Steve Simms's Blog, page 270

4 men, an elephant & the Bible . . .

4 men & an elephant can give you great insight into the Bible. Check this out!

When people tell you that there are contradictions in the Bible; think about an elephant. (To make sense of that statement, watch the first two minutes of this video!)

“Sit & be told?” or “Go & be bold?”

The living experience of Christ is far more amazing than anything anyone can say about Him. To really understand the Gospel it must be more than preached. It must be personally experienced and lived. People learn what they do. To really learn Christianity we need to do Christianity.

When God’s inner rivers aren’t allowed to flow; God’s people aren’t able to fully grow. Let Jesus freely flow from within you! Once you begin to bask in the Spirit flowing from within you, it’s hard to be in a Christian meeting where He is shut down.

People come to church expecting to hear from a preacher. In early Christianity they came together expecting to hear from God. To hear your conscience is to hear from God. Listen! Pay attention to what’s going on in your heart and open the door when you hear Jesus knocking.

To hear a sermon, yet not personally experience what was preached, leaves a person with little more than fleeting head knowledge. However, the essence of Christianity is to know, experience, and daily obey the risen Jesus.

Let’s make church a Christ lab where we experiment with fresh ways of interacting with and obeying Jesus. Ekklesia is a faith-lab where Christians demonstrate the reality of the risen Jesus as they flow with the gifts of the Spirit.

Only you can manage your relationship with Jesus! If you try to delegate your responsibility to someone else, you may drift away. Christians have a responsibility to personally hear and obey the living Jesus, not just to go to church. Church’s message is “Sit & be told.” Jesus’ message is “Go & be bold.”

Sermons are available at church or on internet, TV, and radio; however, open, Spirit-led interaction in a body of believers is rare. If you want a sermon, they’re easy to find, however, if you want to meet with Christ-followers who practice 1 Corinthians 14:26; that’s almost extinct! (So why are modern churches almost universally sermonopolies?) Sermons are too often like retweets; merely repeating something a preacher saw, read, or heard somewhere else

How can Jesus be the Head of a church if the church meets under the headship of a pastor? Can a church have two heads?

Schools and colleges are graduating people. Why don’t churches ever graduate people and send them out to change the world?

Jesus promised inner rivers of living water. What clogs your soul? If you have no sense of sin, you may see Christ as an accessory, but you won’t see Him as a necessity. Without the idea of judgment, the concept of grace is meaningless.

Many emotional problems come from a reading disorder–the failure to consistently read positive, hopeful, uplifting material. (Like the Bible!)

What’s the world’s worst tasting mint? Discouragemint! Don’t put it in your mouth and don’t give it to others!

Oops! An atheist is a person who believes himself to be an accident. You’re too important for that to be true.

 

 

Ireland declares prenatal human life to be disposable

Ireland has joined most other Western nations in making prenatal human life legally disposable. Irish activist, Cora Sherlock, put it this way:

“What repealing or replacing the 8th Amendment would actually involve, if voted through, is stripping unborn babies of all meaningful protections which in turn would inevitably lead to countless babies having their lives deliberately ended with the full sanction of the State. That is the simple and stark reality.”

But how can making human life disposable in one stage not devalue it in every other stage of life? If you and I had no value in the womb, it doesn’t make any sense that we would suddenly be of value now that we are outside of the womb.

By declaring human life to be worthless in the womb, it seems that Western culture has caused some people to follow the logic and to see life as worthless outside the womb. Perhaps the appearance and rise of random mass murders of innocent people in our Western culture is an example of this. The random killing of innocent people isn’t just crazy; it’s unbelievably evil

Society has lost sight of the value of human life. Each human life is of greater value than all the world’s great art works combined. The idea of disposable plastic is destroying our planet. The idea of disposable humanity is demolishing respect for human life.

Alice Paul (born in 1885) was an early, American suffragist, feminist, and women’s right’s advocate. She said: “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.” (Half of its victims are female.)

