In the parable of the sower the seed that fell among thorny ground sprouted and grew well at first but Jesus said that thorns and weeds sprung up and choked out the plants before they could produce the desired result. This could be a stumbling block for many Christian men because they have the burden of providing not only for their families but also for employee's if they have workers or they are ministers that watch over a flock and are ever concerned for them.
Responsibilty. Anybody who makes decisions on behalf of others takes responsibilty for those decisions and therefore the blame if something goes wrong. That is the reason that many men fear responsibilty and may prefer to be working in a job for wages that following their dream and starting their own small business. They can then off load a lot of resposibilty onto their boss which removes a need for themselves to take a risk and start on a journey the will lead them into maturity and full production. God our father has induded each of us with many gifts and talents for which He expects usefulness and a return on His investment. He expects us to take domminion and establish ourselves through hard work and good character. Idilness and immaturity do not please the Lord. Let us not be slack in our doing because He promises that He will prosper us if we remain faithful in all His word, not envying what another man my have but using just what we have in our hands to the maximum advantage. Our domminion and prosperity will then be a witness to other neighbours around about us for which we must give all the Glory to God or be lost to the deceitfulness of riches. If the Lord does bless and prosper us we must never be lifted up in our hearts and forget the rock of our salvation. We must never get carried away with building kingdoms for ourselves either because we do not even own ourselves, everything belongs to Christ, especially those of us who have surrendered our lives already, and thus everything we do now is as his servants and is for the building up of the kingdom of God. Let us make His name great in the earth, through our obedience and diligence.
Sometimes though things get away from our control and go pear shaped, this can leave the man in responsibility in a uncomfortable position. He may experience sleeplessness. Worry and anxiety are the enemies tools and can easy cut off our relationship to the Father. Then we are like woundering restless vagabonds with no home to call our own, when in fellowship with the Father we have a home in heaven and Rest .
Matt 6 deals well with this to of course. Those whom the Lord loves He grants rest. We must learn to roll our cares over onto Him because if we try to carry them ourslves we will be crushed by the weight of them!
The father will say to that faithful ones on the glad day we meet Him
“Well done good and faithful servant now enter into my Rest.”
This does not neccesarily mean sleep because we can be at peace while awake. The peace that passes understanding should be our dwelling place day and night, waking or sleeping.
I pray that you reader will know peace with God, and be able to retreat when ever the world pushes in and begins to rob you of your inheiritance, to that quiet place away from the rat race where He will restore your peace with sweet one on one communion with the Himself the Master of the Universe!
Each day is one. As the birds sing their hearts out each morning our minds fill with wonder at the blank canvas God has once again provided for us on which to write history. Let each Day begin as it should, with hearts full of praise let us arise to Glorfy God today and serve Him gladly.
A life of comfort and ease, filled will leisures and pleasures inumerable. In a word Blessing.
The words of a prophetess Irene Gleeson ring true.
“ People in the west care only about keeping their bodies fat and warm!”
But what has God given us? hardship and frustrations, toil , pain and sorrow. In a few words a Cross.
“A servant is not greater than His Master. If they hated me they will hate you.”
“He was despised, a man of sorrows and aquinted with greifs”
“For the Joy set brfore him, Christ endured the Cross.”
Have you ever been reading a book and skipped to the end to get to the happy ending. Thats what a lot of the people want to do in their Christian jounery, just give the middle a miss. Unfortunately in the case of the Bible the centre of the book is unmissable. Miss it and you miss everything. Its even usually printed on the front cover, heathens are so offended by it they never draw near to God. They seem to understand even by looking at the guilded symbol on the cover that before every follower of God lies a unpleasant and uncomfortable cross. There is no way around it. And no eascape from it. Not for christ and not for us.
What does it mean to take up your cross daily? The cross is suffering, being prepared to suffer daily for christ's name. Here is a verse from a song the Lord gave me,
Let me not be ashamed
to stand for you name
in the courts of the heathen
and the mockers.
For the honor of your name
for the Glory of your name
I offer my life again.
The name of the Lord is the most valuable thing in this world. It is the pearl of greatest price.
If we start to speak in defense of the name of Christ where ever it is being profaned, we will begin to meet opposition, and the intensity of this opposition will increase as we keep on doing this until we know what suffering is. At this point do we cease? No we must continue and press on we must defend his honor to the death if nessasary, there is No turning back, No turning back. We must give our utmost for His highest!
But the good news is the cross is not the end but a new beginning. If we remain faithfull to the end we will know fully the Joy of the Lord and enter into the place the Father has been preparing for us.
Peace and Restfullness without end shall be our inheirtence. Praise be to His name.
“There is a way which seems right to a man but the end thereof is death”.
If we think that getting saved is all that needs to happen we are mistaken, in the path to eternal life for every believer (except those saved only by the skin of there teeth!)is a cross that we must take up daily. Sorrow must come before Joy. Expecting to bypass our cross and enter the blessing now is foolishness and is definitely a snake and not a ladder!!Woe to those who try to enter the sheep fold except by the door.
As a vessel a man is designed by God to be filled with things. But God doesn't like mixtures, he desires that we be filled with only one kind of thing. Just the same way as he desires that we devote our whole heart to him and not be half hearted. We can not love God and mammon, we must love one and hate the other. Just so we must be a vessel of honor or dishonor, filled with love for God or the world.
