Steve Simms's Blog, page 235

Worship actively engages with Jesus heart-to-heart

When many people find church boring, they endure it. I’ve always wanted to open it up to Spirit-led excitement. If God’s not doing exciting things inside of you, Christianity will be boring.

Anointed insights that God gives to the heart, are much more powerful than any theological reasoning of the human mind. Pouring your heart out to the living God, is much more life-changing than filling your mind with theological concepts! Loads of lectures about Jesus can never replace living encounters with Him! Yet, somehow church got the idea that the prescription for the world’s woes is to weekly gather religious people for another sermon.

Humans have a need to worship something or someone. That need can only be fully met by the living, resurrected Jesus Christ. Spirit-prompted worship that is released to flow from deep within, is like taking a wonderful shower from the inside out. If you truly, “Behold the Lamb of God,” “in spirit and truth,” worship will well up from within you.

Worship is active interaction with and adoration of the living God. Thanking God is good, but worship goes way beyond what God has done for you and is overwhelmed by who He is in Himself!

When I focus on Jesus in worship, invisible floodgates open up within me and indescribable glory gushes out of my soul. The glorious reality of the eternal, living Jesus, cannot be exaggerated!

Jesus said the Father is seeking people who will worship “in spirit & in truth” — freely from the heart and with total honesty. Worship and church attendance aren’t the same thing. They can be done separately. They can also be done together.

Christians can meet and passively take a seat, or we could meet to actively listen to the living Jesus and repeat what He tells us. Wanted: Jesus alive and allowed to be in direct control of His body when we gather in His name. Just because He’s invisible, is a poor reason to ignore the risen Jesus. The living, resurrected Jesus is calling you. Accept no substitutes.

There’s no BFF like a deep, daily, ever-growing, heart-to-heart connection with the risen Jesus. Perhaps the benediction comes too quickly in church. After a sermon, we need to all stick around and practice together what we’ve been taught.

Biblical Christianity and hate can’t mix! “If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.” (1 John 4:20) It’s hard to look confident and happy while living in a straightjacket of insecurities.

A sermon is like a talk about Hawaii. It’s good but it can’t compare with being there. Check out my book: The Joy Of Early Christianity. Search for it on Amazon. Thank you.

Short inspirational originals

Dare to delight in life.
Deprioritize self.
Words ignored or forgotten offer no help.
What’s done can be forgiven.
Self-forgiveness without God’s forgiveness is a fantasy.
Self-forgiveness lacks the power of God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness of those you have wronged.
To lie is to defy reality and rely on deception.
Great happiness happens in self-forgetfulness.
Hate is never great. Kindness always is!
Fight what blocks your kindness, not to get your way.
Some of life’s biggest wins come from quitting sins.
Dishonesty intentionally denies reality.

Think more.
Some thoughts shouldn’t be allowed or tolerated in your mind.
The world isn’t a fair or a theme park. It’s a planet in need of much healing.
Some people call creative thinking “judgmental.”
Appreciate now before it becomes then.
One day it will be forever too late.
No one is good enough. Bad can be done by anyone.
Desire God’s best for everyone you encounter.
The New Testament can help us declutter Christianity.
Actions are more powerful than lectures.
Let the living Jesus interrupt and demolish your self-focus.

Conscience first.
Think beauty.
Care with compassion, not with self-focus.
Radical honesty prevents self-deception.
If we won’t rethink the obvious, we’ll stay stuck in first impressions.
Go and let Jesus lead.
Jesus is perfect.
Flow with Jesus.
Be Christ’s alone.

Make church a support group, not an audience for a lecture

Church pumps people full of Christian ideas, but offers little (or no) daily support or accountability in living out those ideas. However, the Holy Spirit can be trusted to lead a worship meeting without a human controlling it. I’ve seen it hundreds of times.

The chain of command in the body of Christ flows directly from Jesus to you without going thru a hierarchy. However, sermon-based church is so widespread that even the mention of support-group-style church makes people uncomfortable.

Modern Christianity focuses on meetings in religious buildings, but early Christians focused on daily following the risen Jesus. I believe the early Christians met to encourage one another, confide in one another, and experience the risen Jesus in each other.

