John 14:26 – “But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”  KJV

I tremble when I hear some people talk about the Holy Spirit.  I hear Him referred to as it or spoken of as some ethereal apparition rather than a real person and member of the Godhead.  Likewise, I hear people talk about our Lord Jesus Christ as though He were not a present reality and the Son of God.  I hear Him being called God, but His directives and commandments treated in a shockingly cavalier manner.

Some live and speak as though the Son of God was nothing more than a mere ideal and treat much of the Bible as though it were myth, not truth.  In the words of patriarchs of the faith who have been promoted to the other side, “To follow a merely human savior is to follow no savior at all.”  If the work of Christ on the Cross is mere theory, we will never recognize the power of the Resurrection and the need of the Comforter to Come in our daily lives.  Someone said, “If Mary’s son was not the Son of God, then in a very real sense, no other man is.”  That would mean that we are hopeless as well as helpless.  But, we are not because He is, and He Lives!

Church Creeds are valuable only to the degree those doctrines impact our lives and make a difference in our lives.  If we used that as a test for doctrine, then I contend that in far too many churches and lives the Bible has no practical value.  It is not obeyed, believed, and embraced as life or death.  In that, the Holy Spirit is ignored, and we miss the value of the Promise of Jesus that when the Holy Spirit of Truth would come He would guide us into all truth.  He has come, why then do so many, walk, in defeat and darkness?

That which is important to us enjoys emphasis by us!  If we do not see the value of the Holy Spirit we will not emphasize Him or seek His Presence, Person, and Power.   Too many Christians know about the Holy Spirit but too few actually know Him.  It has been said that a man can die of starvation knowing all about bread and a person can stay in the condition of being spiritually dead while knowing all the historical facts about Christianity.  Knowledge and experience are not the same.  Knowledge should lead us to the experience of God’s Person.

It is through the ministry of the Holy Spirit that we truly become one with God experientially.  He is able to penetrate our minds and help us to bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.  We must never view Him as anything but God because He is God.  Some tend to treat Him like He was God’s messenger but fail to grasp the truth that He is God!  The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit never work separately they are God!

            My prayer is, “Lord fill me to overflowing, saturate Me with the Spirit of God.”  That’s why I love the chorus or song, “Come Holy Spirit.”

Come, Holy Spirit, I need you – Come, Sweet Spirit, I pray – Come in Your strength and Your Power – Come in Your own gentle way.

Come as a rest to the weary – Come as a balm to the sore – Come, Lord, as strength to my weakness – Fill me with joy evermore

Come, Holy Spirit, I need you – Come, Sweet Spirit, I pray – Come in Your strength and Your Power – Come in Your own gentle way.

Come like a spring in the desert – Come to the withered of soul – Lord, let your sweet healing power – Touch me and make me whole.

Come, Holy Spirit, I need you – Come sweet Spirit, I pray – Come in your strength and your power – Come in your own gentle way

Come in your own gentle way

May the Lord God Almighty bring you His complete victory and give you a total transformation and transform you into another man or woman. 

God bless you as you seek His presence!

I have encountered and had to challenge within my own heart and mind the concept that being meek equaled being weak.  Biblically meekness is the exact opposite of weakness.  I want to avoid offering opinions and go directly to the Scripture for my explanation and evaluation of the quality of Meekness. 

In studying the Bible, it is impossible to miss the fact that Jesus never offered an opinion.  He never guessed; He knew, He knows and that will never change.  When we read the Beatitudes we often come away with emotional and mental difficulty grasping the concept or truth that Jesus presented.  I’ve known preachers that avoid the Beatitudes as though they were infected with some contagious plague.  One even said, “I don’t want to preach being poor or sad, I want to preach joy and blessings.”  I thought, wait, Jesus used the word Blessed which encompasses not only happiness but inherent joy and prosperity of soul in His declaration of the desired conditions presented in the Beatitudes.

