Throw off Limitations

What limits us in our walk with Jesus?  For each of us, the answer may be vastly different but the following ideas may be common ones that we all face.

1.       We have a wrong view of God.

We make God small in our own minds and put Him in a box, confined to our small minded thinking.  The heavens cannot contain the Almighty God, our Father and His hand created everything visible and invisible.  He is the God that splits seas, raises the dead and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust.

Isa 40:26  Lift up your eyes on high, And see who has created these things, Who brings out their host by number; He calls them all by name, By the greatness of His might And the strength of His power; Not one is missing.

Jesus told the story of the Master who went away on a long journey and before leaving gave to his servants, according to their ability, talents.  One he gave 5, to another 2 and to the final one 1.  On his return he summoned the servants to see what they had done with the talents he gave them.  The first two servants doubled their talents whereas the last had an issue with the character of his Master.

Mat 25:24  "Then he who had received the one talent came and said, 'Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown, and gathering where you have not scattered seed.

Mat 25:25  And I was afraid, and went and hid your talent in the ground. Look, there you have what is yours.'

The scripture is not clear as to how this servant had such a bad report on the character of his master yet even today there are people who think of God as a vengeful God waiting to send a bolt of lightning to fry them.  Many people do not understand the unconditional Love of the Father heart of God.   The master in this account did not need to give his servants anything.  He owed them nothing, yet he gifted them and trusted them to use what he had given them to the best advantage.  We often do get a wrong picture of God, fashioning Him in the image of man instead of us being fashioned in His image.  God has gifted all of us and yet when He wants us to use the gift, we come up with all kinds of excuses, looking instead and our inadequacies instead of looking at His adequacy.   The master did not defend his character yet brought a huge indictment upon the lazy servant, informing him that if he believed so bad a report, it should have compelled him to do the best he could with the talent he had been given.

2.       Doubt and unbelief

Jesus could not do any mighty miracles among his home town in Nazareth because of their unbelief.  They refused to recognise Him as the Messiah and so did not recognise His authority in the spiritual realm and were in fact offended by Him.  They were offended because He was the kid that grew up and played with their kids in the town.  They were familiar with Him and His family and because they were familiar with His humanness they could not believe that He was also divine.   In fact, they were so offended by Him and His claim to be the Messiah they wanted to throw Him off a cliff.

Jesus has given us a blank cheque on Heaven’s account with this scripture:-

Mar 11:23  For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be removed and be cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.

What stops us receiving is the doubt we have in our hearts.  What we can see with the “eye of faith” we can speak into being.  In fact scripture clearly teaches us that we must call those things that are not as though they are.

Heb 11:1  Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Heb 11:2  For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.

Heb 11:3  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.

Everything that we see around us was first of all seen in someone’s imagination before it was physically brought into reality.  God created this way too.  He imagined creation and He spoke it forth.  When we do not have the faith in God, we will not step out boldly to declare, to share or to touch the needs of humanity.  This will definitely limit us in our walk with God.

 

3.       Unforgiveness

Jesus gives us a provocative insight into unforgiveness with the parable of the master who calls his servants in to pay back the debts they owe him.  One servant owed a large fortune and the master calls for him, his family and all their belongings to be sold to pay off the debt.  This debt was large and the servant fell on his knees to beg for mercy and patience.  The master had compassion on him and wiped his debt clear.  You would think that this servant would have left rejoicing but he went and found someone who owed him a small amount and demanded immediate payment.  His debtor immediately fell to his knees begging him for mercy and patience but instead of giving the same compassion he had received, the servant ordered that he be thrown into prison until the debt was paid.  Jesus continued the story with:-

 Mat 18:33  Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?'

Mat 18:34  And his master was angry, and delivered him to the torturers until he should pay all that was due to him.

Mat 18:35  "So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses."

 We have been forgiven a huge debt of sin by God through the cross of Jesus Christ and our forgiveness cost Christ His life.  When we will not forgive others we are treading on dangerous ground.  God clearly teaches us that if we do not forgive, He cannot forgive us.  Unforgiveness opens the door to satan, the torturer, to bring a root of bitterness into our lives, and this has the ability to shipwreck our faith and continually torment us.  Yes we may have been hurt and hurt bad, but we need to trust God to deal with the situation on our behalf and we need to forgive more for our sake then for the one who has hurt us.  Forgiving others does not mean that we condone what they did but God is clear that He is the only one who can avenge justly.  We need to release the perpetrator into His Loving hands and move on with life.