If something can be done without Jesus’ active involvement, it won’t demonstrate His living reality. Jesus isn’t dead or departed. He, Himself, said that He is present and powerful!

A church service can be so finely planned and organized that the Holy Spirit isn’t necessary to conduct it. A Sunday sermon is a one-size fits all approach to Christianity. Allowing anyone to share, lets the Spirit adapt the meeting. I love it when Christians meet to do the stuff taught in the Bible (not just to hear a talk about it).

When Christians are given no guidance or training to practice what they hear in a sermon, they learn not to practice it. Members of the body of Christ don’t just need sermons about the Head. We need to daily listen to and obey Christ our Head.

It’s hard to take a lesson from a sermon and live it by yourself. Christians need to actively minister to and encourage one another. Always listening to the same person’s sermons can deprive us of the God-given wisdom of other members of the body of Christ. People don’t always need a sermon. Sometimes they need to share what God is doing in their life and listen to others share as well.

Support groups empower people to connect heart-to-heart as they open up to each other with compassion and love. Why not church? So much is missed by training people to be silent in church. The mutual support they could provide one another is shut down. According to James 1:22, sermon-hearing without Bible-doing is self-deceiving.

Perhaps church puts too much emphasis on a sermon and too little on surrendered hearts. William Booth called “religion without the Holy Ghost,” a “chief danger.” It’s a danger embraced by much of modern Christianity.

Joy thoughts to help you self-identify as happy

What does it take to be happy? Just joy. MAKE CHRISTIANITY JOYFUL AGAIN!

I wish more people would self-identify as happy. Maybe these thoughts will help. I like to self-identify as happy, even when I don’t feel like it. Be a joy dispenser, not a joy quencher! (Search for: The Joy Of Early Christianity.)

When good things happen to people, enjoy their joy as if it is your own joy, and quickly it will be! There’s great joy in discovering heart-felt, common interests and experiences with a stranger. Try it and see.

Where there’s little heart-felt gratitude, joy is hard to find. Over analysis, in any situation, will squeeze the joy out of it. Sometimes you just need to let your heart flow with appreciation. Crying for joy is an amazing experience. Why hold back happy tears?

Trying to get joy into a closed heart is like trying to force a straw thru a solid concrete wall. A guilty conscience finds no real joy, but a forgiven one makes joy for real! You can listen to music to dull your pain, or you can listen to music to release and enhance your joy. (It’s not the same.)

Joy isn’t something that you figure out. It’s something that you cultivate to flow from within. The more we surrender to the risen Jesus, the more joy flows from within. When I actively adore Jesus a door opens within me for His joy to pour thru.

Let Jesus send joy thru your heart like your favorite music flows thru your favorite devise.

We walk past joyful scenes many times everyday, yet we often neglect to notice them, appreciate them, and celebrate them. Joy isn’t a drunken reaction. Laughter can be forced, faked, or alcohol induced, but it’s far more fun when it freely flows from rivers of inner joy. Fun is fickle and fading but joy will keep your heart jumping with wonder, gratitude and astonishment.

To notice, ponder, and appreciate beauty, releases joy. Some characteristics of joy are: spontaneity, sincerity, appreciation, kindness, compassion, clear conscience, forgiveness, an open heart. We can get so caught up in striving for a mere moment of joy that we miss out on manifold joyful moments.

There’s sure to be some joy somewhere in your soul. Search for it, soak it up, and share it with others. Overlooked joy (both in the world around us and in our own heart) leaves us emotionally impoverished.

There are certain things that don’t belong on an airplane and certain thoughts that don’t belong in a human mind. Those thoughts kill joy.

Jesus continually bedazzles me!

Jesus continually bedazzles me,
His glory shimmering within,
Dancing and singing in my soul.

Jesus dazzles the beholder. “Behold the Lamb of God!” Beauty can dazzle the eye, but Christ dazzles the heart! Jesus Christ wants to shimmer, shine, and radiate in and thru you! He wants to take you out of the prison of self-focus and into the bedazzling prism of His presence and power.