A person cannot be lectured into godliness, that takes an inward, spiritual transformation. However, your life matters and so do all other human lives in all other stages. Disposable diapers are one thing. Disposables babies are another!

The yes vote in the Irish referendum illustrates this principle: When godly Christian influence is strong, society hides its evil — when weak, society openly displays evil and even boast about it.

Here is some godly influence: Mother Teresa sums it up with these words: “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is ‘Abortion’, because it is a war against the child… A direct killing of the innocent child, ‘Murder’ by the mother herself… And if we can accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”

[image error]

What are the essential beliefs for Christianity?

When Christians begin to think about and discuss unity, the question of doctrine always comes up. How do we overcome doctrinal disagreement?

Augustine, a Christian brother who lived in the fourth century, answered that question this way: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, love.”

Every belief system (and/or worldview) has essential beliefs. For instance, it is essential to atheism to believe that there is no such thing as God, a god, or gods. If someone believes in God, by definition, she/he is not an atheist.

Every belief system also has non-essential beliefs. For instance, one atheist may believe in the Big Bang and another atheist may believe that the universe has always existed. However, they are both still atheists because neither of those beliefs is essential to atheism.

So what are the essential truths of Christianity? The book of 1 John, tells us how to recognize them. “Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist.”

According to John, if a spirit (or doctrine) acknowledges that Jesus has come in the flesh it is of God. If it doesn’t, it is not from God. So certain beliefs about who Jesus is, are essential. If we redefine Jesus and deny who He is, we have broken with essential Christian teaching.

So how do we know who Jesus is? Fortunately, Jesus told us who He is, and we have His words in Scripture. He told His disciples and we also have many of their words. Jesus also revealed Himself through Old Testament writers and we have their words as well.

Jesus is God in human flesh. He is the Messiah (the Christ) that the Jews were looking for. He is the sacrifice for our sin. He is Lord (Absolute Master). He is bodily risen from the dead. He is present as the Spirit when we gather in His name. He is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

If someone says they are a Christian, yet continually affirms a doctrine that denies or redefines who Jesus is, they have broken with Christianity. Paul confirms this by warning us against following “another Jesus” (a redefined Jesus).

As John wrote, some teachings (and the spirits behind those teachings) are not from God. Both Jesus and many of His first followers warned us to watch out for false prophets. We need discernment and wisdom not to follow or support any teachings or teachers that redefine who Jesus is.

So in order to have Christian unity we unite around Jesus. It is important that we unite on the essentials of who He is. This doesn’t mean that we try to force or coerce people to believe the essentials, but that we don’t try to have Christian unity with people who redefine Jesus. We need to love them and serve them, but we shouldn’t accept their doctrines that redefine Jesus, to be Christian teachings.

As far as other doctrines that don’t redefine Jesus, Christ-followers have much liberty and diversity in our beliefs. We all see in part so let’s love one another (and all people) in spite of our doctrinal differences, “speaking the truth in love.”

Church can be like a full 747 sitting on the tarmac with no fuel

Having church without the active leading of the Spirit is like sitting on the tarmac in a full 747 with no fuel. A plane full of people won’t go anywhere without fuel. Neither will a church without the supernatural working of the Spirit.

When the fruit of the Spirit isn’t present in abundance, somebody’s quenching the Spirit. (Love, joy, peace, patience . . .) There’s no such thing as “church as usual” when the Holy Spirit is free to work.

Preachers talk to you, but the Holy Spirit wants to freely flow from inside you. (See John 7:38.) The biblical purpose of preaching is not endless proclamation to the same passive people but radical and disruptive transformation. Pentecost was an abrupt and disruptive interruption of the norm, turning bankrupt believers into world changers. Do it again, Lord! The events of Pentecost show that the Holy Spirit doesn’t follow a program!

Isn’t it odd that although Pentecost was not liturgical, programmed or controlled; church services commemorating it are? Pentecost as a religious service is benign; but Pentecost as present reality is revolutionary! To celebrate Pentecost without God’s surging power is like swiping a phone that doesn’t have a battery.

