Steve Simms's Blog, page 146

An appeal to free will is often a false flag

Every time
You deny
The truth,
You chain
Your free will
To a lie.

Without the will to be free, free will’s a false flag–an excuse for being imprisoned by desire. In a world of deception and darkness, free will doesn’t just happen. It must be sought and fought for.

Free will isn’t free. It requires that we resist and overcome our inner bondage and deception. When you allow your life to be consumed by cravings and compulsions, you lay down your free will. When you surrender your free will to be dominated by enslaving desires, you give up your right to choose.

Unless we discover and admit the truth, we may claim we have free will, but in reality, our will is in bondage to deception. Our conscience is our inner warning system that alerts us when we begin to surrender our free will to things that enslave it.

Obsession obliterates free will. Addiction annihilates free will. Compulsion crushes free will. Depression deletes free will. Enslavement to destructive desires destroys free will.

Deception dimishes free will. How can you freely choose if you’re deceived about what your options are? Anytime you’re tormented or controlled by feelings that go against your will, that’s a warning that you’re losing your free will.

Every time you’re inwardly coerced into self-enslaving behavior, you walk away from your free will. To win back our free will we must begin with humble honesty and with realigning any deception in us with truth.

An imprisoned will isn’t a free will. When your will is enslaved by deception, desire, addiction, or obsession, you’ve given up your freedom to choose your behaviors. When your will is enslaved to anything, the first step to free will is to freely admit your bondage.

Specks become planks when they’re right in front of my pupils. A speck can block my vision as much as a plank of plywood can. I don’t want to live in delusion. I don’t want my free will to be in bondage to deception caused by my inability and/or unwillingness to see truth. I want to take the planks (those pesky, tiny specks that block my pupils) out of my eyes so I can clearly see the truth and no longer have my free will held in bondage to self-justifications, desires, or ideologies.

When people appeal
To their free will
They're often waving
A false flag
To distract
From their bondage.[image error]Pexels.com" data-medium-file="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." data-large-file="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." src="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." alt="" class="wp-image-31137" />Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

The desire to be free from dominating desires

When desire overrides reason life is reckless. When reason overcomes desire sanity is restored.

Modeling your message is more powerful than meddling and manipulating. Kindness is more effective at changing a human heart than coercion is.

No matter what your role in life, as life rolls on, be a role model for good behavior, not an example of bad. Disagreeing with something someone does doesn’t mean that you’re judging or meddling in their life.

True love neither insults or attacks a sinner nor approves of or applauds sin. Love the sinner so much that love liberates him from his sin. “Love lifted me.”

Human-powered Christianity crawls in circles. Christ-powered Christianity soars in His Spirit.

God is working in you right now. Are you aware of what He’s doing? If the risen Jesus isn’t real to you every day, calling one day Easter seems to be pointless.

Because of pride,
Reality is denied
As people hide
From truth.

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Meddling or modeling?

Human nature is to meddle and to try to fix people “fix” people who we believe are broken (or messed up), even if they don’t think they are broken–even when they think we are the ones who are broken. To “fix” someone (to align them when what we believe) requires persuasion. We can’t do it by coercion. That only makes them push back.

Persuasion (salesmanship) requires kindness and logic; unkind debate won’t work. However, even if we “fix” someone by our persuasion, unless they are changed on the inside, their newly persuaded behavior will soon revert back to their old behavior.

Politics and laws and slogans and rules won’t change people. Genuine transformation requires a change of heart and that’s what the living Jesus offers to whosoever will surrender to, listen to, and obey Him. Living in a way that demonstrates Jesus’ presence and lifestyle to other people creates hunger and thirst for righteousness in their hearts and shows them that their hunger can be filled up with peace, healing, joy, and freedom from guilt and inner bondage. Christians need to stop meddling with accusation and begin modeling with love, joy and the rest of the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Christianity that models Jesus is much more powerful than Christianity that meddles in people’s affairs. Try modeling Jesus’ lifestyle.

