Trust the Lord with All Your Heart

 

When societal dilemmas rise,

yes, pray, but also actively seek

God's guidance through His word 

Blessed be the Lord who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

Psalm 124:6 

In many parts of Africa today, we see a subsistence existence that Christian brothers and sisters have rationalized as being God's will for everyone. The refugee crises that don't appear in the news anymore, continue to make for a very present way of life among millions who have fled civil wars, internment camps, and bloody terrorism.

Taking courage from Israel's difficult history, maybe knowing Israelites had been subject to attack by peoples who could be cannibalistic (leading Israel to desperate self-cannibalism at times), some Christians in Africa may see missionaries who partake of meats as suspect.

There may tend to be a lack of discernment between human sacrifice and the complete sustenance the love of Heaven has made possible. There also may be an outright disdain for anything that may seem like gluttony in comparison.

But thank God today, that many have known, with all our hearts in the U.S., a provider whose loving kindness has taught us how to recover when we're ailing, and whose Grace often has told us not to eat so much the bread of affliction (the Old Testament saga) but to eat of the bread of life: the bread that brought us through slavery and gave us eternal hope.

To more fully understand that meaning, think of Old Testament scriptures that were painstakingly written on scrolls made from animal skins. When a prophet physically ate a portion of a scroll and found it sweet to taste but bitter to digest, that was God's poetic way of saying we don't have to live bitterly.

God's word, the Bible, calls the old scroll the "bread of affliction." But thank God today that we shouldn't have to eat that old, unleavened "bread," and, more importantly, that we have the unleavened bread of Heaven, instead.

Instead of suffering and living on fragments of painful wisdom, we're supposed to have the free gift of a new testimony: a testimony that provides; a testimony that says, "Let your moderation be known."

While being gluttonous isn't the way of new life we have in Jesus, knowing He is provider and allows us more than enough, is.

***

Answers like in the above opinion don't happen overnight. Answers in Jesus often take years of trial, prayer, and seeking God through his word.

One thing I've learned for sure [Hackers, please don't

change another word], is that if we understand

what Heaven is telling us, that means our

understanding isn't puffed up in error. Instead of

being puffed up like leavened bread, our

understanding needs to hold together like the skins

of an Old Testament scroll and the crisp, bound

pages of the New Testament books

(not like puffed up bread).

Understand, yes, God is artistic, and, yes, God is

poetic. Hasn't He made us in His likeness? And

wasn't He aware that bread was being leavened and

shaped in vulgar and even murderous error? And

isn't that part of why He has said to eat of the

unleavened, skin-saving truth of His word, instead?

(That is to say, drawings and pictures like the above

are not what God means by the bread of ljfe!)

When we're patient enough in affliction and in good, we ask God our questions and one day see answers in His word, clear and day (answers He often already has given us in heart).

By the way, probably the best way to study the Bible is never a Bible-in-a-year study plan. It's probably always best to hear Sunday school lessons, which usually are topical; to be in a Bible-study group, if possible, wherein the Holy Spirit may have answers a lot of seeking people need; to sit at a pastor's feet for mid-week studies, which can often bring us sharper theological and historical understanding of scriptures; and to seek answers to prayers during your own quiet times.

A photo of an old animal-skin scroll

(the "bread of affliction" for some faithful),

published in the New York Times

As to getting through passages that are that difficult bread of affliction, it's my personal testimony that God makes a way. I was in a Bible-study group in a shelter when the topic was Nehemiah's rebuilding of the Jerusalem wall. That one chapter-by-chapter study in Nehemiah, with commentary, made it so much easier to put much of the Israelite journey in right context.

Other topical help I've found, through independent study years ago, included following the books of Kings in order to understand imperfection becoming perfection through Jesus.

It's all about what the believer needs and wants to know by faith (Knock, and let truth be opened), not about how many times anyone has read how much of the Bible.

In my own heart, I'm led to believe it's not God's will for me to know every passage of the Bible intimately. I've accepted that there is at least one Bible book I may never read.

How Jesus Ends Our Suffering

 

In Bible terms, serpents are only

problems, but problems that

can be handled in Christ

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.

John 3:14 

Two folk expressions are appropriate right now:

One is, "Give it to God." Another is the old Jewish expression, "You're dead to me."

To say or even think, "You're dead to me" is a terrible way to feel. That's a feeling that doesn't have Jesus. But it's appropriate for this lesson, because it helps bring together some very strange puzzles that Jesus gave us.