God has an awesome plan for all our lives.  We need to keep our hearts sweet in His presence and grow in the grace and knowledge of Him.  Those who know their God will be strong and do exploits, as the scripture exhorts us.  We need to make the decision to just believe and trust.  God will never let us down and He will allow us to bring His Kingdom to earth as we co-labour with Jesus Christ. What an awesome privilege He has given to us.  Step out and step up in faith, amen!

The Law of Love

1 Jn 4:18  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

Made in the image of God, we are wired for love.  We were created to receive, respond to and give out love.  I was contemplating on the law of love as I was having a walk down by the beach this morning and ended up lamenting because we don’t walk in the law of love as we should do.  We know that God’s “perfect love cast out all fear” so therefore the opposite of love is fear.  When we are safe in God’s love, we have no fear of the future.  We are content to wait for God’s timing and for His plan to be worked out in our lives. We know that He has a perfect plan in His Love for us, and He will see His perfect plan accomplished.  Not only do we have no fear for the future but we look forward to it with great expectation as we abide in His Love.

Psa 23:4  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

Psa 46:2  Therefore we will not fear, Even though the earth be removed, And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

Love is the highest law there is in the universe and it is a law that should supersede the law of sin and death that is in our members.  If we put the law of love in its rightful place, we would not cater to the law of sin and death in the flesh.

1Co 13:4  Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;

1Co 13:5  does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil;

1Co 13:6  does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;

1Co 13:7  bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

1Co 13:8  Love never fails.

Love is the more excellent way, and grows out of continued devotion to God, being filled and filled again and again by His Love.  Love is the higher path and love brings meaning to life.  Where there is no love, there is all kind of bitterness, fear and envy.  Love is tender, yet love can bring discipline where needed.  Love always forgives and restores. 

The Law of Love supersedes prejudices and emotions.  Jesus was weary and resting at the well in Samaria when a woman, caught in the bondage of looking for love in the wrong places, came to draw water at the well. The Jews disliked the Samaritans so much that many of them would not even step foot in Samaria.  Enmity was so great that no Jew would have spoken to a citizen yet alone a woman.  Jesus could have totally ignored this woman because of the years of ingrained prejudice between Jews and Samaritans.  He could have turned aside from her in His weariness but the Law of Love in Him reached out to her and brought her into freedom.  Jesus knew her sin.  He knew the darkness in her soul but He brought her into the light and love of His mercy.  In doing so, salvation came to her and the townsmen.

Love doesn’t push boundaries but keeps everyone safe within those boundaries.  Love also contemplates the consequences before it is put to the test.  It protects.  It does no harm to anyone. Love prefers others over and above oneself.  This is why Jesus said to follow Him, we need to die to ourselves take up our cross and follow.  Love walks in the light because it has nothing to hide and where all can be seen and everyone kept safe.  Love is clearly seen by the way we treat each other.

Joh 13:35  By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

This kind of unconditional, pure love is hard to find in the world today.  This is why when others see genuine love displayed in the church it draws them in.  There is nothing like being an eyewitness of a loving encounter to warm and soften the heart.   Nor is there anything like being the giver or reciprocator of a genuine loving gesture.

Let us pray every day for God to so fill us with His Love that we are compelled in the overflow to reach out and touch others for the Kingdom so that His Love can be perfected through us as we obey Him in all we do because our love for Him.

Rom 13:8  Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Thoughts on the Trinity

It is so hard for our finite minds to capture and understand the Trinity, that God is One in 3 different and distinct personalities.  Yet throughout the Word, the work of the Godhead is clearly seen and demonstrated. “In the beginning” of what we know as the creation account, we see God saying “Let there be... and we know God is at work and the Holy Spirit is “hovering over the waters”, waiting for the Word to act on it.  In the creation of man, God says Let us make...” John’s gospel teaches us that “in the beginning” which ties us right back to the creation event, “was the Word and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God”.  So we see, right from the beginning God the Father, God the Son (the Word) and God the Holy Spirit.  Yet they are one.  I don’t think that we can understand this mystery but have to take it by faith believing what God has revealed to us in His Word. 