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The uncomfortable blessing–persecution

It takes courage to refuse to take a side, but rather to expose the flawed beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of both conservatism and progressivism. No human ideology is perfect and even if there was a perfect ideology, we humans would ruin its perfection by our flawed implementation of it. Jesus builds His ekklesia (the Greek word that was the name of the interactive city council in Greek city-states that is translated as church in most English Bibles) on the rock of supernatural revelation from God, independent of human governments and ideologies.

If the kingdom of God (body of Christ–ekklesia) has an ideology, it would be revelationism–individuals being continually led by and obeying the Holy Spirit–not by the flesh (human desires, feelings, and ideologies). That’s the difference between the kingdom of God and the world. People either follow and obey the voice of the living God or we follow and obey our desires, feelings, and ideologies. We can’t consistently do both at the same time.

When the Holy Spirit is allowed to freely lead, carnality recedes. When our carnality begins to recede, it causes both carnal conservatives and carnal progressives to be uncomfortable enough to confront and persecute us. We get it from both sides. But then, Jesus calls that a blessing. Don’t forget to count your uncomfortable blessings today!

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The ultimate escape experience

To embrace
Wrongful desires
Is to lay down
The resistance
It requires
To escape them.

No matter what you escape in your circumstances, if you’re still in bondage to your mind, feelings, and desires, you’re not free. When anxiety feels like a life sentence, remember that one uplifting sentence if allowed to penetrate your heart can set you free.

As humans, we need to escape self-focus, not to enable it. We have a greater need to escape from self than to escape to self. The more I flee from self-focus, the freer and happier I am.

To escape from tormenting thoughts, consistently read, repeat, memorize, and saturate yourself with hope-filled thoughts.

Conformity to what’s cool isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. It quickly becomes a cage, a cell that crushes inner freedom.

Jesus is the ultimate escape experience. Through Him we can escape the bondage of our own thoughts, opinions, feelings, and desires.

Self-focus isn’t an escape game. It’s a real escape room that holds us in bondage until we embrace Christ’s escape experience. Self is a prison. We can love our prison or leave it to follow Jesus. “Whoever wants to be My disciple must deny themselves . . .”

To “prepare the way of the Lord,” we need to get self out of the way. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Jesus is the way–the escape route thru the rough realities of life, who’ll lead those who follow Him, to inner freedom and peace.

I love to relish the radiance of the risen Jesus–to bask in the beauty of His presence! When Jesus draws me into His presence, He becomes my escape artist and fills me with “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

A Christ-centered human heart functions differently than a self-dominated heart. Get to know the risen Jesus, not with your intellect, but with your heart and life. As long as commitment to Christ is confined to a particular church, we’re tempted to conform to that church’s culture more than to Jesus.

--The Bible’s Escape Experience--O taste and see.Partake of the divine nature.Come unto Me.Escape from evil desires![image error]Pexels.com" data-medium-file="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." data-large-file="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." src="https://stevesimms.files.wordpress.co..." alt="" class="wp-image-31107" />Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels.com

Underestimating life

It’s easy to underestimate the true value of life and to treat it as trivia.

From conception
To birth
Through the time
Spent on earth,
Human life
Matters.

Hardened hearts
See compassion
As a distraction
So they focus
On self-protection.

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Does “Love your neighbor as yourself,” promote self-love?

“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus used self-love as an example of how to love others, not as a command to focus on self.

Take care of your neighbor’s needs like you take care of your own. Overlook your neighbor’s faults the way you overlook your own. Celebrate your neighbor’s achievements as much as you celebrate your own. The more we focus on helping and loving others, the happier we’ll be.

Self-love is an example of how to love others, not a command to focus on self. Self-love is lot more popular than self-denial.

The more we focus on self, the more likely we are to make self a personal idol. Self-love too often leads to self-deification causing people to replace God with self.