Many of the teachings of our Lord can and will become heavy weights if we fail to grasp both who we are and whose we are.  If we fail to reconcile what God says about us with what we think, or the world declares about us.  When we do we will find incredible liberty and transformation that makes the Beatitudes not only possible but powerful realities in our lives.

God says that we are members of the Body of Christ.  The Bible declares that we are more than conquerors through Jesus.  The Scripture teaches that we have authority and power over all the power of the enemy.  From that position and condition, we can realize that a biblically ‘meek man’ is not a human mouse held down by his own sense of inferiority.  That is biblical meekness it is human oppression and a demonic misrepresentation of the truth.   

I believe that a man or woman who is ‘biblically meek’ can be bold as a lion because he or she has experienced victory over the deception of self.  When we overcome the attempts of the devil to fool us about who we are and what we are capable of we rise in a boldness that is incredible.  When one accepts God’s estimate of their own lives they experience a transformation that is a launching pad for faith and opens the door to fulfill Jesus words in John 14:12. It is then that we can, in humility, do the works that He did, and even greater works having received the Power of the Spirit of God in our lives.

A truly meek person, in the biblical sense, finds no need to defend himself because he knows that God is his defense.  He no longer is entrapped or ensnared by pretense.  He is who he is and does not feel the need to be anything else or impress anyone else.  God is his focus and his desire is that the words of his mouth, the meditation of his heart, and his life pleases God.  If a man is pleased that is a bonus but not a focus.  No, he is not inconsiderate, but the opinion of man is secondary to the favor of God.

Too often we wear masks as Christians and fear being exposed or fear someone realizing our own personal deficiencies.  In our attempt to be ‘meek’ we become ‘weak’ and in our weakness we become proud.  I hope that is not confusing but although it is not a bad thing to want to put your best foot forward if the approval of man is your focus you will gain neither man’s approval or Gods and find yourself deeply dissatisfied. 

We become artificial and many live with the fear that some deep dark secret in their hearts or some deficiency in their life will be exposed.  That artificiality will steal from them any peace and rob them of the ability to ‘rest’.  Jesus’ instructions and invitation in Matthew 11:28-29 was to enter into His Rest and allow Him to help us carry the burden of living and life.

When we come to Jesus and surrender all to Him, we realize there is no need for artificiality or pretense.  In Him, we are forgiven!  It is from the position of forgiveness and grace that we gain the power to become who God says we are.  In that condition, we become ‘meek’ because we know that in ourselves we are nothing, can do nothing, and have nothing.  However, in Him, we have all that heaven offers.  That reality is humbling and allows biblical meekness to flood our hearts and in that condition of dependence, we become bold as lions with no pretense or artificiality.  We become overcomers because we know that we do not have to defend ourselves or be something we are not.  We Trust!

Never fear biblical meekness, for out of that condition you find humility, compassion, and strength beyond anything you have ever known.

God bless you as you enjoy this day in Him!

Psalm 139:7 – “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?”  NASU

I have heard, even said, and I’m sure you have as well, “God showed up today,” speaking of a church service or an event.  I have a problem with that statement when it is viewed in light of God being somewhere else and suddenly showing up where we were.  That is a mistaken view of God and His presence.  Some may totally disagree with me at this point but let me continue and hopefully, we will arrive at an agreeable conclusion.

If this Psalm is the truth, then God didn’t just show up, He was already there, we just didn’t recognize, receive, or accept Him.  We did not recognize the manifestation of His presence for whatever reason but to convey the idea that He ‘showed up’ is to suggest that He is not, as this verse declares, EVERYWHERE!  I believe and believe that the Bible teaches that God dwells in His creation and is present in all His works.  At the risk of sounding as though I embrace the doctrine of Pantheism, I contend that there is no place we can go where God is not.

