE IT? That depends on how alive my flesh is.
When I don’t receive the words of Jesus through broken vessels of light, I may as well have been one to have a stone in my hand that day and whirled it at Stephen. All the while the leader God sent to lead us says, “Lord don’t hold them to the account of their sin of railing accusations and wrong opinions and judgments. Forgive them Lord. Let me take what I can in the way of pain that they could see clearly and be saved.”
Amen.