Self-love’s a sign of the last days. “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves.” 2 Timothy 3:1. When self-love is unchecked by loving your neighbor, it leads to selfism.

Jesus assumes that people already love themselves. Instead of commanding self-love, I think Jesus meant: Give your neighbor some of the focus and concern that you have for yourself.

As humans, we are naturally self-centered beings. Perhaps we don’t need to learn to love ourselves more, but to deny ourselves. Selfism teaches that people are basically good, but the Bible states, “There is no one righteous, not even one.”

True self-care isn’t self-pampering. It’s striving to align your desires, emotions, and behaviors with God.

Which will we choose–God’s love or self-love? God’s love isn’t quantifiable–at least not by me. Isaiah said it best: “I am undone.” To get a glimpse of the greatness of God’s love we need to see our sin as the horrific rebellion against God that it is and not deny it or trivialize it. Seeing my sin from God’s perspective leaves me undone, like Isaiah in chapter six. Then when love covers my sin with mercy, grace, and the blood of Jesus, I experience undeserved and unquantifiable pardon, peace, purpose, power, and provision and all my heart can do is to continually praise and thank the living, resurrected Jesus!

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God focus vs. focus on our desires

When Christians watch, read, listen to, talk, text or post carnality, they’re welcoming demons into their life. If Christianity will decentralize from church focus, it can reestablish Christ focus.

Jesus invites us to come as we are. He never invites us to stay as we are. You can’t be a self-follower and be a Christ-follower at the same time.

As long as church builds institutions instead of training and releasing Christ-following disciples, it won’t have much power.

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Self-love or neighbor-love?

My heart is waking up to a deeper longing to “be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” and it’s a shocker! The “fullness of God” doesn’t allow me room for self-love. I’m learning that self-love and neighbor-love can’t coexist. Jesus put it this way: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Me.”

To love is to lose yourself through focusing on showing compassion, caring, and kindness to other people. Jesus quoted Leviticus 19:18; “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That verse doesn’t say to love your neighbor “along with yourself.” It says, “as” yourself. I believe it means “as a replacement for yourself.”

Because my will and my neighbor’s will are never perfectly aligned, my self-love becomes a hindrance to neighbor-love, and I have to choose between the two. Loving myself distracts me from loving my neighbor. The only way to truly love my neighbor as myself is to love my neighbor instead of myself–to shift the love and focus I have for myself to my neighbor. Self-love puts self ahead of neighbors. Since neighbor-love puts neighbors ahead of self it calls for intentional self-denial.

Turn your attention away from self-love and focus on neighbor-love. As Paul put it: “Consider others better than yourself.” Jesus showed us how to “love your neighbor as yourself” when He denied Himself, prayed “not My will, but Yours be done,” and then freely surrendered His life to die for others.

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Awareness of God’s glory ads up to adoration . . .

You can’t express deep adoration for Jesus if you’re not intensely aware of His presence, power, and majesty. If your heart isn’t overflowing with adoration for Jesus, maybe you’ve only heard about Him, but haven’t actually encountered Him.

If you will ponder God with your heart, you’ll gradually become aware of His presence. Then adoration will begin to flow from within you.

Adoration is to be so captivated by the presence of God that you abandon personal preferences in order to worship and obey Him. Genuine restoration with God produces passionate, ongoing adoration for Him.

We can admire Jesus while we do our own thing, but once we begin to adore Him, we’re forever changed from deep within. Any attempt to formalize, ritualize, and script adoration stifles its free expression.

If you’re not passionately in love with Jesus now, you’d probably be pretty bored with Heaven’s ongoing, adoring focus on Him. Without active adoration worship is rote. When adoration becomes a duty, it’s no longer adoration.

The more you accommodate
The living Jesus,
The more you’ll radiate
His presence.

Rather than giving Jesus
Passionate adoration,
Church tends to become
A mere oration.

Instead of cultivating
An atmosphere
Of actively adoring
The risen Jesus,
Church can settle for
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