"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up," Jesus told a man named Nicodemus one night.

If you're a Christian and are the kind of person who has reached out in prayer about every strong question you have had about the Bible, you may have wondered, or may be wondering right now, Why has Jesus compared himself to a serpent?

It's a mystery, the most odd puzzle I think the Holy Spirit has ever given.

But it helps to know that, in God's terms, serpents represent problems.

Sin is a problem for God. And a tradition of sin ("iniquity") that goes from generation to generation more and more as time goes on, becomes so much a problem that hearts grow cold, the love of Jesus has warned.

Yet so many people think sin is a remedy. And maybe a few, in strange theological circles, have made it up in their hearts that the serpent himself that Moses lifted up was a remedy - as in a reflection of Jesus on the cross. ... But how wrong is all of that!

In Moses' time, the Israelites were familiar with prophets, but they didn't have the Messiah, the Savior from God, firm in heart. So God spoke to the people in some very rudimentary ways.

There came a time when the people were getting bites from snakes that felt like fire, and those people were dying, possibly at an alarming rate (which begs the question of why the people didn't quickly walk away from the snake-bitten place where they were traveling or where they may have been living).

Moses, like a shrewd father, went and most likely killed a large snake that was the color of bronze. He posted a pole up high somewhere and put the dead snake on the pole.

The sight of that dead thing on a pole had to have drawn crowds away from sulking over repeated snake bites. It put eyes on a solution. ... Just trust God, move away from the problems for at least a few minutes, look here, look up, remember what God did in Egypt, pray and slay whatever problems are in the way, and stop being bitten.

That was a solution that didn't quite include Jesus.

That was a the-problem-is-dead solution. That was a "The problem is already dead to me" response. Instead of reflecting or foreshadowing the coming Savior, Moses raised up a solution by taking things into his own God-given hands.

The trouble with that solution is that, oftentimes, our problems, although snakelike, are very much about differences or fighting among very human people. So, we need Jesus.

Jesus isn't the problem. He is the solution who is the remedy. He is the one from Heaven whose self sacrifice says, "Go on now, to a new freedom. Sin no more."

Instead of reflecting what Moses did, Jesus was lifted up to do the opposite, to draw people not to ending problems with their hands, but to accepting Him as the only Heaven-sent sacrifice for this world's problems.

The only similarity between Jesus and the serpent was that both were lifted up in order to draw people away from perishing.

But in Him, there is a whole lot of waiting problems out ("longsuffering"). In Him, there is a lot of trial or testing. In Him, there is slowness to anger and care in judgment. In Him, each one is held to an account. In Him, there is deliverance, even if we're unable to move and are just being still. In Him, there is wisdom and there are hands to help heal. In Him, solutions, real remedies, take time, despite how we expect Him to, in the end, come swiftly.

Amen.

Endurance Helps Save

Living through turmoil and

confusion in these "last days"

is just as Jesus said,

but He also says to endure

In the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.

2 Peter 3:3 

I don't want to give voice any of the naysaying I find online and in everyday living. Instead, I'll say I'm faithful.

We need faith to be Jesus' body in these eschatological end times. To keep being His hands and feet, helping make a difference, let's stop in-fighting in the church.

If we're fighting in unrighteousness, there's no victory in Him.

Jesus: The Savior who didn't have a place to call home at night, because his mother apparently doubted Him at one point; the Savior who depended on whoever was willing and listening, who depended on others in flesh but who said, "I'll give you rest"; the Savior whose prescription was to labor less like Mah-ta (the English say Martha), and to rest more like the sister who stopped her hurrying in order to listen.

Being pressed and stressed today, one of the best things there is is being still, getting organized and collected, working in peace. From early childhood to elder years, that's a blessed prescription.

And if you wouldn't want anyone to disrupt your peace in Jesus, don't make it your everyday mission to be disruptive to anyone else's day to day.

We're living at a time when some organizations have written "to disrupt" as part of their mission or goals. But I'm here to tell you, devil, you have another thing coming.

As the apostle Paul said, "I bear the marks of Christ," so don't bother me, anymore.

Let's keep quiet sometimes, study, and rightly discern not only biblical history but, more importantly, God's words of Bible truth. Let's keep our bearings and always know victory is in Jesus.