Go back to the Garden of Eden and consider the error of Adam.  I am not talking about His error in choosing to disobey God but the fact that once he had disobeyed he attempted to hide from God.   Adam and Eve heard God in the Garden and they hid from Him or attempted to.  Imagine that!  Most of us would laugh at such a feeble attempt to hide but tragically we demonstrate that we believe it is possible to be somewhere God is not.  Go back to my earlier statement of someone saying, “God showed up or turned up here today.”  That is an expression of the idea that He was not there and therefore not everywhere.

We mistake the Presence and the Manifestation of God as being synonymous.  The failure to recognize and embrace His manifestation is not an indication that He was not there.  We either believe Him to be Omnipresent or we do not.  There can be and is the Presence of God but there may not be the open Manifestation of Him.  In Jeremiah 23:23-24, we read, “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God afar off?  Can a man hide in secret places so that I cannot see Him? Declares the Lord.  Do I not fill heaven and earth? Declares the Lord.”  If that is the truth, then we readily see the difference between the Presence of God and the open Manifestation of Him. 

God wants to be found of us or by us.  We are told to ‘seek the Lord’ and if we understand that to mean that He is afar off, in hiding, or not always present we make a grave error.  We are to seek Him so that our receptivity of Him is enhanced.  We seek Him so that the eyes of our spirits are open to receive and recognize Him. 

It is possible and likely that we will not always sense Him, feel Him, or recognize His presence but He is there!  The fact that He is Present does not mean we notice, feel, recognize, or embrace that presence.  That’s why we pray, worship, praise, and always seek to be filled with the Spirit of God!  Jesus instructed us, in Matthew 6, to pray that the Kingdom of God would come, and the will of God would be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Does anyone think that God’s Manifest Presence is not realized at all times in heaven?  Would anyone suggest that God might be absent from His creation at any time? 

He may seem far off, but He is there!  He is there all the time, every time, and no matter where we go, He is there!  The problem is not the absence of His presence but the sensitivity of our spirits and hearts to recognize His presence.  We are sometimes too preoccupied with visible things to see the invisible presence of God.  We are so accustomed to that which we call reality we miss the reality of His presence in the invisible realm.  It is when we live in a consciousness of His presence that we learn to exercise authority and power over the powers of darkness.  It is then that we become bold as lions and fear are banished from our minds and our lives. 

My prayer is, “Lord, help me to recognize your presence.”  I want to take up permanent residence in His presence and fulfill the purposes of God for my life and complete my assignment on this earth.  My heart cries as the Psalmist in Psalm 42:1, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for You, O God.”  He continued declaring, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?’”  He did not ask, “God when are you going to show up?”  He recognized the reality that God is there, everywhere, all the time and the problem was not the absence of the presence of God but His failure to enter into that presence.

God bless you as you enjoy this wonderful day in Him!

Revelation 1:8 – “I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was, and who is to come. The Almighty.”

It virtually impossible for the finite mind of man to truly comprehend the infiniteness of God.  The limitlessness of God is a truth that most people attempt to embrace in theory, but its reality is absent from their manner of life.  What I mean by that is that too often we declare that we believe that God is Infinite, but we live as though He were Finite. We conduct ourselves in a manner that belies our declaration that He is everything at once without being diminished in His person or power.  Sometimes we live as though God might not see us. 

The reality of God seeing everything is both comforting and frightening. Therefore, the mind of mortal man tends to diminish the infinitude of God.  We tend to redefine the word infinite and rather than it being limitless we make it mean much or a great deal rather than without bounds.

God is not bound by time or space and in Him, there is no time.  A.W. Tozer said, “In God, time does not pass, it remains eternally the same.”  We find that concept incredibly difficult to grasp because we are time sensitive creatures.  Our perspective of life is measured in time.  We have deadlines and schedules and that means that from time to time we get in a hurry.  Not God!  He never hurries and that’s why we sometimes become frustrated in His timing in answering our prayers. I heard years ago, “God is never late, and He is never early.”  I have no desire to debate the declaration because sometimes, in our minds, He is late. 

