Taking God to the poor

You can't get who you are from somebody else

Do you ever expect people to like you, love everything you say, joyfully tolerate all you petty differences? Do you think people love you? I am not asking if people should behave that way. I am asking do your expect them to?

OR
Are people like you and me. People who have issues of judgment, hurt feelings, likes and dislikes, fears and rejection. In the real world that is not yet taken over by the Kingdom of God, we have people treating people badly. This is OK!! It is even good (in a heaven forever and redemption under way sort of way).

As long as people treat us poorly, and you can decide what poorly means to you. I'm not worried, someone, many people, are going to treat you poorly no matter how you define it. Even if you define it in such a way as to allow for every kind of evil, someone is going to treat you nice and make a mess of your plans and thought life. So in this life we are going to be ill treated.

At this point we are blessed (read Beatitudes for description). It is great to have the help of all humanity in our quest of loving God first and foremost. In this world you cannot get from others what you can only get from God. The great redeemer has give us broken humanity to assist us in loving and needing love from Him. Sure we need to love one another and ought to. But no one should ever pressure others to love them in a defining way. Only God gets to wrap His fingers around us and make us and mold us.

I am loved by God. No sticks of stones can change that. Just read VOM and you will see that is true! I was made by God to be loved by Him. If a few people love me while I am here on the earth, that is frosting on the cake or Moosetracks in the bowl.

PS: Trying to be loving to others while you are not yourself filled with the love of God results in pretending in the worst sorta way. But feel free to start with kindness and work your way up.

What is God up to?

Most of the time we do not want God's perspective. What we want is to know how to live our life with the most ease and praise. Even when God allows things into our lives to cause us to grow and mature, we reject them, seeking rather to have a good life, not the best life.

In some kind of religious way we can also take the discipline of the Lord and convert it into some kind of distorted self-righteousness. We can use the hard things we go through as some sort of "badge of self worth". Our heart can crow cold toward God as we live as servants for Him, having little love and a lot of fear.

To make life more complicated, we can do both at the same time. The human heart has the ability to deceive the mind and emotions. We can spend hours of our life by filling ourselves with guilt, shame, self-righteousness and self- worth. We can spend days and weeks bounding back between the "I shouldn't have to's" and the "No one else has to" and the I'm better because I". Living life with God can be turned into a never ending exam or an endless pursuit of what I want for me.

The cross is the place of truth and divine justice. As we realize how much we are loved and how much God is willing to do so that justice is served, we find a revelation of how to live. We need to go through some things because God is worthy of our being equipped to help others. Being loved by God is a greater way than some kind of divine neglect. We are loved with the intent to be like God Himself. Christlike transformation requires some enduring of stuff.

The authority to heal the sick, raise the dead, speak with transforming power into the life of another, all require inner and personal transformation. We go beyond talking about the ideas of these things and into living them out as we are personally and internally changed. God is making in us vessels of supernatural love. Like Jesus, we too are called to love Him much when the cost is beyond common acceptance. Now is the time to gain authority to "not be shaken" in any area of our life because we have become "unshakable in the encounters (knowledge) of the love of God.

What I like about those who do not like me!

Most of us have people who just do not like us. Many times these people have never met us. They know us through our opinions, beliefs or ideas shared through other people. They read something we wrote or overheard some comments and form ideas of us. As you can tell this is somewhat of an inconvenience or negative situation, but it does happen, everyday.

So what do we do now?

The first thing I want to do is love them for their zeal. Thank God for people with life and zeal. I have been zealously attacked (just like all of us) by people and find that I like their passion.

Secondly I like their boldness and desire to get things right, to fix the wrong, to show the truth to those in need. Don't read that above statement with sarcasm, it is not meant that way. People who love the truth are people who hold a character that I like. God has justice and righteousness as the foundation of His throne and we need both ourselves.

The third thing I like is that those who do not like me work good in my life. God uses them to make me a better me. All the thoughts, issues, things that I must work through by all the different levels of "un-liking" somehow make me better.