While much of the world is allied in war, confusion, and lawlessness now; and while there are those Europe- and Russia-oriented elite who have become headstrong not in faith but in standing on war power and on prideful thoughts of ancestors who migrated back to the land of Israel after the second most recorded world war; while there is racial and gay pride gone to godless extremes in thinking no one can go to the hell that men like Herod the Great went to, not if the offences are only using the tongue for evil compared to Herod murdering a wife, two of his sons, and Hebrew children (something the Jewish historian Josephus was probably too entangled with Rome to ever write about); while there is so much against many of us each and every day, we cannot forget that we are Heaven's shepherds, lions, and lambs, and that we are supposed to be witnessing our faith convictions no matter our circumstances.

God help us never to fall from grace.

Lord, help us remember how you said he who endures to the end will be saved. (Matthew 24:13)

***

When I logged in early morning weeks after I made this post, I happened to see someone had messed up this post. ... So I'm asking the Lord for the hacking to just end. ... I have held out too much faith for too long -- and have poured my whole heart into leaning on how I learned to write, edit, and keep faith that the love of God is always right there helping us speak our heart. ... The struggle God has given us is for His good, and there has been sacrifice enough without ministry being ruined.

Almost Infinitely Patient

 

SOMEONE IS WRECKING THIS BLOG. I LOOKED AT IT THIS MORNING AND FOUND WHAT I THOUGHT WERE COLOR CHANGES THAT HACKERS BROKE IN AND DID. SUBHEADINGS SHOULD BE LIGHT GRAY, NOT PURPLE, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!!!!

BUT NOW, I'M FINDING NOT ONLY COLOR AND FONT CHANGES, BUT WORSE: THESE PERSONAL POSTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO READ LIKE AN EDITORIALLY FOOLISH PERSON IS DOING THE WRITING: ANYTHING TO RUIN THE SACRIFICIAL WORK THAT WENT INTO FAITHFUL BLOGS LIKE THIS.

HEAVEN HELP US.

I'm not a scientist, but how some people talk about pre-history makes my blood boil, so to speak.

If I don't know the great many technical facts that lifelong scientists have learned, I at least know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the vision someone received in Genesis, is correct: telling us our human journey began with only one man and one woman. I also rest assured that the Bible is true in its vision of thousands upon thousands of years being as one "day" to our Heavenly maker. I trust, with my whole heart and understanding, that God, although His judgments can be grievous, is nearly infinitely patient with mankind, as is evident not only through all the Bible tells us, but also is evident through the millions of years He allowed for land to become fertile and for land to break apart into continents: continents that initially ensured we would be stranded from one another as groups of people, but that would allow mankind to gain in population and prosper more freely.

Still, the extreme simplicity of creation continues to elude some scientists, who talk as if the Neanderthals, for example, were not human. Some somewhat learned people still believe and talk the way many slave holders believed and spoke about African peoples, who they deemed subhuman.

I also wonder why any scientist or science writer still makes the extremely ill mistake of believing that, because all human beings apparently have an ancestral link to the Neanderthals, that must mean "humans" and "Neanderthals" mated at some point.

Heaven knows how wrong!

The Neanderthals were human beings, plain and simple. They were among our ancient cousins who apparently chose to go off on their own and live in isolation. And constant interbreeding among them was enough to cause bodily malformations.

That's so simple.

It's puzzling why any scientists continue to talk about human beings as if we evolved from different species — as opposed to the good sense we have that we evolved only ethnically (based on the closeness of the sun to the plots of earth where we lived, and also based on some of mankind's unspoken sins, including apparent Neanderthal practices with cannibalism — same as in ancient India and other parts of the world).

The fact is, we never have been different species. Not even other animals become whole new species through natural procreation. That is to say that if an animal is a natural-born bat, it remains a bat. And the 1,000 or so types of bats are not supposed to be called different species. Instead, we're supposed to say, and write, that there are about 1,000 subspecies of bats.

So simple!

But we don't say subspecies about ourselves, because it's obvious how wrong that would be.

Here are three outrageous articles to help you know more about what I mean:

https://guardianlv.com/2014/09/cave-art-reveals-the-neanderthal-more-intelligent-than-believed

https://sciencebulletin.org/inbreeding-and-population-demographic-shifts-could-have-led-to-neanderthal-extinction

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/africans-europeans-more-neanderthal-ancestry-160000127.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFNW9XOU25PLZSTLCNc-OB6HOMJpwZf8MYE7uFpqiVRtafvsgg-xeWo4zFjaXO8UcWjyJ41d1i8lwPSfNoE0GQOrgip6oXQj3Atwp48iPH9QOd2Z6JVUiTASZelJ9qJtmsmymcGiWnIy__avemWG5yGLji4n9VNC-yoFHVop2x_E

Grasses Do Die, and Flowers Fade: But ...