God gave the Israelites the Shema which is “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” (Deut 6:4, Mar 12:29)  Jesus Himself when questioned by a scribe regarding which is the first commandment of all repeated this phrase from Deuteronomy and later also went on to confirm that He and the Father were One. (Joh 10:30)

Throughout the Old Testament, we see the hand of God and the power of the Holy Spirit at work but the Old Testament is seemingly relatively silent about Jesus, or is it?  No, it definitely isn’t, but is packed with shadows, types and prophecies of the coming One who would bring the human race into the salvation through the Jews.

From the outset when Adam and Eve sinned, God spoke of the Seed that would come through the woman to crush satan’s head. (Gen 3:15)  Jesus ties the seed, who He is to the Word in the parable of the Sower who sows the seed and as he is scattering the seed, it falls upon four distinct and different soils representing the hearts of humankind, some receptive to the Word and others not.  John’s gospel, which introduces the deity of Jesus, tells us that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.  Clearly Jesus, The Seed is the Word of God.

One of the best scriptures for me concerning the power of the Word is Rom 1:16  “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” and another in Revelation 12:11, “And they overcame him [that is satan] by the blood of the Lamb and the power of their testimony and they did not love their lives unto death.”  Speaking the Word of God is powerful for it brings those who hear it and mediate upon it into freedom, overcoming the power of the enemy’s accusation in their lives.

It amazes me every time, how from cover to cover, God completes for us a beautiful puzzle of the Godhead’s predestined action plan and love for a fallen people to save and deliver from the kingdom of darkness and the power of sin.  God loves and care so deeply for the human race.

Right from the Old Testament, God begins to build a nation through whom He will send a Deliver and Saviour.  He promises Father Abraham that through his son Isaac, his descendants will be numerous and Abraham would be a “father of nations”.  Through the story of Abraham offering up Isaac (although an angel holds his hand and God provided a ram for the offering instead), we see a prophetic type of another Father, God, who offered up His only Son Jesus on the altar of the cross for the nations of the world.  Isaac, as far as God was concerned, was Abraham’s only son being the son of promise.  Jesus is God’s only Son too, and who is the Son of Promise to a dying and hostile world.

According to some archaeological evidence, where Abraham presented Isaac as a offering is the same place of the crucifixion of Jesus - being a literal fulfilment of Abraham's offering of Isaac when God said, "On the mount of the Lord it [the final offering for sin] will be provided."

What an amazing truth for us that God provided His Son, Jesus as a sacrifice for our sins, and brought us into “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” 2 Co 13:14 (a)

Not in our own strength

The (Holy) Spirit [Himself] – indwelling your inner most being and personality...May Christ through your faith [actually] dwell – settle down, abide, make his permanent home – in your hearts!  May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love.... Eph 3:16, 17 Amp

Grace! And more Grace!  This Christian life is a life built on God’s unmerited favour upon us and our faith in that grace.  It is astounding to me that the Maker of the Universe could lavish so much love and grace upon us humans who have been infected with a sin nature since the days of Adam.  But as all loving parents, God desires a better life for us then we sometimes even desire for ourselves. 

As a parent, I find it particularly hard when I see wasted potential in a child.  You try to “get through” to speak truth lovingly and to pass on wisdom but it gets rejected because your child “knows” better.  You see the struggle they are in.  Life is always a bit clearly for the one on the outside looking in on a situation but not involved in it.  How many parents have felt the pain of seeing a child “speak death” (negativity) over their lives because they simply cannot believe better being full of self-loathing and self-rejection.   Before I met Christ I was exactly like this.  I had no hope, no confident expectation that anything good would happen to me.

I thank God for His grace upon me because of the cross of Christ.  I know that I am not perfect and I still struggle with parts of my old nature that I don’t seem to understand but make me react in certain situations and turn a molehill into a mountain.  Sometimes we have deep-rooted hurts in our soul that we have buried so long we have no idea what they even are anymore and unless the “spotlight” of the Holy Spirit unveils a memory where the lie attached itself and continues to challenge the truth we will continue to react out of that hurt.  Yet I have seen in my Christian walk great change in my life and healing that has come from the gentle touch of a nail-scarred hand to my soul.  More and more I see that we are victorious when we, by faith, appropriate the grace and love of God, through what our Saviour Jesus Christ did for us at Calvary.

We know that our old (unrenewed) self was nailed to the cross with Him (Jesus).  Jesus fully identified with us so that we can identify with Him and what He did on that cross for us.

Just believe that we have “died to sin” and to our old nature through the work at Calvary and that we now walk in the newness of life and live to the glory of God.  God Himself works in us daily to bring us from one degree of glory to another.