When cooking we mix things, recipes are mixtures of things. In the same way as we take raw (God made) ingredients and react them together to get a new (man made) thing. As we take a raw stone and fashion it, grave it into a new image. It is as though God seems to despise things made with our hands and it is interesting that man is the only creature that the scriptures speak of as being formed with His Hands. It also gives us the picture of a potter, forming things from the 'dust of the earth'.
With the rest of creation it seems that He spoke and it came to pass, He commanded and it stood fast without 'manual' labour. It is obvious that man is the pinnicle of creation. And nowhere else in the scriptures does it speak of the nitty gritty of how the thing came to be as it does in Genesis 2 about how man and woman where made, formed from the dust of the earth and then He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. Man is obviously a special work in creation and the rest of creation seems to suit man, be made for him to take dominion of.
We are commanded not to make graven images and idols but God has made in man a image of Himself in pottery.
As a pot we can either be filled or empty. But obviously the purpose of a pot is to be filled with something. Interesting side note is that allthough pots generally are designed to be filled, cooking pots do spend most of their time empty on the shelf. However if a pot has been filled with a mixture of things then it must first be emptied before it can be filled with a pure thing.
The best way for us to be emptied is to fast and repent of our sin. In order for us to become “vessel's of honor” it is nessasary to reset, to be cleaned by a time of fasting and sorrow for our sins. When we have been made clean we may be filled with the holy spirit. Which of course is the desire of God and the purpose for which he made us as vessels, in order to be filled by His Spirit.
Why did the enemy come to Jesus while he was fasting in the desert?. Because he realised that this was a man who was emptying Himself in order to be filled with the Holy spirit and this emptyness created an opotunity for the unclean spirit as well. The devil wants us to be filled with uncleaness just as He is. He certainly wanted this for the saviour of the world. But any man who is filled with the Holy spirit is just as dangerous. Since a man being filled to the brim with a clean spirit will not just remain full in himself but overflow that clean spirit where ever he goes, out of him will flow rivers of living water!
This makes fasting/repentance important because a man who is filled with a mixture of spirits clean and unclean will not overflow a pure spirit but a tainted one. In the example of drinking water in different places, that slightly different taint in the taste of the water than what one is used to is usually enough for a person to reject the water and keep looking for something pure. Just the same way a tainted spirit will be rejected. We must be made clean so Gods spirit in us is not rejected.
As for the food and cooking there are still clean foods and unclean God has decleared somethings as unclean for an everlasting statue, for instance the blood and fat of animals, unclean for ever. Never eat them if you want to be clean. Also all the food laws in the bible still should be a guide because the foods where declared unclean for a reason, usually to do with what the animal would eat in the wild like pigs for instance will eat anything in the wild including the carcasses of dead animials, there own offspring, guts and intestines which are unclean. Poo is unclean. It seems to obvious to state but some people are to blind to realise this, anything made with intestines like sausages which will usually also contain chunks of fat that melts and infuses the other contents (what ever they are) so sausages are doubly unclean. (It hurts me to write this as snags used to be one of my favorite foods.)
Custateans eat the waste products of other sea creatres off the bottom of the sea floor, they are bottom feeders. These things are so obvious but we have still forgotten them. Fisherman talk about bottom feeders as being unworthy, people insult other people by calling them bottom feeders but still we are eating off the bottom. Bottoms are unclean. Soil is also unclean, that is why we call dirty things soiled. Root vegetables are not clean then because they grow under the surface. Still not sure on that one but Genesis says that man was given the fruit of the trees, bushes and vines and grains for food and the animals the grass and leafy green plants. Generally speaking thing under the surface of the ground are not clean i.e. coffins with dead bodies in them, hell, pits etc so perhaps this is true of root veges. Like I said the jury is still out on that one. It also might have to do with the intelligence of the animal for instance horses, dolphins and whale,s dogs and cats. But cannibalistic animals, animals that clean their nether regions with their tounge etc must be unclean!
This might be seen as legalistic as Acts 10 and 11 cleansed all foods as long as they be eaten with thanksgiving, and Jesus himself said that “nothing which goes into a man can defile him but that which comes out”, he was refering to the overflow of the heart. If the heart or mind is evil then evil will be the overflow from his mouth. We are under grace now and not saved by the law however christ himself is never said to have eaten any unclean food as he came to forfill the law and the pharasies would of accused him of it if He had. So should we throw out the law as our guide of which Jesus said not one jot or title shall pass away until all things are forfilled. Are we not under grace so that we may be brought into conformity with the law without being condemed by it in the process?
Acts 10,11 used a vision of unclean animals to show Peter than gentiles had been made clean.
“What God has made clean let no man call unclean” that is not what I am trying to do. If we are fighting the battle in the mind and God is sanitifying our thoughts speech and de'eds then that being taken care of as primary is it not appropriate to santify our bodies also that we may be wholly seperated unto God? God even gave a law that all poo must be buried outside the camp because I didn't wish to encounter it as He walked through camp this another reason that fasting purifies us because it's that which comes out of us that defiles us. If we do not eat then nothing unclean will come out the back passage either and thus it will not defile us, simple.
Dead things are unclean. We eat the flesh of dead animals but it must have been slaughtered correctly to drain the blood out or it will be unclean. We shouldn't eat an animal that is sick or died of old age and so on obvious stuff. The work of undertaking is unclean because Jesus said let the dead bury the dead.
I believe that God desires all of our lives. That we can be in the world but not have the world in us. Let us be partakers of one spirit and live our lives 100% seperated unto God our saviour.Amen.
