Sacrificing Personal Desire

If in fact God is the God of all creation and He created you and me, then I think that it’s okay for Him to ask us to put some effort into knowing what His will is. I assure you that if you are touched by His Holy Spirit, then you will fall in love with Him, because you will be touched by the heart of God, by the heart of true love. As we learn and experience God’s heart, we become willing to sacrifice ourselves and lay down our lives. That is part of the experience of knowing God; we must receive His Word and lay down our lives and get out of the way so that He can live through us. The point is not my will but His will be done, this way humanity (you and I) can experience the healing power of His love.
If we are all selfish and self-centered then His will cannot be done on this earth and people’s lives will not come to an understanding of His love. If we are willing to surrender, and sacrifice ourselves to know Him, then He is able to work through us and bring healing to the world around us. In my opinion this is the key that unlocks the doors of true fulfillment here on earth.

 

A Life of Prayer

According to Genesis chapter 2, when God created man, he provided him with a free will. Because man has a free will, he could choose to obey or disobey God’s Word. God has a will, and man has a will. The beauty (and the curse) of free will is that depending on our choice, we can either be one with God and have the benefit of His will in our lives, or we can be separated from Him because our will doesn’t align with His. Whenever our will is not one with God’s will, He is limited. The reason for this limitation: when God asks something of us and we do not respond, He is not able to release His will in the earth. He needs us, his human hands, feet and mouths, to release His power and authority. Because He created man and gave him dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28), he was essentially saying, “Okay, people. We’re going to cohabitate this place.” God’s intent was that we would stay in fellowship with Him and there would never be any contradiction to His will. But of course there was the fall, which broke that connection.

Now the true church is a group of people who have been redeemed by the blood, who have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, who have committed themselves to God, and have taken on His name and become the manifestation of Christ in the earth, thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 2:21).

God is a God of order. Since God has given us a free will on earth, He will not take back what He has given us. He will not override man’s will and force His will on anyone. Everything related to Him can be accomplished only when there is a will on earth that cooperates with Him. When we release His will on earth, then it allows God to work.

The ministry of the church is to bring the will in heaven to earth. Prayer is a work; it is the church saying to God, “God, we want your will.” Prayer is the church knowing God’s heart and opening its mouth to ask for what is in God’s heart. This harmony in will is a great glory to God – man standing on God’s side to declare that he wants what God wants.

It is like a giant tank of water, the only way for the water to get to the desired location is through a tap. If you have a small tap, you will have a small amount of water flowing. But if you have a very large tap, then you will have a great release of water. Once the tap is turned on the water flows out. Once the tap is turned off, the water is blocked. When the water is released the pressure decreases. And when water is blocked, the pressure increases. When the church prays, it is like turning on the tap; the more the tap is turned, the less the pressure becomes. If the church does not pray, it is like a tap being turned off with pressure building up. And if you think about it, you have experienced the pressure, and so have I. It’s the pressures that surround us and all the frustrations of life.

It is very important for us to hear what the Spirit is saying concerning prayer for it will usher in the fulfillment of all that we desire, which is, all that God desires.

Psalms 2:8 “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.”

The highest and greatest work of the church is to be the outlet of God’s will. The church becomes the outlet of God’s will through prayer.

2 Chronicles 7:14 “If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

In the weeks ahead we will unveil the mysteries of a lifestyle of fellowshipping with God.

The Light of God's Word

God is love. God’s Word is food for His children. We have to eat what He has given us, whether sweet or bitter. Just as good parents wants the best for their children, it is important to understand that what God asks of us is for our good. The pain, in the long run, is far greater if we do not apply the Word of God in our lives. Here are a few things that are of great importance when we read His Word.