What is the “cost” of a new Pentecost? It is stepping away from programs and human-control, into the spontaneity of the Spirit! Pentecost is Christ’s power working in and through all His people, not programs & preaching for the passive. (See Acts 2.)

The devoted religious leaders of the time rejected Jesus in the flesh. Today we must be careful not to reject Him in the Spirit! The Pharisees were Bible-believers; the Sadducees were Bible-repudiators. Both saw a living Jesus as a threat and wanted Him dead.

When church established a clergyopoly it confined “ordinary” Christians to the role of spectators. Too many Christians today feel like they are nothing but spiritual spectators; passively sitting through a church service, listening to Christian music and radio, watching Christian TV, attending a conference or concert.

Christianity is about direct revelation from God and living demonstrations of Christ more than about religion, regulations, and ritual! Christians are called “the body of Christ,” not “the organization of Christ.” There’s no place for vanity in Christianity. Celebrate Jesus, not a preacher or a program or a particular organization.

Being Bible-taught without the Spirit, can dry up in textualism. Being Spirit-taught without the Bible, can blow up in deception. Hearing Christ explained is nice, but it can’t compare to Christ continually experienced in everyday life.

Listen to hope; not to discouragement. Heartily hunt for hope; determinedly dodge discouragement! If you aren’t finding the inner peace you’re looking for, get close to Jesus.

I find hope in a relationship with the risen Jesus. It is the most absorbing, addicting, and amazing thing on earth! (Christ loves us so much that He gives us the freedom to not love Him back.)

Church attendance without heart and lifestyle transformation is religion without results. Perhaps the question, “What do you do when not in church?” is more important than the question, “Do you go to church?”

The Bible never says, “You in church, the hope of glory.” It says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Perhaps when Jesus said, “Occupy till I come,” He didn’t mean to occupy a church seat every Sunday.”

The gifts of the Spirit can’t work through the body of Christ if one man does all the talking. We need to stop ignoring this Bible verse: “Now to each one (not just to 1 pastor) the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”

I can’t find anything in the Bible that gives pastors a monopoly on preaching. Can you? I think early Christian preaching was more facilitation than lecture. (See 1 Corinthians 14:26) Jesus opened up “a new and living way” so we can all “draw near to God” (not just hear a talk about Him).

If after Pentecost Sunday we have no more power from God & passion for God than we did before, we somehow missed the point! “Ekklesia” is to meet with and interact with the living Jesus, together with others, letting Him directly lead the gathering. Let’s go back to ekklesia!

Ekklesia, like a support group, helped me heal

(I first wrote this for ONE Body Life’s blog @ this link.)

Too many people feel like Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-French filmmaker. He said: “I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal.”

That’s how I used to feel. I grew up emotionally insecure and self-conscious, believing that I was strange and abnormal — never feeling like I really fit in with “normal” people. Then I started meeting with a non-denominational group of Christians that met something like a support group (what the Greek New Testament calls ekklesia).

As people opened up and shared in the group, I saw that they had the same “abnormal” insecurities and thoughts that I did. (Comedy writer Joe Ancis put it this way: “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.) Soon I begin to feel a real sense of oneness and unity with them.

The truth is that all human beings are basically the same. The Good News Bible puts it this way: “Every test that you have experienced is the kind that normally comes to people.” (1 Corinthians 10:13)

The problem is that most of us try to get other people to believe that we are better off than we really are. We’re all weird. Some people just hide their weirdness more than others do.

We usually don’t want other people to know how messed up we are and how much we struggle. However, Christians are told to “walk in the light” — to open up and be completely honest about what we are going through, so that we can encourage and help one another.

You are not strange or alone. It’s normal to struggle and mess up in various degrees. We need to open up and lovingly help each another get back on track. That’s the key to unity and healing in the body of Christ. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on Him (Jesus) the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

Fresh insights on royalty

A British Royal Wedding is a huge, world-wide event. But what is royalty really? Could you be a royal — born to royal ancestry?

Royal–a king or queen or a member of their family. “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.”