Much religion replaces Christ’s dazzle with human razzle. Religion tends to “simmer down” Christ and His glorious shimmering. However, for me Jesus is the inner prism, continually spreading His bedazzling light all across my soul.

It’s good to study God and theology, but it’s much more powerful to be dazzled by Him! When the dazzle of Divinity dims, religion steps in to substitute sermons, programs, and rituals for it. Turning Christianity into “systematic theology” tends to stifle its spiritual sparks. “Quench not the Spirit.”

I was just “dazzled” and “awed” by God. I posted this comment on Facebook: “Casual Christianity lacks the power to dazzle, but the risen Jesus floods hearts with awe!” Then the next thing I went to was the Music City Miracles webpage to read about the Titans. The first thing I saw was: “Derrick Henry is in the midst of a career year in 2019. Anyone who’s a Titans fan loves him, and since his days in Alabama he’s ‘dazzled’ audiences with his ability to break tackles and stretch for long touchdown runs.” I almost never use or read the word “dazzled” so, I believe the odds against that happening are too coincidental to be a coincidence.

The early Christ-followers wrote a bedazzling read about their experiences with Jesus. We call it the New Testament (the last third of the Bible). I find the Bible to be word jewelry — verbal diamonds alive with the light of God.

“Christ dazzles me and stirs within me such feelings of amazement that I can never get over Him.” –A.W. Tozer

[image error]The risen Jesus facilitates His power and presence within me!

When people say, "The end justifies the means," it's usually because their "means" have become mean.

Human life has a splendor, but if we fail to see it within us, it’s hard to see it in anyone else.

Check out my book about kindness. Search Amazon for: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind.

The Phenomenal (Not Nominal) Christian Life

The Bible specifically says that we should avoid “having a form of godliness” without the actual power of God. It challenges us to be phenomenal Christians, not nominal ones. Biblical Christianity isn’t a one-time declaration of self-identity, but a supernatural transformation and lifestyle empowered by Jesus. Early Christianity overflowed with signs and wonders, not with whines and blunders.

Much Christianity through out history has been nominal, lacking the reality of Christ’s living presence and life-changing power. Thus most people have met many more nominal Christians than they have phenomenal Christians. However, if you search for them, you can also find many amazing, phenomenal Christians.

Biblical Christianity isn’t religious allegiance or church attendance. It’s God’s fire actually burning in a transformed human heart. If you never have a testimony about how Christ is working in your life, you may be a Christian in name only.

When Christianity is seen as little more than a nametag we wear, we have denied the power of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” It’s too easy to settle for a nominal Christian life and to ignore Christ’s call to a phenomenal, Christ-centered life. The nominal Christian life requires nothing but occasional church attendance. However, phenomenal Christianity requires full surrender to the living, resurrected Jesus Christ.

The greater the persecution in any country, fewer nominal Christians will be there, but more phenomenal Christians will be there. Grace isn’t nominal. It’s phenomenal! Grace isn’t the absence of standards or morals, but the free gift of God’s power to live by them.

Jesus wasn’t born to give the world a nominal religious holiday called Christmas, but to offer people a phenomenal relationship with Him. If you look deeper into the events of the first Christmas you will be astonished at the phenomenality of Christianity! Biblically Christianity is lived phenomenally, not nominally!

I love finding phenomenal Christians in history. Then I like to hang out with them by reading their books!

Don’t settle for nominal Christianity, go after a phenomenal relationship with the risen Jesus! Check out my book about the phenomenal Christian life.

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Unity in the body of Christ (ekklesia) must include racial diversity, respect, & equality

There is much conversation about unity in the body of Christ and that’s a very important, biblical concept. In fact, the idea comes from Jesus, Himself, and from His prayer in John 17, where He prays that His followers be one so that the world will know that He is from the Father.

Much of the conversation about unity in Christ’s body addresses doctrinal, denominational, and other organizational divisions. However, a key part of “oneness” is often ignored. That is racial unity — the body of Christ coming together in racial/ethnic diversity, respect, and equality.

A gathering of Christ-followers (ekklesia) should look like Heaven. The book of Revelation describes Heaven as having people from “every kindred and every tribe.” When Christians meet together based on race or ethnicity, they are just as divisive (if not more so) as meetings based on doctrine or denomination.