When we read the Bible, we are reading what God himself has said. We must not put stock in man’s opinion, only God’s. Some would say that the bible is nothing but man’s opinion because man is the one who has written it. This is simply not true. Yes – man wrote the words, but God was the voice behind the words. In 2 Timothy 3:16 the bible says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” I have done exhaustive studies and have come to the staggering conclusion that the bible is the most supernatural book on the planet. The numerical aspect alone is beyond anything that man could possibly conceive (I recommend the book Number in Scripture by E.W. Bullinger). We must open up our hearts to the reality that God loved us so much that He gave us a very accessible road map into a relationship with Him. And this road map is the Word of God – the bible.

We cannot be under any other authority but that of God’s Word. When it comes right down to it, only what the Bible says really counts, and we must subject ourselves to it only. We cannot change God’s Word. The Word of God is not only designed to fill us full of God’s love and wisdom, but it discloses our destiny. It reveals what we will experience in God’s kingdom. We must pay attention to these issues, because sooner or later we will face them. If we pay attention, we will be careful how we live on earth today.

Only those who understand the truth can oppose heresies. Heresies are not pure, for heresy is to add wrong things to right things. Add a little of man’s thought to God’s thought, and you will have heresy.

Acts 4:12 “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

God’s Word gives us the ability to have victory over sins, and be cleansed by the blood of Jesus. In this way, we can rise above the constraints of our sin nature.

1 John 2:1 “My little children, these things I write to you, that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

This verse refers to the children of God – people who have received Jesus as their Lord and Savior. The word advocate in the Greek is parakletos. Para means “alongside of” and is like railway tracks, and kletos means “helper.” A paracletos is someone who is alongside helping. You can run away, but wherever you run, the paracletos will be there also. Likewise He is there to help you understand. The Greeks used the word paracletos to refer to a defense lawyer in court. If you do not understand the law, and others accuse you, sue you or take advantage of you, you have a paracletos to answer for you. Others will charge that you have sinned, but the paracletos will say that you do not have sin.

Satan will never stop his accusations against Christians.

Revelation 12:10 “Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down.”
1 John 2:1 says that Jesus Christ is “the righteous.” Jesus and the Father are one, and Jesus intermediates on our behalf before the Father. Jesus paid a debt for us that we couldn’t pay. Now we must accept Jesus as our Lord in order for His payment to be accepted by God in our behalf. If we will not love and exalt Jesus for what He has done, then the bible says that the Father will not accept us. The Father exalts the Son, and if we will not exalt the Son, then we are not one with the Father and we cannot enter into His love.

In John 14:21 Jesus said, “He who has My commandments, and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself to him.”

What should we do on our part? 1 John 1:7 “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” What does it mean to be “in the light”?

In the Old Testament (Exodus 26:33), God was shrouded in darkness. He was in the Holy of Holies, and man could not see Him. In the Holy Place there was a lamp, and in the outer court there was the sun, but in the Holy of Holies, there was no light at all. God was mysterious and unknown.

But when Jesus died on the cross, the bible says the curtain that separated the holy place from the holy of holies in the temple was torn from top to bottom. God did that to show humanity that now, through Jesus Christ, we can know Him. Mark 15:38 “Then the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” God is now in the light, no longer in darkness. He is a known God, a revealed God. When the light of the gospel shines out, we see God. The word revelation is apocalypses in Greek. Apo means away, and calypsos means veil. So the word revelation means taking away of the veil, the opening up of the curtain. We can now walk in the light; we can see and know God through Jesus Christ who is the light. Jesus said in John 8:12 “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

Today we do not know God by way of conjecture, or guessing, as those in the Old Testament did. But today we can know God by the eating of His Word. Jeremiah 15:16 says, “Thy words were found and I did eat them and thy Word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart, for I am called by Thy name, oh Lord God of hosts.” One of the byproducts of revelation is joy and thanksgiving. A life of peace!

Christ vs. religious leaders of the world

In past posts, we have been talking about the purity of God. The information I offer in today's post provides further proof of the authenticity and diety of Christ. Consider the following facts:

Religious Leaders:

Confucius: Born in 1551 B.C. And at one time his teachings influenced 300 million people.