The Story Of “Blest Be The Tie That Binds”

In 1765, John and Mary Fawcett went to minister in Wainsgate, a rural English community, described as: “farmers and shepherds, poor as Job’s turkey; an uncouth lot whose speech one could hardly understand, unable to read or write; most of them pagans cursed with vice and ignorance and wild tempers. The established church had never touched them.”

They began to minister from house to house and built a small congregation. Eventually they had four children, but at Wainsgate they struggled with very little money. Eventually John was offered a pastorate and a very good salary at a famous church in London. They decided to accept the offer.

After preaching a farewell sermon, John and Mary and their children had a cart loaded with all their belongings. People gathered around them and were crying and hugging them. Mary said: “I can’t stand it John. I know not how to go.” John responded: “Lord help me, Mary, nor can I stand it! We will unload the wagon.”

Then John told the people: “We’ve changed our minds! We are going to stay!” And everybody began to rejoice and celebrate. Later John wrote a song about the unity and love that his family experienced with the believers at Wainsgate.

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts is Christian love.

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like to that above.

Before our Father’s throne

We pour our ardent prayers

Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one

Our comforts and our cares.

We share each other’s woes,

Our mutual burdens bear

And often for each other flows

The sympathizing tear.

When we asunder past

It gives us inward pain,

But we shall still be joined in heart,

And hope to meet again.

The Fawcetts stayed with the people in Wainsgate for the rest of John’s life letting the rivers of living water flow there for 54 years in all. John said: “The Lord is a fountain of life, of strength, of grace and comfort.”

Here’s one of John’s prayers: “O blessed Jesus, Your love is wonderful! It is the admiration, joy and song of glorified saints. The experimental sense of Your love on earth sweetens the bitterness of life and disarms death of all its terrors!”

Here is how John taught people to stay strong in the love of God: “Love to Jesus is maintained and continued in its warmth and fervor – by frequent meditation on His adorable person, His dying love, and His infinite excellence and preciousness. If we lose sight of Jesus as the spring of all our happiness, and of His ineffable glories, the fervency of our love for Him will be abated.”

Beyond sermon-hearing to Spirit-hearing

Christ experienced is much more powerful than Christ explained. The “let the preacher do it” mentality has crippled contemporary Christianity. However, Jesus never said: “Whoever has ears, let them hear what the preacher says.” (He said, “Let them hear what the Spirit says.”)

If church would teach Spirit-hearing rather than sermon-hearing, it would transform the world! Sermon-hearing can give you a weekly heads-up, but Spirit-hearing gets your continually heart fired up.

“Today’s sermon” is usually tomorrow’s amnesia. And what good is a sermon heard if you don’t do the word? A sermon is a preacher’s formal talk. The Spirit’s inner voice is revelation. It’s easy to hear a sermon an miss out on revelation. Try not to do that!

Today great sermons are electronically available anytime and anywhere, so why spend our time together as Christ’s body, sermon-hearing? It’s time for church to begin pioneering the ignored, 1 Corinthians 14:26, alternative to sermon-hearing!

Church is about sermon-hearing — showing up, sitting passively, and going home after enduring till the end. Early in its history church substituted a sermon for the Spirit’s spontaneity.  However, look at the Great Commission. Christians are called to preach the Gospel; not to listen to sermons. Perhaps we could go beyond sermon-hearing and meet to practice praying, testifying, teaching, and our spiritual gifts.

Sermon-hearing is informational. Holy-Spirit-hearing is transformational! Go beyond sermon-hearing to Spirit-hearing–listen to and obey the inner promptings of the risen Jesus!

Sermon-hearing hears what a preacher says. Sprit-hearing hears what the Holy Spirit says. They are not the same thing!

Sermon-hearing continually instructs people, but doesn’t hold them accountable (or help them) to carry out the instructions. A sermon a week often makes Christians passive and weak. (Compare contemporary sermon-hearers to 1st century believers.)

Creating sermon-hearers is easy. Making disciples is much more complicated. Acts 2:42 says early Christians “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine.” (“Doers of the word” not just sermon-hearers.)