 

It's awful that anyone who claims Jesus would destroy for years on end, standing on a scripture the wrong way.

Yes, grasses do wither, and a flower does fade, but that is supposed to be only in God's timing.

And, yes, the word of the Lord is Sovereign. But Jesus' kind word assures us that as long as earth is here for us, Heaven will keep on generating our supply. As long as earth is, there'll be seedtime and harvest.

Just consider the truth this way:

If all grasses withered and every flower faded in a day,

 where would life be? Who ever could live?

Our living happens in God's timing.

~

Food for thought:

Whose living have you helped sustain? ... Whose fullness of life have you helped prevent?

It's Not Like Becoming a Butterfly!

So thankful the Christian

change in heart, is spiritual

In my heart, my old life is absolutely in the past. A new life, in Jesus, has begun. Because life in Christ
is new for me again in life, I'm just not the same, unaware, sinful person I once was.

2 Corinthians 5:17

2 Corinthians 5:17 has been translated — and misused — in more than one way. Some translations say we're a "new creation" in Jesus. Others say we're a "new person" in Jesus.

But neither of those translations means we're changed in the flesh! (Colossians 2:10-14, Ephesians 2:8-9, Philippians 3:3, Philippians 3:2, Galatians 6:15, 2 Corinthians 3:2-3, Romans 2:28-29, Galatians 6:13, 1 Corinthians 1:30-31, Colossians 2:10-11)

When we get saved in Jesus, when we know we have salvation in Him, when we know we have forgiveness of old sins and the opportunity to live delivered or free from those sins, we don't get that salvation through destruction or even circumcision of the flesh.

Instead, Jesus gives us new awareness, a new excitement about life (all things becoming new to us in life: even old lessons seeming new). Jesus gives us newness of understanding (faith comes by hearing), and sets us free.

And when Heaven sets us free from sins, we truly are free, indeed.

We really do become like children in the way we behold things. The Bible says it's through childlike faith in Jesus that we're saved.

Our childlike faith in Him, our being new in Him, is spiritual. It's like being re-born in Him, discovering Him anew. Salvation is having new understanding, a whole new way of wanting to live our lives.

A change in life because of salvation, isn't a change in flesh, but it's a change in awareness, like leaving a womb where you haven't known anything and suddenly seeing life the way Heaven meant you to.

Salvation is a gift that gives us grace, a new awareness, a new, spiritual hunger. And that gift (that release from sin) is spontaneous and good: no evil reminder of the past needed.

Salvation, in Jesus, is deliverance from the past, being set free to have new life from Heaven in heart.

In Jesus, the old mistakes of living are overwith. And it becomes each Christian's testimony of heart that my old way of life is gone.

Redeemed.

Everyone's View of What Heaven Must Be Like, is Different ...

and yet the same.

Maybe, just maybe, the journey back Home isn't as complicated or otherworldly as many may think. Maybe it's not about the fears and hopes a songwriter expressed in the old hymn, "Finding It Home." Maybe, it's not about meeting masses of souls on celestial shores versus the darkness of this world; for that's not quite what the Bible says at all.

The Bible says wait on rescue from the Lord. The Holy Spirit says our deliverance is promised, not as a meeting of masses on a heavenly shoreline, but, really, as Heaven's army descending to meet us at a time of fiery trial in this world.

When Jesus returns to this world full-force, He will have all of Heaven's armies with Him. He is "I Am" (Yahweh), I Am Lord of Hosts (The Lord of Heaven's Armies); and He will deliver this world.

Just how that will look, in flesh and in Spirit, no one really knows. Maybe it's simple as our descendants, our children, fighting a great battle, in righteousness one day.

But something we know for sure is that Jesus is our sure Deliverer, and that rescue begins today, with faith, a belief, a thought.

Deliverance is on the way. Heaven isn't a distant shore, but is so very close in heart.

For now, maybe, our rescue from Heaven is simply in our relationship in Jesus.

And, one day, hopefully a ripened old age, maybe that relationship is ultimately as blessed as being swept up and away into loving adoptive arms on a cold winter's day.