[Not in your own strength] for it is God Who is all the while effectually at work in you – energising and creating in you the power and desire – both to will and to work for His good pleasure and satisfaction and delight.  Phil 2: 13b Amp

I love this scripture.  It is not in our own strength.  We don’t have the strength to be Holy as God is Holy nor perfect as He is.  But He has given to us Christ’s righteousness and by faith we believe that we are right with Him because of this and all the while God’s responsibility is to effectively work in us the change to become more like His Son.  I love it.  He energises us and He creates in us, through the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, the desire that becomes our driving force to surrender our will, our hurts, our rejection and pain and trust Him to work in and through us for His pleasure.  It brings God great satisfaction to see His children walk in the freedom that Christ has paid for us to walk in.  It delights Him when we move with Him, obeying the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and allow Him to flow in and through us, to become His nail-scarred hand to others.

We are in Christ.  Our life is hid in Christ in God.  We are His hands, His feet, His passions, His love and His truth to others when we live by faith in the Son of God and in His great and wonderful Grace.

He promised an outflow of “rivers of living water” to all those obey Him and are filled with the Holy Spirit.  We are that flowing water that will bring life and refreshment to others when we allow the Spirit to work in us and through us. 

At the Feast of the Tabernacles, when Jesus went to Jerusalem, He stood on the steps as the water flowed and cried out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty let Him come to me and drink”.  He beckons, He woos, He calls and it is up to us to respond.  Come and drink of Him, the water of Life and live.  This is the greatest invitation that we could accept.  RSVP today a resounding YES to Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God.  You will never regret it.

Displaying the Fruit

Gal 6:22 But the fruit of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.  Against such there is no law.

I so desire to become more like God and I sometimes feel that I have to strive to achieve perfection.  Those of us, particularly stuck with this malady, would be the first to say it is unachievable and, in fact, frustrating and self-de-meaning.  If we don’t achieve our level of perfection, whatever it may be, we tend to get very down and critical of ourselves.  This is definitely not how God wants us to live, and I think that this is the outworking of a shame-based nature.  We don’t like to make mistakes because we don’t like to look like “idiots”.  We are often able to extend grace to others but are particularly harsh with ourselves.

I was thinking about the Cross of Christ on the way to work the other morning and was particularly stuck with the fact that Christendom has “sanitised” the cross, giving Jesus a loin cloth to cover His nakedness. But His death was a shameful death, and His nakedness was exposed to all.  This was an exchange.  Jesus took the shame of our missing the mark and the curse that comes with sin (our own or those perpetrated against us) and which causes deep-seated shame in our souls and gives us honour as Sons and Daughters of the Most High God.  He also gives us honour before the enemy of our soul, the accusing adversary, satan, (1 Pet 5:8) who can hold nothing against those washed in the blood.

Psa 23:5  You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over.

When Adam and Eve sinned, God covered their nakedness, their shame with animal skins (“I was afraid because I was naked” Gen 3:10b).  They miserably tried to cover themselves with fig leaves (even as we always try to hide our sins) but God’s love is such that He sacrificed the first animals, shedding their blood, to lovingly cover the rebellion exposed in their lives.  And He lovingly gave Jesus, His only begotten Son, for us, where His blood flowed down, not to cover, but totally remove the stain of our sins and where we walk in the forgiveness made available to us.

We are called to imitate God, seemingly an impossible task, especially in the light of Galatians 6:22.  I realised afresh in meditating on the fruit of the Spirit, that it is everything God is, and it is His power through the Holy Spirit in us, to live a godly lifestyle. 

2Pe 1:2  Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord,

2Pe 1:3  as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue,

2Pe 1:4  by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

God is LOVE.  That is the first fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Love is the great motivator of the heart.  God loved us first, and when we received the revelation/knowledge of this truth we were able to receive it and experience it.  It is not head knowledge but revelation that came to our spirit/heart, and enabled us to “taste and see” that God is good. (Ps 34:8)  Everything else will fade but love will always remain. This is very challenging to me, but like everything, we receive God’s love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:5) and faith, and then out of the overflow we minister to others.

Human’s who have not experienced and received God’s Love into their hearts, are incapable of the “agape” (total unconditional love towards others including enemies) which is the love the Father wants to lavish on us.  We cannot even strive to achieve this measure of love.  However, we are much more capable with Holy Spirit power and help. 