Buddha: Originally his name was Sidhartha Quattamma and he was the leader who was called “the enlightened one.” He was born within a few years of Confucius. Many people follow him today mainly in Northern India, China, Indonesia, Japan and Korea and some in the United States. Today there is an estimated 350 million people who call themselves Buddhists.

Mohammed: Born in 570 A.D. he is the person in whom Islam was created, and currently an estimated 1.5 Billion people are followers of Islam.

Christ:

Jesus Christ: Born at zero for our calendar (our calendar was established at His birth). His influence is worldwide; approximately 2 billion people call themselves followers of Christ.

Five areas of their lives

Their teachings

Religious Leaders:

Confucius: Called by his followers, “the wisest of the wise.” He was a collector of wisdom from other people and put them together. Not much was originated of himself, so he was more a gatherer of wisdom. He recognized and exalted that which was wise. He was a pillar of wisdom for all those who followed him.
His teachings did not attempt to connect people with God

Buddha: Most of Buddha’s teachings were taken from Hinduism, such as reincarnation, karma, and the heavy emphases on meditation for the means of maturing the soul. His famous teaching would be the four noble truths 1) Life is suffering. 2) All suffering comes from desire. 3) Suffering is overcome by eliminating desire. 4) Eliminating desire is achieved by following an eightfold path. At the heart of Buddhism is the elimination of human desire. At the end of the eightfold path all human desire is eliminated and this state of mind is referred to as nirvana. Buddha has influence and touched more people in the world than Confucius.

Mohammed: His teachings can be summarized in five statements.
1) Allah is the one true God. 2) Allah has many prophets including Moses and Jesus, but Mohammed is the last and greatest of all. 3) The Koran is the supreme religious book in the world. 4) There are many intermediate beings between God and us, some good and some are evil. 5) Every person’s deeds will be weighed someday to determine who did enough good to warrant going to paradise. If you didn’t do good enough then you will be placed in a place separated from Allah in a place of torment forever.

Christ:

Jesus Christ: Widely recognized as the greatest teacher who ever lived. No matter what walk of life, people recognize his teachings as sound and wise. Countless civilizations have built their judicial systems on the teachings of the Bible. Unparalleled circulations of the Bible, 60 to 70 million copies of the Bible are published every year. The widely translated book in history, estimated that at least 90 percent of the world’s population has access to at least part of the Bible in their own language. The teachings and impact of Christ clearly exceed all others.

Their moral life

Religious Leaders:

Confucius: Strongly proclaimed moral living and he deplored the moral laxity of his day, he never proclaimed that he was perfect. There is no record of him being really good or really bad.

Buddha: A strong proponent of moral living, the virtues of kindness and truthfulness and humility were a big part of his teaching. Some of his followers called him the perfect one for he truly tried to live out the eightfold path and eliminate desire in his life.

Mohammed: A noted killer and exceeded the allowable number of wives, stated in the Koran. Although one night he received special revelation that gave him special privileges to have as many wives as he wanted. He acknowledged his own sinfulness and asked Allah for forgiveness. His many followers wrote many things about his dark side.

Christ:

Jesus Christ: Exemplified moral perfection. Friends, family, and witnesses gave testimony to His moral perfection. His enemies also declared that he was without fault. There was no evidence of any moral lapse in His life. He set the standard when it came to love.

Miracles

Religious Leaders:

Confucius: No miracles. Never claimed to be able to do miracles.

Buddha: No miracles. Never claimed to be able to do miracles.

Mohammed: The Koran says that Mohammed preformed no miracles. He never claimed to be able to do miracles.

Christ:

Jesus Christ: During His three year ministry Jesus healed multitudes of physical afflictions, controlled the weather, cast out demons, opened blind eyes, and raised the dead. Thousands and thousands of onlookers saw his miracles. They were recorded by the writers of the Gospels, and widely recorded by secular historians as well.

Prophetic Power (the ability to see insight into peoples’ lives, and into the future)

Religious Leaders:

Confucius: None

Buddha: None

Mohammed: None

Christ:

Jesus Christ: He could read the thoughts and hearts of people, recorded on numerous occasions. He predicted His death, the kind of death, the kind of burial, His resurrection, and the list goes on and on.

