Steve Simms's Blog, page 132

Conscience-health issues

October 10 is World Mental Health Day. Unfortunately, there’s no World Conscience-Health Day. A healthy mind without a healthy conscience can cause much harm. Without conscience-health, the human moral compass gets way off track. An unhealthy conscience leads to frequent self-inflicted pain.

Conscience-health issues are buried in stigma. To even mention conscience makes people uncomfortable. Conscience-health is so far off the human radar that when I search the internet for it, not even one thing shows up about it.

Many things that we call mental health issues are really conscience-health issues. It hard to have a healthy mind without a healthy conscience. Bad conscience-health enables people to justify bad behaviors.

A healthy nervous system releases pain to warn of physical problems. A healthy conscience does the same for behavioral problems.

Conscience-health requires that you cultivate your conscience. If you don’t the weight of the world will gradually collapse it. However, the uncomfortableness of guilt often motivates people to disconnect their conscience instead of correcting their wrong behavior.

The sting of a healthy conscience steers people away from corruption and cruelty. The silence of conscience opens the doors of deception. Yet, the world’s most neglected health care is conscience-health care. Many people never give their conscience a single checkup.

The human mind has the ability to self-justify most wrongful behaviors. Without a healthy conscience it easily goes astray. When a society saturates people with the idea that morality doesn’t matter, it is flooded with conscience-health issues.

As you can see, I’m a conscience-health advocate. Without a healthy conscience, we humans are easily deceived.

An unhealthy conscience can:

Lie without being bothered,Be fine with being unkind,Cuss while feeling righteous,Enjoy insulting people, andJustify cheating and stealing,

What you cultivate
Will motivate
Or demotivate
You.
What you nourish
Will flourish.

When media is
Used to publish
Mental rubbish
Discouragement
Will flourish.

Whatever thoughts, desires, and feelings that you choose to cultivate in your life will eventually captivate you. The living Jesus supernaturally empowers His true followers, who cultivate His presence, to bring forth kindness, forgiveness, and compassion in ugly situations.

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How to spiritually flourish

–Flourishing–
O, to overflow
From within
With the fruit
Of God’s Spirit
So that His nature
And His actions
Radiate through me
As rivers of life
Nourishing everything
And everyone one
In my path.

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Choosing what to be hungry for

If we won’t
Seek to be
In sync with God,
We’ll be hobbled
All life long.

Desires can be diminished,
Or they can be strengthened.
We have the choice
To revel in a desire
Or to resist it.
Choose to cultivate
Wholesome desires.

To “hunger and thirst for righteousness” is to crave and live to be in sync with and in submission to the living God. Jesus taught that being hungry to live right is a good thing. If we’d develop and pursue the desire to do right instead of wrong, we’d overcome much self-imposed destruction and guilt.

Desire’s good when it motivates you to pursue good; bad when it enslaves you to bad. Train your heart to hunger for what is right.

Without hunger for more of God, people become spiritually satisfied and complacent. If you’re not hungry for a closer relationship with God, you won’t be motivated to pursue Him.

The religious authorities “hurled insults at” a blind man Jesus caused to see and “threw him out.” (John 9.) They still do.

Jesus is the way
But He’s not a program,
A curriculum or technique,
Or a religion to follow.
He wants to personally lead His people
By His active presence within us.

To hunger
For what shames
Your conscience
Is to play
Guilty games.

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Political heroes rise & fall, but . . .

Beyond human politics
There’s an invisible kingdom,
A government that flows from
Beyond this world
And seeks to end
The widespread rebellion
Inside human beings
And to bring restoration
And peace of mind
To all who will fully
Surrender to its authority.
It’s not aligned with governments
That demand outward compliance
And rule by laws,
But have no power
To change human hearts.
“The kingdom of God
Is within you.”
Is it ruling inside of you?
Are you obeying
Its resurrected King and Lord?
Or are you following
Your own desires
And rebelling against it?

If you focus on and exalt a politician, you’ll be disappointed. Instead focus on and exalt the living Jesus. When Christians get distracted and live like Jesus is merely a myth, their lives go amiss.

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Seek out what inspires your heart, not what corrupts it

Harden your heart to corruption. Soften it to compassion.

Influences matter. They mold you into their image. Discern and avoid deceptive and/or devious influences. When you neglect to consciously choose your influences, you surrender to whatever influences come your way.

Think twice before you watch or read something. Like food, the thoughts and images you consume will influence you for better or for worse. The media you consume influences you. If you continue to consume it, it will squeeze you into its image.

Everybody has a flock of options in life, but negative influences often blind them to the point where they feel stuck with few choices. Much is influencing 21st century people to be irresponsible and to cave into self-destructive attitudes and behaviors. Make every effort to avoid negative influences.

Whatever expands your ego and inflates your pride is probably a bad influence on your future. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” –Proverbs 16:18.

Text messages and phone conversations don’t originate inside your phone and many of the thoughts you have don’t originate inside your brain. They come from outside influences.

