What to focus on

Heard a lady say an absolutely brilliant thing the other day, truly. She said this.

"You know how when somebody tells you not to think of a pink elephant, you automatically think of a pink elephant? The reason why that happens is because there is no mechanism inside of a human soul for don't. There is only mechanism inside of the human soul for do. So when you say, "don't", your brain (0r whoever's you are saying it to) responds with a "do" mechanism. "

This is the most brilliant and amazing thing I have ever heard.

So what is the lesson we can learn from this? The lesson is to not focus on what you don't want to do...focus on what you DO want to do!! Because you are a "do" kind of being! It's how you are created, by God! Don't try to stop bad habits...do good things! Don't try not to bad things...do good things!!!!

More Proof...

...that faith only works through love. There are all these verses in the Bible that say that if we ask God for anything that is according to His will, then we will get those requests from Him. I think it says this in the book of John, Jesus Himself talking, and in the book of 1 John as well. It probably states it in other places as well.

Here's the rub. How do we know what is according to His will and what isn't? Well, here is what I have learned. I have only become able to know what His will is as I've come to know Him.

Before I knew Him, and only knew about Him, those verses didn't work for me. They stayed in the misty grey area of Bible verses that had zero effect on my faith. But, now that I've gotten to know Him, and what He is like, and, more specifically, what He is like toward me, I know a lot of what His will is. And, therefore, I ask Him for things regularly and receive them, because I know it's what He wants for me! It's so simple!! But I never knew what His will was, and therefore those verses never worked for me, until I got to know HIM!

This is just more proof of the fact that faith works through love! My faith never worked until I discovered that God loved me and wanted to have a relationship with me. After I discovered that, and began to live in it, MY FAITH BEGAN TO WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Why is it...

...that before we become Christians we are promised all sorts of wonderful things like healing love, a friend who never quits on us, freedom, purpose and destiny, and the like, but then after we become Christians, we are constantly bombarded with all the things we have to do or else? Where did the change come in and why? As Christians, we need to be actively partaking of these real things that we were promised all the time. It did not change after we chose to follow Christ.

And we must live these things ourselves to prove the validity of them to anyone else that we are going to promise them to, or else we become hypocritical.

So, what's the point in all this? Love. As usual. What everybody needs, Christian and non, is love. And trust. And freedom. And healing. And peace. And hope. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Why Trust is so stinking important.

Was feeling pretty bad about not knowing how to trust God, and not knowing how to receive love correctly, and wondering what I was going to do about any of it, until I heard a great sermon tonight. A sermon about Abraham. A man who didn't know how to trust or be loved. A man who suffered from depression as a result. A man who did really, really really stupid things as a result. A man who had to learn, just like the rest of us, that God is good, and loves us, and is worthy of our trust. And it took him years, and years, and years.

And not only Abraham, but Moses, and Elijah, and Job, and Gideon, and Jonah, and all the rest. All people whom God had to teach to trust, because they were not taught it. All people who had no idea how good God is and how much He loves them.

The Greatest Weapon in the World

The greatest spiritual weapon in the world is the ability to receive love. This ability makes one impervious to fear, guilt, shame, pride, (the wrong kind), insecurity, etc. Without it, all these other things can grow. Where love is, there can be no fear, guilt, shame, insecurity, etc. Therefore, the ability to receive love is critical. Where love is not, there will be fear, pride, insecurity, shame, etc. (this is only a partial list of the other things that grow where there is no love).

Therefore, the greatest spiritual weapon available to a human being is the ability to receive love. If you don't have it, you must get it! If you have the ability to help someone else get it... give it to them! Being loved is a person's greatest defense in this world. Defend someone today!

The Determing Factor

Here is something that used to not make sense to me. I couldn't understand why it was that I could see no consistency between people's belief in God and their well being or success as a human being. I had always thought that belief and faith in God were the sure ways to go and were the things that would set a person right in this life. I was sure that they were the path of life that the Bible talked about. But, when I looked objectively at people, I did not always see consistency between people's faith and their overall well being as a person.