The fourth thing is that "un-like" brings some flavor into life. It mixes the pot of everydayism and stirs up the ingredients of life so that there is interaction, evaluation and just a good old "heating up". The pot gets stirred even more when the judgments are weak, wrong, a directer reaction out of the insecurity of others or just a plain lie.

So as you go through life here on earth, enjoy the "un-liking" as much as you can. Don't let the weight of trying to be loved by everyone be a daily burden. Yoke yourself with Christ Jesus and know that if people rejected, disliked, criticized, mocked, persecuted, make fun of, called stupid and blamed wrongly the perfect Son of God, you too are going to un-please them.

Uno Prayer Meeting

If you take a group of kids and have them play Uno (a card game) you can have a good prayer meeting. Simply ask each child to ask God what to play each turn. What you will have is several kids all asking God for help to win. But winning is not winning the card game. Winning is more than that.

Having spent years in the prayer room now, I know that the life of prayer is all about living. The revelation, insight, power, visions and a thousand other favors from God are about living life well, playing each turn of the cards the best you can. When we do the best we can, we win. Winning is not the one who wins, if you know what I mean.

Each of us is a person living in a long line of people - history. None of us arrived on our own. We were both created by God and cared for by other humans. Our place in time was the Lord's doing. Our place in humanity is the result of the life flow of humanity, this is our personal "fullness of time". This is the card we have been dealt to play.

Winning, which is continual fellowship with God, is making each play under His Lordship. Even if we loose the game we can win with our ongoing fellowship with God. Winning is not always winning. The people of God need a fresh understanding of this.

Some of the greatest people, greatest Christians are people who have a very very bad hand to play, and they play it well. Some of the most immature believers have a great hand and think that their external success is the result of their wonderfulness. It is not. They simply had a good hand.

Father God
I offer up to you today
My "me" centered Christianity
I ask you to upgrade my "meness"
To the wonder of the revelation of Jesus Christ
Thank you for the cards you have give me
Even these are more than I deserve
My I play well this day
In fellowship with you.

What is life all about?

I think I am going to spend my whole life figuring out and re figuring out what life is all about. I learn every day in a new way that life is about a relationship with God. But honestly that is to frightening. I want rules to live by. I am just no good at living in relationship. If I cannot keep my kids, my wife, myself happy; how am I going to keep God happy.

I know that I will never disappoint God because he already knows what I am like. To disappoint him, He would need to have some expectation that I would not meet. God already knows me so He knows all that I am not going to do and fail to do. So why am I bothered so much by the hurt I cause Him by not doing what I am not doing. I am not saving the world, healing all the sick, transforming central IL - so I am a __________.

How does God love those of us who labor so hard to be loved. How does He love those who don't care if you love them of not. How does He love any of us? Wonderfully, simply wonderfully. But that destroys my ability to earn the love of God. If you can't earn love, what good is it.

So here is my list of how I will significantly love God today. This is what I am going to do today to be loved.

1.
2.
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4.
5.

Fear

How often would we be more if we only let ourselves?

One of the most difficult things to conquer is our own knowledge of ourselves. We each know all to well our faults, failures and mistakes. Even when things are going well, we tend to look for troubles. Usually our first response to most of the things we do is ask, "how did I do"? If people do not comment on what we did/do we usually comment ourselves and out right ask them.

Now here is a strange thing. God, who is perfect and powerful is the one most responsive to our need to be loved, our need to push back the fears we have. While we, and others like us, are to busy, to important, to pressured to waits out time helping others with their fears, God seems more than willing to spend time with us. Even if that time is more "ME" time than quality time, God seems to understand and except it.

So in some strange way the very being that we all should "fear" the most is the very being in whom we must actually work at fearing. Of all the stuff makes us feel insignificant, broken, a failure, the very being who should make us feel the most that way - doesn't. Strange world isn't it.