In the view of God’s limitlessness, we can approach the reality that everything that flows out from Him is also limitless.  His mercy is limitless.  His love knows no bounds.  His grace is timeless and unending.  His power knows no limitations.  Before, I allow someone to adopt a wrong view of God let me state several things. 

God does not have the things we ascribe to Him such as power. He does not have, He is!  He is Love! He is Light! He is Power!  He is who and what He is!  He is eternally the same.  Also, although His grace, love, and mercy are boundless He is also Just, Holy, and Righteous.  Therefore, He will and does judge sin.  We can never separate God’s Justice from His Mercy for He is Holy, therefore as the Psalmist asked, in Psalm 24, “Who can ascend into the hill or the presence of God and stand before Him?”  The answer is, “the one with clean hands and a pure heart.”  God’s Grace enables us to become Holy as He is Holy and to dwell in His presence.

Let me also address the Presence of God.  Many today are praying for God to send His presence into our world.  I too want to live in the Presence of the Almighty and destroy the works of the devil.  I suggest that you consider the fact of the infiniteness of God and the reality that He is everywhere that His presence is ALWAYS here!  The problem is not that God has not sent His presence to us, it is that we have not entered into His presence and realized its personal manifestation in our lives. 

I suggest we stop praying for God to ‘turn up’ or ‘show up’ as some suggest and realize that HE IS HERE! We need to enter into Him and His presence.  We need to not only pray that His Kingdom come, and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven but to determine that we will reside in no other condition and position that in His realized presence.  He wants to be fully expressed and realized in our daily lives.  My heart’s cry is more of you Lord, more of you!

God bless you as you enjoy this wonderful day in Him!

Genesis 3:4 – “But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.”  ESV

I often call Genesis the “Seed Book of the Bible” because in the first twelve chapters you find the foundation for virtually everything taught in the remainder of the Bible.  If one were to get a good handle on those chapters I am confident that much of the deception that has and does take place would be thwarted and we would see vast new doors of understanding opened to the Body of Christ.

But DECEPTION did not begin in the Garden of Eden it began before that when Lucifer convinced one-third of the angelic hosts to rebel against God.  It was through deception that this transpired.  His work in the Garden is just a continuation of his very nature and character and sadly, Adam & Eve bought what he was selling and were deceived.  Their deception not only cost them but the human race and had God not been willing to allow Jesus to come to earth and go to the Cross we’d still be in the clutches of the devil.  There is a consequence to deception because it results in actions that as Paul equates in Galatians as sowing which produces a harvest that has to be reaped whether we want to or not.

Deception comes when we fail to keep our hearts open to the Word and the Spirit of God.  It comes when we neglect our study of God’s Word and our prayer life.  It comes when we allow the flesh to rule over the spirit.  It comes when we allow the lust or carnal desires to override the spiritual directives of the Spirit and Word of God.  It comes when we become self-centered and dethrone God while elevating ourselves to the Center of our Universe as Adam & Eve did. 

In a sense Adam & Eve voted God out and voted themselves in as the supreme in their universe. As one of my friends often describes it, “They were born again backward.”  They opted to believe THE LIE rather than GOD who is TRUTH.  They opted to follow their own carnal desires and wisdom (so-called) rather than be obedient.  The fruit could have been a bridge over a stream that God said “Do not cross!”  It didn’t matter it was a matter of obedience and they disobeyed because they were deceived.

I doubt that there has been a week pass in my Christian experience that I haven’t meet and talked to someone who is in some kind of deception in some area.  That is probably applicable to me as well and as the Holy Spirit reveals to me any area of deception in my life I Immediately repent and begin diligent study to correct the error and become rightly aligned with the Word of God.  Do I have all truth?  NO!  Do I have all my doctrine right? Since I do not believe any human does, I would say NO!  

I would like to think I have it all right, but from time to time I find that something I have believed is not completely accurate. When that becomes a reality I must allow my doctrine to be modified to accommodate what God says not what I want God to say.  I do not want to be like a preacher I heard once say, “I’ve been in the ministry for 30 years and I have not changed my doctrine or my message.”  I thought I have!  