The ability to overcome death

Through time, there have been thousands upon thousands of people who have called themselves messiahs. But one event always calls a messiahs bluff and that is death. And despite of all of their bold declarations about what would happen after they die, what always happened was that they stayed dead.

Religious Leaders:

Confucius, Buddha, and Mohammed all stayed dead, and you can visit their tombs today.

Christ:

Jesus Christ died and on the third day He rose from the grave. His resurrection was very well documented. Multiple exhaustive studies have been done to present and prove the evidences of Christ’s resurrection.


This information is not to make any one less than what they actually were. The point that is made is that no one has distinguished themselves the way that Jesus has; Jesus is in a class all His own. He is the Son of God who came to the world to do exactly what He did; to willingly lay down His life for us and pay a debt that we couldn’t pay, so that our relationship to the Father could be restored.

Reunited

God sent His Son, Jesus Christ who is pure. Jesus became the bridge that gave us a way to be reunited with the Father and His nature. We still can’t know how to create a tree but we can know the love and character of God by accepting Jesus into our hearts.

In so doing we can experience the nature and character of God. A great picture is when a man and woman come together and a child is conceived. This is what happens when we accept Jesus into our heart, or into our spirit. At that moment our spirit is united with the Spirit of God and a child of God is conceived and established inside of us. We become the temple of the Holy Spirit.

The bible talks about the spirit of man as being the area inside of us where our conscience and our intuition reside. You couple this with our mind and you will see that we have been given the power of choice that has the ability to open the door into eternity, and that door is Jesus Christ.

This is an amazing phenomenon. God created us in a way where we were meant to house His Holy Spirit; the bible calls us the temple of the Holy Spirit. But since back in the Garden of Eden, where the serpent defiled Adam and Eve, humanity became contaminated, we stopped living for God and our connection with God was broken. We were no longer pure and innocent. Humanity’s bloodline became contaminated. We became self-seeking and self absorbed. We stopped looking to God and when this happened we became disconnected from the source of life and we were destined to die.

But God loved us so much that He was not willing to let us perish and be destroyed. He made a way for us to be restored back to Him through Jesus. The bible says it perfectly in John 3:16-17: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. “

Who is God?

Who is God, the One who created the heavens and the earth? How can I comprehend Him? What exactly does He have to do with me? Can I really know Him? Does He really care?

These are very good questions, questions that I think deserve answers. In this and coming blogs I will attempt to address all of these questions. I think this is pretty cool and amazing stuff, and I hope that you enjoy it also.

I would like to share with you something of God’s nature, a part of His nature that is necessary to know if we are going to understand who He is, and who we are in relation to Him.

It has to do with God’s purity, He is the ultimate pure!

The nature of God is so pure that life emanates from him. A creative force comes out of the wisdom of His nature that by the Word of His mouth He causes things to be. As a matter of fact in the Hebrew His name means “He Who Causes to Be.”

He is beyond space and time and all that we see came from Him. From the simplest cell to the most complex systems it was all designed and created by Him. We cannot even begin to comprehend the level of power that emanates from His nature of purity.

Scientists try to figure out the blueprint and the laws that God established when He created the heavens and the earth. But the reality is that man will never understand God. We can never understand purity, or be God-like, if we could then we would have this amazing life force emanating from us, but we don’t.

The nature of purity has nothing to do with us, but it has everything to do with God. God is amazing; He is beyond anything we can comprehend. We do not know how He created a tree, a leaf, a bug, the stars, us. But we do stand in awe before Him and appreciate the beauty that He has surrounded us with. He ROCKS!

God designed us to live forever, but all that we see is going to pass away and only God and all that is His, will live forever.

The only way for us to endure together with God is for us to be a part of Him, one with His purity. There can be no contamination allowed into His pure eternal realm. He is very protective of His nature and there can be no compromise. So the question is how does this work? How can we become one with Him and become a part of His eternal life?