In other words, I would see people with no faith or belief in God doing wonderfully well in their lives, while seeing people with faith and belief not doing well. And then I would see some who DID have faith in God doing well, while others who had no faith were not doing well. In other words, their seemed to be no direct correlation between a person's faith, or lack of faith, and their well being as a person, either for or against. It all just seemed to be random. Until now. I have discovered the determining factor.

Love is the determining factor. And love knows no theological bounds. It crosses them all. Love occurs in Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhists, Paiutes, agnostics... All people have the ability to experience love. And any human being's well being is a direct result of how much love they have received, experienced, lived in, and currently live in! A child of atheists who receives more genuine love than the child of a Christian is going to be better off. And, the child of a christian family who receives more genuine love is going to be better off than the child of athiest who do not love. Theology is not the issue! Love is!

Belief and faith in God are factors in a person's well being, in that they connect them with God, who is love. So they are contributing factors, but they are not the most important factor. The most important, overriding, all important factor for being a human being, is, and will always be, love.

Destroying religion, bit by bit

We, those of us who have been around religious circles for a while, have all heard this phrase, that "Jesus has the keys to death and hell". (I think it's somewhere in the book of Revelation).

Well what does this really mean? Here is one thought. Since we know that hell is something, or somewhere, as evidenced by so many of Jesus other teachings, then why would he want, or need, the keys to it? Why would he want to go there? If somebody has the keys to a place, this infers that they will be going there at some point, and have access to it, and can go there whenever they want. It infers, at the least, authority to be there, if they so choose. So, He can go there any time He wants to.

Well,why? What is He going to do there? Isn't He the one who sent all those people to it in the first place? Or, it was His Father, at least, wasn't it?

Let me make a couple of suggestions, based on a couple of Bible verses that seem to be almost universally ignored. Jesus said, in the book of John, that a time is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and those who hear it will live. So, assuming that some of those dead are in this place called hell, apparently Jesus went to hell, spoke to them the word of the gospel, and those who heard it (accepted it?) lived. Just like He did (does) here on earth. Amazing. So much for the theory that all the people who lived before Jesus showed up on earth are burning in hell for eternity.

And, here is the other conveniently ignored verse. This one comes from 1 Peter 4, and says, " for this reason, the gospel has been preached also to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God". Wow! Like God is actually fair and just, and understands that there is deception and darkness that affects people and their decision making processes while they are here on earth, and so gives them the chance, when they are dead (physically) and can see it all clearly. This sounds like just what Jesus said, that He Himself went, or maybe even still, goes there, and preaches the gospel to the people who blew it and found themselves there. Just a thought. So much for the theory that everyone who dies without hearing the gospel is going to burn in hell for eternity!!

Maybe this is why He needs the keys!!

Danger Will Robinson

A dangerous thing to do-- Believe that the trial that you are or may be going through is ordained by God to make you stronger.

The trial you are going through is a result of living in this world. The goal that God wants for you from it and through it is to draw you closer to Him in absolute dependence and trust and love.

This doesn't happen when you believe that He has ordained the trial for you to make you stronger. That breeds pride. Pride is always very dangerous.

Living in this world has trials. God certainly does use those trials for His purposes, but His purpose is always to love you and to show you His love for you. That love MUST be your only goal through any trial you face.

God works through the trials that we go through to bring us closer to Him... FOR LOVE.

Real security vs. fake security

Fake security-- acting against your fear and insecurity to try to make it change

Real security-- trusting and being loved

Can your religion and let God love you.

Proof that God needs you

Here is proof that God needs us, that God needs people.