Religious rigidity to the point of being stubborn and believing you have everything totally perfect is dangerous. A person in that condition could and probably would rapidly become a Pharisee. I was one once and never want to return to that place of legalism.  I want to be like a piece of clay in the hands of the potter to be molded and shaped into whatever He desires for my life.  That has been an ongoing process and what and where I am today has evolved dramatically in some areas and remained pretty consistent in others.  I know in part and have a limited perspective but God sees everything from the beginning to the end whereas we see things from the end to the beginning.  There is a big difference!  One is foresight the other is hindsight.

So as you go through the day allow the Holy Spirit to guide your footsteps and keep your heart and mind open to and expansion of truth in your life that God chooses to bring to you.  

Blessings as you go through your day!

2 Peter 3:8-9 – “But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” NKJV

When I first began in the ministry there was an urgency and expectancy that the LORD was about to come.  We thought it so imminent that some foolishly sold all they had and went into hibernation waiting for the LORD’s return.  Others, however, felt the urgency and expectancy as a compulsion to Spread the Gospel to everyone and anyone who would listen fully believing that there might, not and likely would not be a tomorrow.  As time has passed I have seen a loss of that urgency and expectancy because as Peter described in the preceding verses people lose the urgency because they kept hearing it but nothing happened and time just kept rolling along.

Today some are beginning to feel a resurgence of the “urgency” and there is a growing “anticipation” that something is about to happen in the spiritual realm.  Our world has evolved to a place where more and more things are in place for the fulfillment of biblical prophecy concerning the “end times.”  There is legitimate cause to be concerned about things in our own government as well as in the world overall regarding the opening of the door for the “Anti-Christ” to come on the scene.

            For some time I have been sensing an urgency from the LORD and a reminder that just because it has not happened doesn’t mean that it is not going to or that it is necessarily sometime in the far distant future.  I don’t know when the LORD will return and neither does any other human on planet earth.  Yet, what I want to say here is less about the delay or the imminent return of the LORD, but more about the last part of verse nine. 

Verse nine bring to mind the reality that the LORD is longsuffering or patient with us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.  That is the heart of God our Redemption. That is why Jesus came the first time, lived as He did, and went to the Cross.  We have been God’s focus from the beginning and sadly we have, at times, lost a sense of that and the urgency of God’s heart regarding the lost.

I pray to God that I never become so calloused regarding the Gift of Salvation. I pray that I never lose the sense of urgency that comes with it.  If somehow tomorrow a vast fortune came into my hands and I could do with it whatever I choose I would instantly seek to bless those I love and care about.  Following that I would seek to help as many ministries as I could to further the cause of the Kingdom of God.  We have been given this Great Treasure of salvation and often seem to take it for granted and appear calloused with regard to those who have not received this gift and do not know our LORD.

Early in my Christian experience I heard an account of a man in WWII who did not believe in God. He went to the chaplain and said, “Sir you do not believe in hell.”  The chaplain was astounded and protested but the unbeliever said, “If I believed in hell, though this land were covered in broken glass I would crawl on my hands and knees, if necessary to warn people to flee it.  You sir, are not telling anyone so I must conclude you do not really believe it exists.”  That should give all of us a reality check! 

If we see real danger we do not hesitate to warn people about the danger, yet how many times are we as guilty as the chaplain in this regard?  I’m not trying to turn everyone into an Evangelist but we do have a commission from our Lord to share what we have received and to take this message to the ends of the earth.  It is not your job or responsibility to win the world but it is your responsibility to share your gift within your sphere of influence and where the Holy Spirit affords you opportunity.  If salvation is as great as we Know it is then how can we not speak of it to others?

May God be with you as you go through your day!

[Thanks to my dear friend Tim Malone for causing this to rise up with a renewed freshness in my heart.]