JESUS SPEAKING

            Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?  Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.  He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear isn’t mine but the Father’s who sent me.  These things I have spoken to you while being present with you.  But the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all of the things that I have said to you” (John 14: 22-26.)          

INSPIRED THOUGHTS

            Jesus had been speaking to his disciples about his death, resurrection, and ascension.  He promised that after his ascension, he would send to them a replacement; someone to comfort their hearts, and to give them the power to continue his works on earth.  The world wouldn’t receive this Spirit, but only those who loved God.  Jesus said the Spirit would manifest itself by teaching them all things; he also said that the Spirit would remind them of all that he had said.  The Holy Spirit would bring out of each person’s heart, his treasured words.  These treasures were both from the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Jesus said, “Therefore every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.”  Every follower had become a conduit through which God’s words would be presented to the world; the Holy Spirit was the means by which the proper scriptures were used in each situation, to minister to the lost and to edify His followers.  Jesus said, “Now when they bring you to the synagogues and magistrates and authorities, do not worry about how or what you should answer, or what you should say.  For the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say.”

            During the course of writing this message, I was speaking to a girl who was writing a book on Zombies; a book about the dead coming to life.  As we talked, we spoke about inspiration, and I was able to tell her that in each human being, there is a place, deep down inside, where ideas come from.  This place is where a person’s heart is.  I quoted a scripture brought to mind by the Holy Spirit, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  I told her that there is no way to keep from expressing in her writing, what was in her heart.  The Holy Spirit led me to talk about the power of words, as she was a writer and used them to express herself.  I asked her, how it would feel if, as she was writing, she just happened to see her main character walk past the coffee shop window.  I told her that Jesus had been written about long before he was born, and that he was the word of God made manifest in the flesh, quoting John, “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  So the character of Jesus walked off of the Holy Scriptures and in to the world of flesh and bone.  We then defined a zombie as half living and half dead.  I responded by telling her about ‘new birth,’ and how everyone born is alive and yet still dead; I told her that full life comes when someone is reborn and filled with the Holy Spirit.  I quoted to her the experience Jesus had with the demoniac, who was a living man, hanging out in a cemetery (he was naked and had been cutting himself); a real life zombie; living among the dead; as Jesus passed by he exercised the demons within him, and the man was restored to sanity and fully clothed.  The Holy Spirit had brought to my mind this story, as it was fitting for our conversation.  Finally, she told me about her other novel she was writing, and she told me that it was about ‘How love saves.’  I told her that was interesting; I motioned to the open bible before me, and told her the bible was a book about the exact same thing.  She said, “You’re right; the bible is pretty much about the same thing.”  This entire conversation was set-up, orchestrated, and led by God’s Holy Spirit speaking from within me.  I just had to willing to let Him lead.  The girl, near tears, convicted in her heart of the lifestyle she had been living, said (roughly), “All I came in here to do is write a little bit of my story…But He is always after me (the Lord.)  He never wants to let me go.”  As it turned out, she grew up faithful to the Lord, but had walked away because of a man she had been seeing.  She left knowing she had a decision to make.  (There were so many more scriptures that I quoted to her and didn’t mention here, all of which were brought to my mind at the right time.)

            Today, God is seeking to use you to minister his word to others.  The first step is reading His word, and storing it up in your heart.  The second step is to believe in His Son, His death, resurrection, and ascension.  The last step is to find a quiet place, sit down and ask God to give you His Holy Spirit and he will.  The Holy Spirit will then testify to you concerning the truth of God’s word, and you will for the first time “know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  He will bring to your remembrance the words of Jesus Christ.  You are then qualified to begin ministering to others.

            “Lord Heavenly Father, we ask You for more of Your Holy Spirit, and we desire to be Your ministers in this place.  Give us the power to speak Your words, and to love others according to Your testimonies.  We love You Lord, we praise You, and we thank You, and we ask and pray all of these things in Jesus Christ’s name.  Amen.”  God bless all of you.

JESUS SPEAKING

            ‘Now Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, and when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward he was hungry.  Now when the tempter came to him, he said, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”

            But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’” (Mathew 4: 1-4.)

INSPIRED THOUGHTS

            After being baptized, Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights, where he was tempted by Satan.  Satan attempted to control him through manipulation.  He called in to question Jesus’ deity, and appealed to his bodily desires for food.  The Lord replied by quoting scripture, saying “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”  There are bodily and spiritual needs; the stomach needs food, but the heart (spirit) needs the word of God.

            Recently I have been ministering to a woman who is near spiritual death.  She can’t stop doing drugs, yet professes to know God.  When asked if she reads the bible daily, she replied, “No.”  Strangely, when told that daily bible reading would bring about a transformation in her life, she didn’t seem to get it, or worse she didn’t believe it.  When asked what had happened when she was reading the bible daily, she roughly replied, “I read it for a while, and then my life gets better, and then I stop reading it, and I go out and revert back to my old ways.”  She has failed to understand the truth of what is revealed in this scripture; that the spirit needs to be fed with the bible daily; not two days a week, or one week out of a month, but daily.  The spirit controls the body, and when the sprit is starved, it becomes so weak, the fleshly desires take control.  They then are guided by immediate desires for food, for sex, for drugs, etc.  The key to regaining control is feeding the spirit with the word of God.