We can will, (with the Holy Spirit’s strength) to choose to love others, even when they have disappointed us, hurt us or let us down.  God demonstrated His Love towards us, that even while we were sinners, (wilfully going our own way and totally opposed to His Holiness and Character), Christ died for us.  (Rom 5::8)

Jn 4:10  In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

When we meditate on God’s incredible and life changing Love for us, knowing that He loved us, even whilst we did not care for Him at all, we draw near to Him, fully confident in His forgiveness and mercy toward us.  We know, like the Loving Father He is, He is there with welcome-arms open and ready to receive us and pour out His grace and mercy upon us and in drawing near to Him, we become like Him.  In my own life, God has moved upon me to love the “unlovable” and the pure love that flowed was of God, definitely not of me.  We can allow the Holy Spirit to flow through us, through the rivers of living water, to refresh others and help bring healing to their lives. 

Please get this, that God doesn’t love us only when we do the right thing.  He loves us regardless of what we do.  The cross is proof of this.  Christ died for us whilst we were sinners.  He didn’t die for us when we began to behave better.  God’s mercy for us saw judgement come upon His own Son.  Jesus Christ, who is the truth, took our deserved punishment on Himself, so that we can have peace with the Father and live confidently by appropriating Christ’s righteousness to ourselves.  Hallelujah.  What a gift.

Psa 85:10  Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed.

The fruit of the Holy Spirit operates and flows through love.  There is no love, except for self love, in the works of the flesh.  Love covers, the flesh exposes.  Herein lies the will of love.  Do we spread gossip and bring disharmony, disunity or distrust, or do we stop gossip in its tracks? Do we go to a sister or brother which whom we have had or caused an offence and ask for forgiveness and reconcile, or do we hold the offence against them?

Love outworks through action and not just words.  Ask anyone who has fallen in love.  They sacrifice time and money to be with the one who has captured their heart.  Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for his friends. (Jn 15:13)  This is the outworking of love.  And this is what seperates us from the world, that "we love one another" as Jesus commanded.  This is what will bring thirst to those who do not know God, when they see love in action and desire to have and to be the same.

Let us "love one another".

The Finished Work of Calvary

The cross of Christ!  An amazing gift!  God-given, God breathed and God performed. 

When Jesus Christ said, “It is done”, an exchange was fully completed on our behalf.  Thank you Jesus, for the finished work of the cross.

You became sin so I might become the righteousness of God

You were rejected so I could be accepted.

You took my sicknesses so I could be healed.

You became poor so I might become rich.

You took my shame so I would have honour as a child of the Most High God.

You were hated so I would be loved.

You died so I could have life. 

You became a curse so I would be set free from the curse of sin and be blessed.

You took my punishment and judgement so there is now no condemnation for me.

You were bound so I could be set free and walk in liberty.

You were taken captive by the darkness so I could be released into the light.

You took my sorrows so I could have joy.

You went to hell, took the keys of hades and death, so I could go to heaven.

You rose from the dead for my justification.

You were falsely accused so I could be declared innocent.

Your relationship with the Father was broken so I could be reconciled to Him.

You took His wrath so I could have His grace and peace.

Your heart was broken so mine could be restored and made whole.

Everything that you did at Calvary was for me.

Kingdom First

Mat 6:33  But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

We live in a world run by money and our natural inclination is to worry about whether we will have enough. Jesus taught the principle of seeking first the Kingdom in a passage about money and possessions, to lift our eyes from the natural to the supernatural.  Father does not want His children in poverty barely getting by but He particularly wants us to be a blessing as He blesses us.  The thing here is that God, when we are in right relationship and seeking after Him and His Righteousness, will add to us the things we need.  Jesus said we are not to worry about food or clothing and certainly no father would see his children poverty stricken and starving.  I noticed though this scripture says that these things shall be added, and not multiplied, to us.  I thought it strange for a God who is into multiplying and not adding, especially when He desires our prosperity and health above all things as the King James Version says.