Sermon-hearers are the most underutilized human resources on the planet–sitting and listening when we could be changing the world. Perpetual sermon-hearing seems to produce a lot more boredom and passivity than it produces spiritual growth.

In some ways sermon-hearing is like inoculation. It can expose us to just enough Christianity that we build up resistance to it. Christians miss out on so much because we have been trained to trust in one-man sermons rather than the Spirit’s presence.

No sermon can ever determine your relationship with God. That’s up to you! Jesus is speaking directly to you. You don’t need to go through a preacher to hear Him!

Sermon-hearing requires no thought, no action, no obedience, no response. It’s totally passive. It’s much easier to get bored and to nod off when you’re hearing a sermon than when you’re doing the word! I’ve always preferred reading the Bible for myself and directly interacting with Jesus, much more than sermon-hearing.

People learn to pray by praying together more than by hearing a sermon about prayer. People get to know the risen Jesus by directly listening to and obeying Him, more than by sermon-hearing.

Is there anywhere in the Bible that tells Christians to listen to a weekly sermon? I can’t find it. It is much easier to be a sermon-hearer than it is to be a Christ-follower.

Daily dare to let the Holy Spirit weed-eat your heart and cut down anything ungodly. Then the fruit of the Spirit will flourish. God’s love ≠ God’s approval of wrongdoing.

The body of Christ is a collaborative community of collectively hearing from and obeying the Holy Spirit. All Christians are to be functioning parts of the body of Christ and need to both minister to others and to receive ministry. To regiment and program Christianity is to unplug it from the Spirit. Love’s not a program, it’s from the heart!

Christianity isn’t about how much you know; but about how freely you flow with the Holy Spirit. Too many Christians live in the ebb while missing out on the flow of the Spirit!

The best worship CD is Christ’s Dominion — to let the living Jesus dominate and direct us when we gather in His name! Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.”

“There is a fine line between a long sermon and a hostage situation.” –from a cartoon I saw.

[image error]

Dare to lovingly pray for Christians you disagree with

Should we pray for Christian groups that hold beliefs that we disagree with and/or that do things we don’t approve of? Jesus did. In John 17, Jesus didn’t just pray for His first disciples, “but for them also who shall believe on Me through their word; that they all may be one.”

To me, that means all true Christ-followers, in all time periods, in all nations, and in all Christian groups. Perhaps you and I also should pray for all Christians (and Christian groups), too. God wants to reach the nations. I believe that He also wants to reach the denominations.

In Luke 6:28, Jesus told His disciples to: “Bless them that curse you, and pray for them who despitefully use you.” If we are commanded to do that, surely we can pray for other Christians. (Those who have ever been hurt by church know that Christians are sometimes the ones who despitefully use us.)

The book of James tells Christians to, “pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Of course we can pray for individuals, but we can also pray for groups of Christians other than our own.

Here’s how Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians: “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him: the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, and what is the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.”

So how can we pray for the Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Orthodox, house churches, Pentecostals, megachurch attendees, Anglicans/Episcopalians, charismatics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Dones, nondenominational, and thousands of other Christian groups? Here’s a sample prayer we could use:

Father, I ask You to bless the (fill in the specific name a Christian group here). I pray that You will give them Your wisdom and supernatural revelation through Jesus. Enlighten the eyes of their understanding. Let them know and experience the hope that Christ has called them to, the inheritance that He has given them, and the exceeding greatness of His power in them.

Father, let them have the unity of the Spirit among themselves and with other Christians. May they deeply love one another and all other Christ-followers, so that the world will know that You are from the Father.

May they have a harvest of souls in their midst. Bring their nominal and/or non-born-again members and attendees to full salvation and transformation through Christ. And use them to bring multitudes of people, who have ignored or rejected Christ, to repentance and freedom in Jesus.

Fill them with your Spirit. Give them all a supernatural love for You and an all consuming passion to follow and obey Jesus every day.

Empower them to live godly lives. Renew their minds and keep them from being conformed to the world.

I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.