            Today, we all need to be feeding ourselves with the word of God.  How much time does it take to read a proverb, or to go through a portion of a scripture?  Daily, we spend a half an hour or more eating food; does opening the bible for ten minutes and consuming the word of God seem too difficult?  Give God’s word a chance in your life.  Make it a part of who you are, and you will find a strength to overcome and endure anything that may come your way.

            “Lord Heavenly Father, we come before You today, and we ask and pray that You would give us a hunger for Your word.   Give us a desire to feed our spirits with Your divine power.  Provide for us new insights as we read, that we might be excited with every new truth we uncover.  We thank You Lord, we praise You, and we ask and pray all of these things in Jesus Christ’s name.”  Amen.

JESUS SPEAKS

            And the Lord said, “To what then shall I liken the men of this generation, and what are they like?  They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, saying: 

            ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

            we mourned to you and you did not weep.’   

           For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’  The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’  But wisdom is justified by all her children” (Luke 7: 31-35.)

INSPIRED THOUGHTS

            John the Baptist lived in the wilderness and preached a message of repentance in preparation for the arrival of the messiah (Jesus.)  John did not drink wine, and he and his followers fasted regularly.  He baptized people in the Jordan River, and had no affiliation with the priests in Jerusalem; the priests hated him because the majority of the Jewish people believed he was a prophet, and he undermined their authority by baptizing people with water, for the remission of sins.  John was seen as a threat because he recognized the corruption of the priests, and publicly called them to repent and be baptized.  They refused, because they wanted to keep their power, their wealth, their full stomachs, and their fine clothing.  They wanted John to ‘lighten up;’ they wanted him to ‘play nice;’ this is what Jesus was referring too when he said the priests were like children who ‘played the flute’ for John but he didn’t dance.  (Children in the marketplaces would try to get reactions out of others.)  When John didn’t ‘dance,’ they condemned him as ‘demon possessed.’  Jesus referred to himself as ‘The Son of Man’ (an Old Testament title given to the Messiah.)  He said, “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking.”  He and his disciples drank wine, and didn’t fast, because they were celebrating his arrival as the Messiah.  The religious leaders didn’t want anyone celebrating Jesus as the messiah, so they condemned him and his disciples as drunkards and deviants.  This is what is meant by, ‘we mourned to you and you did not weep.’  The religious leaders called Jesus and John evil in an attempt to regain control, with little regard for right and wrong.  They didn’t want to dance to God’s tune, and God doesn’t dance to a man’s tune, so these men became enemies of God.  Rather than helping, they were hindering His work.  Jesus said, “But wisdom is justified by all of her children.”  The children he was referring too were all of his followers.  Those who were repenting were coming to Jesus and giving their lives back to God.  The religious leaders had no one coming to them, because they had nothing to offer.  They had no children, no converts, no followers, because they were blind.

            Many churches have multiple pastors.  Often times a person who is stuck in sin will go to one pastor for counseling, but when faced with the idea of change, they rebel.  Not liking the answer they found with one pastor, they will go to the next pastor hoping for a different outcome.  Until they’ve exhausted all of the pastors.  If they are still unwilling to change themselves they may change churches.  They may go to the next church, a more liberal church, and if rejected for their lifestyle or sin at that church, they will go to the next church.  Often, when exiting a church they condemn the leaders and the church itself.  Today, there are whole churches that have become ‘last stops’ for those who have ventured down this path.  Many of the churches, no longer teach from the word of God, because to do so would make their ‘luke-warm’ congregations feel uncomfortable.  ‘Judgment, hell, condemnation, or change;’ ‘let’s just get rid of the bible and avoid all of these negative reactions’ (sarcasm.)  I was driving by a building that resembled a church, but the sign outside was promoting same-sex marriage.  I pulled my car over and stopped in; hoping to discover what portion of the bible might support their stand on this issue.  The pastor told me, “we’re not biblical literalists.”  What she was really saying was, ‘since God wouldn’t dance to our tune, we had to get rid of him.’  ‘Since God wouldn’t play our game, we’ll just remove the parts of God we don’t like.’ 

            Today, as Christians, we shouldn’t attempt to make God dance to our tune; we’re supposed to dance to His.  We aren’t to chisel portions of the bible out of our minds and hearts to continue on in some sinful practice.  Reading the bible is invaluable in any Christian’s life.  Why?  If you were about to jump out of an airplane and you were being told the directions on how to pull the cord, would you be interested in what you were hearing?  Your life depends on the words in the bible; you cannot be transformed unless you expose yourself to it.  You cannot grow to know more about God unless you are reading His word.  Followers of the Lord make scripture reading a part of daily living; all the scripture, not just the warm fuzzy ones; but the ones that challenge you to change and be more like Him.

            “Lord Heavenly Father, we come before You now and we ask and pray that You change us to be more like You.  Give us a hunger to read Your word and to dance to Your tune.  Help us to submit ourselves to Your leading.  We love You Lord, we praise You, and we thank You, and we ask and pray all of these things in Jesus Christ’s name.  Amen.”  God bless all of you.