3Jn 1:2  Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers. (NKJV)

 However, we need prosperity of the soul first.  As our soul prospers, and it surely will do so as we seek first the Kingdom and His righteousness, God can add to us.  No parent would buy a super-charged V8 car for a 15 year old son.  With no sense of mortality, wisdom or experience, he will push that car to the limit and wipe himself out.  It’s the same with God.  We need character development to begin to carry more of His anointing and favour in our lives.  When we tithe as God requires; when we give to another in need; when God sees that we can be a blessing, as He intended us to be, because we don’t hold onto money too tightly and allow its tentacles to chokingly wrap around our hearts, He will add to us a greater degree of prosperity.  Our righteousness and character are of great importance to God.  We are to seek His righteousness, doing what is right even when no one is watching, no matter how hard it is; then we become faithful and trusted servants.  The Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.

God knows exactly at what stage of our walk we are with Him and as the parable of the talents teaches, He gives to each according to their ability.  One of the first things we note in this parable is that the Master gives His servants His goods.  So Jesus gives us our abilities and gifts to serve in His Kingdom. The parable goes on to tell us that one servant received 5 talents, another 2 and the last 1.  Each one was given the option whilst the Master was away to work with that which they had been given and each was rewarded according to the “fruit” they produced.  Two doubled what they had received but the one servant who had a wrong concept of the Master’s character did nothing with what he had been given.  The other two were commended by the Master whereas the last one had what had been given to him taken away.

Mat 25:29  For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.

I believe that as we grow in the Lord and are trustworthy with little, He begins to trust us with much more, as Jesus said in this same parable:-

Mat 25:21  His lord said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.'

Going back to Matthew 6, the passage teaches that our eye is the lamp to the soul.  A pure eye lets in light but an evil eye, darkness.  I thought that this was a bit strange to have this concept in the discourse about money and possessions but realised that it is through the eye gate that we develop greed, covetousness and dissatisfaction.  Living in a world where the rich and famous are revered and celebrated, where we are constantly bombarded to have this or that latest fashion, best car etc, we lose our contentment in having enough food and clothes as God promised He would provide.  We have become a society of waste and are seemingly always restless for more.  Jesus is teaching us to be satisfied and content with our daily needs even though I believe God still wants to prosper us beyond this to be a blessing to others and to nations.  He wants us to have enough for “every good work”.

2Co 9:8  And God is able to make all grace abound toward you, that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may have an abundance for every good work.

God needs to be able to trust us with more.  Will we hold onto what we have and become a hoarder of our wealth or will we indeed release it to where it is meant to go?  Success can be a huge battle ground for pride. God desires to bring us into the Promised Land; a land that is flowing with milk and honey, where there are streams and pools of refreshing water and an abundance of wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates and olives.  This passage in Deuteronomy speaks of abundance, fullness and rest.

Deu 8:11-18  Beware that you do not forget the LORD your God by not keeping His commandments, His judgments, and His statutes which I command you today, lest—when you have eaten and are full, and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them; and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied; when your heart is lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led you through that great and terrible wilderness, in which were fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty land where there was no water; who brought water for you out of the flinty rock; who fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your fathers did not know, that He might humble you and that He might test you, to do you good in the end—then you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gained me this wealth.' And you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth that He may establish His covenant which He swore to your fathers, as it is this day.

It is very pertinent that God give us this warning because pride is a blemish, a darkness on the soul, and it causes us to become unthankful and forgetful of the Lord’s blessing.  Pride is so insidious that often we don’t even know that we have it.

God will gift us, and as we seek His Righteousness and are “character-developed”, He can increase His anointing on us to do even more.  We need to have character to keep and carry what is precious to God, His anointing, and what should be extremely precious to us too.  Samson was anointed by God as a judge in Israel to bring freedom from the enemy.  But Samson was a pampered and spoilt brat who did not practise righteousness.  He broke the laws, catering to his fleshly desires and defiled himself on many occasions.  He did not treasure the anointing on his life and grieved the Holy Spirit of God, dishonoured his parents, touched the unclean and ended up blind and mocked in captivity in the enemy’s camp.  God still used him to destroy some of Israel’s enemies but one wonders how much more God could have done through Samson if he was not ruled by his passions and lusts.  Samson had a strong anointing on him but he did not have the character to carry that anointing to accomplish even greater things during his lifetime.  The race he ran was shortened by his own folly and he did not “strip off every weight that slows us done and the sin that so easily hinders our progress” Heb 12:1

There is a world of hurt out there that needs the touch of God through our time, our love, our resources and our faithfulness to use the gifts and abilities God has given us. Let us seek His face and His Righteousness and allow His Spirit to flow through us according to the grace He has bestowed upon us in Jesus Name.  Amen?