Ungodly influences are like a nicotine patch. If you let them stick to you, you’ll absorb and be affected by them. Seek out what inspires your heart, not what corrupts it.

Christians should be examples of compassionate influence, not dogmatic legalism. Deceptively presenting partial truth is a self-righteous way to lie.

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Marsh Madness

O, the glorious value
And amazing treasure
Of every human being,
Even when it’s unseen
And unappreciated.
Even people society rejects
Contain the image of God
Buried beneath their brokenness,
Yet still present in their pain.
Love finds, beholds, and respects
The Creator’s work and reflection,
No matter how dim,
No matter how faint.
March through the marshes
That malign people.
Search for and release
The God-given treasures
Trapped within them
And lives will be incredibly enriched,
Theirs and yours!

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Baiting people with religious candy or net fishing for human hearts?

Net fishing for people? New Testament net fishing doesn’t work if you don’t have a network of people connected heat-to-heart with the living Jesus and with one another. As the inner spiritual knots that tied the earliest Christians together loosened and came undone, many Christians shifted from heart-to-heart connections to institutional connection. They turned from ekklesia (being knit together by the free flowing of the internal rivers of the living Jesus) to church (being held together by external human organizations).

Human hearts can connect beautifully with other human hearts, but they can’t connect well with institutions. The New Testament ekklesia is united heart-to-heart and overflows with the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit (the inner workings of the risen Jesus) creating a beautiful climate of Christ’s presence that works as a net to continually draw people to Him. Church connection, however, is based on baiting people and hooking them with religious candy, coercion, and control.

Check out Emil Brunner’s, a world-famous Swiss theologian who died in 1966, thoughts on this.

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Desires aren’t definitive ID

What we crave
Can lead us to misbehave
And make us it’s slave.
It’s important to be brave
And resist some things
That we crave
But it’s easier to cave.

To be dictated to by desire is to be driven and dominated by its demands. To define yourself by your desire is to decline your free will. Uncontrolled desire is deceptive and demanding.

To allow yourself to be driven by desires until they seem uncontrollable and take over your life is not good for mental health. A person controlled by desires isn’t free.

Desire should never define ethics. Much that we humans desire is harmful, deceitful, irrational, irresponsible, unjust or abusive.

When a society’s values are desire-based it will be as divided as the spectrum of human desires. True unity requires respect for moral principles.

The concept of ethics used to be based on moral principles. Now it’s too often based on individual choice and personal desire. Desire-based ethics proclaims that if people sincerely desire to behave a certain way, it’s morally right for them to do so.

Desire-based ethics is completely subjective. Principle-based ethics is based on objective reasoning and personal responsibility.

Getting what you want might not make you happy. Sometimes it makes you feel guilty and often it enslaves you to wanting more.

When you’re dominated by what you want, desire is your Lord. When you follow and obey the living Jesus, He is your Lord. We need “Jesus lead us ministries”–no curriculum, no self-proclaimed leader, no human agenda–just people listening to the living Jesus and doing what He says even when it is contrary to our desires.

To “walk in the Spirit” is to flow with Christ’s current in your day-to-day life, trusting and depending more and more on the living Jesus guiding you from within and less and less on religious formulas, programs, and control. Many people ask, “What does my desire require of me?” Few ask, “What does the Lord require of me?”

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Much media is deceptive

Without wisdom and discernment,
Devices that stream
Media and entertainment
Are turned into altars
Of time-devouring devotion.
Then they alter our life
With their seduction
And demeaning content.

Here’s popular media deception: Calling abortion reproductive health care and reproductive rights. Abortion aborts reproduction by destroying a prenatal life. There’s nothing reproductive about it.

Are “Sunday services” in the Bible?

Church services don’t seem to offer any services. They seem more like a lecture series than services.

Church is often called Sunday services, yet neither the word services nor the concept of services is used in the New Testament to refer to a gathering of the body of Christ. There are 50+ “one another” statements in the New Testament where Christ-followers are called to serve but nowhere where we are told to attend services. Yes, Hebrews tells us to “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together,” but even that doesn’t say to attend services. Yet, church seems to be all about Sunday services. Why?

Sunday services can be programmed and controlled by a pastor; what Christians do throughout the week can’t be. Church seems to fear loss of pastor control, so they focus on Sunday services which are some of the most tightly controlled human meetings anywhere. For a great awakening Christ-follows need the freedom, the training, and the encouragement to follow and obey the risen Jesus–the Holy Spirit–anywhere and everywhere! Churches set up a hierarchical system to keep people quiet & controlled, but in the kingdom of God people are led by the Spirit from within.

God’s plan for your life is that you completely surrender your life to His plans. Many people have heard about Jesus rising from the dead, but few people are hearing directly from the risen Jesus and obeying Him. Let your heart freely overflow with the life-giving current of “Christ in you” that releases the fruit of the Spirit throughout your being.

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