The world is in a mess. If God worked in this world apart from people then the world would be just fine. God will not and can not ignore people and walk all over them to just do what he wants and get what he wants done. Because of the nature of us, his creation, and his own nature, that is impossible. He is love, which means that He will always respect us, our choices, and our freedom. That is what love does. We are autonomous beings. We would not be better off if God just ran us over to make things how he wants them. That would not be good for us.

Because of the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves, it has to be a joint effort between us and Him. We are all, us and Him, free, autonomous, beings. He does need you, just the same as you need Him.

God needed about several million or billion people that didn't know it or believe it, and so they were not able to do what God needed them for, and so the world is in the shape that it is in. If every one of those people had realized the truth that God needed them, badly, then they would have come to Him, responded to His love, and out of that love done whatever beautiful and good thing God had planned for them to do in the world, and the world would be in a much better state.

And, conversely, those that have realized God's need of them, have come to Him and found out why, and done, by His empowering love and grace, whatever astoundingly beautiful thing that He had for them to do in this world, have made it better off for the rest of us today. I. e, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, Billy Graham, Bill Wilson, Rich Mullins, George Mueller, etc.

Now, I know that those who disagree with this theory would quote the verse out of the book of Esther (4:14) where Mordecai says to Esther, "if you remain silent at this time, deliverance will rise for us from somewhere else". He may have been right, however, this is not God speaking. This is Mordecai speaking. People often give verses out of the Bible as proof of something and say, "it's the word of God" without realizing that at a lot of places in the Bible, it is simply recording dialogue by fallible, broken human beings, like the place in Acts where the Pharisee strikes Paul and Paul calls him a whitewashed wall. (23:3) The point is, the things that the people say in the Bible are not necessarily "the Word of God".

If God didn't need people, and He raised up someone else to do a person's job whenever that person failed to do it, the world would be perfect. As it is, the world is pretty jacked up. Which tells me that a whole lot of people that God needed didn't agree with Him about that!

God needs you.!!!! Refuse to listen to the religious crowd that tells you differently!

The Phenomenon of Loneliness

Ever experience true loneliness? I don't mean that general ache that most of us feel from time to time that comes from living in this world. I mean the real thing. Like you feel when you come home to an empty house that is usually full. And the full force of actually being by yourself with nobody else around hits you right in your heart. It is not a pleasant experience. And, of course, I'm sure you all know by now where I'm going with this. We are not meant to be alone.

We operate best in relationship. And, of course, since we are made in the image of God, this means that He doesn't like to be alone either.

I hear people teach all the time that God doesn't need us, that God can do what He wants to do without us, God will find somebody else, etc. etc. etc. Like He cares more about getting what He wants done than He does about us, which is simply not true.

So, if God doesn't need us, then why would He go through so much effort to reach us and have a relationship with us?

I think, again, that there are too many people out there saying things that they've heard somewhere in the annals of churchdom and believing that they are true of the nature if God, instead of being responsible for their own relationship with Him so that they could hear some truth that might actually help someone or encourage someone.

God feels loneliness. And the only antidote for His loneliness is YOU.

Worship?

So I have never understood the term worship. It has always just been one of those religious terms that has never done me any good... until now.

My understanding of the term has led me to think that it means always paying attention to something, giving something (or someone,) all of your attention, or most of your attention, or more attention than you give to anything or anybody else. And, I can honestly say that I think I have reached a state in my life where I give more attention to God than I do to anything or anyone else. But the key is how I got here. And, for any of you who have been reading this blog for any length of time now, you can probably guess what it is that I'm going to say.

I have reached this place that looks like what I perceive worship to be by love. Because He has so unrelentingly hammered it into my brain that he loves me, and I am falling so in love with Him, I think about Him more than anything or anybody else. Gee, I guess this is my faith working through love again. That has got to be just about my favorite verse in the entire Bible. Because it is so stinking true. Faith works through love. It is the only way it works.

So, the point here, is that while worship of God is so preached and held up as the standard for us to live, I think that there is only one way that we are going to reach that goal... and that is by learning and coming to know of His love for us!