There is a famous statement that says: “Sunday morning at 11:00 o’clock is the most segregated hour in America.” That statement is a serious indictment against Christianity in America. It shouldn’t be ignored, but believers should take bold, humble, and sacrificial action to remedy that accusation. We should intentionally cross racial lines and begin to embrace, honor, and submit to our brethren in Christ of all races/ethnicities.

So how can we get started. First, don’t wait for others to cross the racial line to come and meet with you. You cross it and go meet with them. Second, we need to learn all we can about the causes of the racial divide in the body of Christ so that we can begin to overcome it.

I have written a book to help with that: Off the RACE Track–From Color-Blind to Color-Kind. It is a Christ-centered book full of practical ways that the body of Christ can come together across racial/ethnic lines. It’s also takes a clear look at some of the difficult history that created such a divide. If you are serious about oneness, reading it can be a solid first step to racial healing in the body of Christ. It’s available at this link.

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Every Christ-follower has a "salvation testimony" to share

The most amazing transformation stories are people changed from the inside out, by the risen Jesus! Let those testimonies be told! Much of God’s work is within people. If they aren’t trained and released to testify, their experience with Jesus remain hidden.

Humbly telling others what God has done for you is an important part of growing in Christ. See Revelation 12:11. If there is no room for testimonies, an important tool for Christian growth and spiritual power, is ignored.

When testimonies are silenced, much that God is doing in a church, will never be known. “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so.”

Without testimony, people openly sharing their experiences, a heart-felt sense of community has trouble developing. Spiritual awakenings are inspired by testimonies about experiences with Jesus; the status quo is maintained by rote tradition.

Only you can tell your testimony about Jesus–not a preacher, a prophet, an apostle. If you don’t share it, it won’t be told. If you have experienced the risen Jesus, you’re qualified to stand up and testify about what He has done in you. When you share how Jesus set you free, that inspires others to want His freedom, too. A salvation testimony is the story of how a person encountered and was forgiven, healed, and set free by the living Jesus.

Without an experience with Jesus, we won’t have a living testimony to share about Him. When He’s burning in our heart, we will. To be a truly effective Christian, you must be infected with the risen Jesus.

There’s “order in the court,” yet people are allowed to testify. Why should “order in the church” keep people passive and silent? Perhaps when the Bible says, “decently & in order,” it means the Holy Spirit’s order, not religious order. (See Roman’s 8:14.)

A friend and I both share our salvation testimonies on this video.

Preaching so that people can connect with & obey the risen Jesus

The purpose of preaching is more than just proclamation. It is introducing people to the risen Jesus, so that they can begin to listen to and obey Him. Early Christians didn’t use preaching to make people dependent on a preacher, but to train them to personally follow and obey Jesus.

Here’s a conflict. A pastor is often seen as one who does it all, but God wants to empower all to do His will.

Would you rather hear a lecture about your favorite athlete or watch him/her in action? When it comes to the living Jesus, I’d much rather see Him in action in and through ordinary people. After all, the goal of Christianity has to be more than hearing religious talks. The goal is that we be “led by the Spirit.” (Romans 8:14.)

The Good News is that Jesus still offers forgiveness, restoration, freedom, and joy to whoever will humbly receive it. Grace offers you free gas so that you can follow God’s Waze to His destinations. “Let’s take the way of the Cross.”

Everyone worldwide, who has a living relationship with the risen Jesus, is a member of the body of Christ and the family of God. No other membership can compare with being a member of the worldwide body of Christ.

It’s easy for a pulpit to become a pedestal for the person preaching from it. However, the only one on a pedestal in the body of Christ should be tie living, resurrected Jesus. When someone has inner, spiritual stature, they have no need or desire to be on a pedestal like a statue.

Here’s a short history of Christian revival. God sends a spiritual awakening. People organize it. It is gradually snuffed out. Don’t quench revival. Quench your “flesh” (the rebellious part of your human nature) that tries to quench the Holy Spirit and reject His inner guidance.

A miniscule thought will grow into a mountain if allowed to continually repeat in your mind. Make mountains of your best thoughts — the ones that come from God.