Steve Simms's Blog, page 64
January 30, 2024
Why do I complain about church?
View all responsesI frequently express dissatisfaction with church. I don’t do it to irritate people (even though people let me know that it does irritate them). I do it because the risen Jesus is so much more stupendous than a structured, human-controlled Sunday religious service can convey. He’s available 24/7/365 (not just an hour a week)! The living Jesus is heart-inspiring, soul-healing, bondage-breaking, guilt-removing, ever-present eternal love. He’s not stuck on a religious stage, confined to a church building, or hidden in ancient history.
I complain about programmed church services because I believe that they get people’s eyes off of the living present Jesus and fix them on religious pageantry or hype, on a preacher, on a program, and on a building. To me, Jesus is more real than the laptop I am typing on. I sense His presence as these unpremeditated, unfiltered words flow from my fingers. (I’ve been through several computers, but the risen Jesus never leaves me or forsakes me.)
I seldom see the spontaneous overflowing joy of Jesus and the exuberant Spirit-sparked rejoicing of His early followers in church services. But I do see sleepy boredom, comfortable routine, and business as usual. I believe that Christianity is supposed to be far more powerful and life-changing than the way it’s usually presented. That’s why I complain about church!
I’m not alone. Jesus said: “’These people honor Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.”
Criticizing formalized religion is an important part of Judeo-Christian heritage. The Old Testament prophets did it. Jesus did it. The Apostles did it. The Reformers did it. Numerous people lost to history also did it.
Before I got out of bed this morning, these thoughts formed in my mind and heart:
“The body of Christ
Is called to be
A Spirit-led
Community
Of open hearts
Embracing the unity
And humility
Of compassionate
Honesty.
(James 5:16.)”
“The body of Christ is called to be a kingdom of priests who walk in the light speaking the truth in love as they overflow with the fruit and the gifts of God’s Spirit and compassionately encourage, exhort, teach, pray for, serve, and support one another.”
These thoughts came to me yesterday:
“When we realize that we think we know a lot that we don’t know, we become willing to open our mind and heart to Christ’s supernatural knowledge and then we begin to know as we are known. However, focusing on our feelings and desires leads to ignoring logic, kindness, compassion, honesty, humility, and our conscience.”
“Christianity’s about
Laying down our ego
And showing Christ’s love.
It’s not about
Push and shove.”
January 29, 2024
Christians are called to internalize Christ, not to institutionalize Him.
Without ongoing awareness of and attunement to the presence of “Christ in you,” Christians live as if Jesus is located some other place. That’s why we feel like we need another authority figure to instruct us and a religious structure to organize us. We become dependent on a weekly meeting and mostly ignore that Jesus is alive and available to lead, empower, and comfort us day and night. Christians are called to internalize Christ, not to institutionalize Him.
Awake o sleeper.
Jesus is a Keeper.
Keep Him active
In your heart.
Let Him keep you
Enthralled by
His presence.
That’s the essence
Of walking by faith.
Christians love
To organize,
Systematize,
Institutionalize,
And formalize
The faith.
If we would realize
That Jesus is alive,
We could internalize
His presence
And revitalize
Our heart.
“Christ in you,
The hope of glory.”
Be Spirit-led.
Let Jesus be
Your living Head
And direct you
In all you do.
Christians can gather and be led by God’s Spirit without setting it up and organizing it as an institutional church. Jesus, Himself, present and active today, is very capable of building His body without a human run religious organization. We need to let Him build His “ekklesia” — the name of the participatory town hall meeting in ancient Greek cities where anyone present could speak.
When you read about the 5-fold giftings in the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:11-13), they are supposed to train the saints (Christ-followers) to do the work of the ministry. They’re not to supposed to control the saints and make them dependent on a religious organization that makes them a passive audience for spoon-fed Bible lessons every Sunday.
Our greatest enemies are invisible. Human enemies can kill our body, but demons can depress and consume our soul with their tormenting and lying thoughts, feelings, images, and desires. We need God’s supernatural revelation so we can inwardly behold and daily surrender to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Then we will be divinely empowered to effectively win the deeper spiritual conflict as we fight to continually experience the deliverance of HIs Lordship as people who are literally led by His Spirit as children of God (Romans 8:14). Notifications on your conscience let you know that you have messages from God, but it’s easy to ignore them and shut your conscience down.
I don’t visualize Jesus. When I interact with Jesus, I have such a strong sense of His presence (both within and around me) that I have no need to picture Him in my mind.
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I’d thank the person who bought me the ticket.
View all responsesThe odds are stacked and packed against winning the lottery. You might win a little bit of seed money here and there, enough get you hooked into the deceptive hope of hundreds of millions of dollars. However, if you don’t grasp the gigantic odds against winning such a cash out on life, you need to shut down your emotional lust for free, sudden, and extreme wealth and rationally study statistics.
I bet no money on the lottery. If I ever win the big blast of a billion bucks (before taxes), I’ll thank the person who bought the ticket and put my name on it.
Then I’ll pay the taxes and probably complain that one government takes a third of the free wealth that another government gave me. I’d like to think that I’d give the rest away to worthy causes, but I’d sure be tempted to spend a lot of it lavishly on myself and hoard and invest the rest.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” I struggle not to not get lovingly attached to a little money, so I’m glad I don’t have to be tempted and distracted by a Lotto grand prize!
Decades ago, I found “the pearl of great price” — the kingdom/government of God over my heart and life and the free forgiveness and healing of Christ’s mercy and grace. Nothing else I could ever win can compare to “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
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Books That Inspire Kindness And Compassion
View all responsesO how humanity needs books (and other media) that touch the heart and inspire kindness and compassion. Those are the books I want to read. I seek them out and devour them. Decades of reading books like that help fill my mind with original positive thoughts that rise up from within me. Here are some of the most recent ones:
The media you use
Can harden your heart
Or make you empathetic.
You get to choose.
There’s more than enough pain in this world. Words and actions that create even more pain aren’t helpful! Caring is courageous but apathy is contagious and causes caring to curl up and hide away.
Kindness and anger cannot long coexist. One will drive the other out of your mind and heart.
A little kindness is a big deal. Go big! Ongoing anguish is common; ongoing empathy is rare.
Without an open caring heart human intelligence is merely information processing. Data sorting can never satisfy your inner longings. Humbly connecting heart-to-heart with other people is a powerful, yet underutilized, medicine.
Instead of looking at what someone says or does, look at how they are struggling and suffering. Then you will feel compassion instead of anger. A tender heart is strong enough to deeply care about other people. A closed heart is too weak to deeply care.
When you disagree with people, they won’t hear your arguments or anger, but they will hear your compassion. Show kindness. When people talk, listen with compassion. It will shock them and soften their heart toward you.
It’s much easier to be kind to people when you let your heart be touched by their pain. When a wounded person strikes out at you, inflicting more pain will only make things worse.
No one will pay attention to your arguments if they think you are hostile toward them. Vulnerability gives birth to compassion. Being aware of your own pain helps you care about the pain of others.
Compassion isn’t weakness.
It’s courage.
Be courageous!
Empathize
Until you realize
A caring heart
Is life’s greatest prize.
I want my thoughts
To be made
Of beautiful words.
When ugly words
Try to invade
I reject their parade.
The human heart is made
For a love that grows
Beyond what the mind knows
And prepares the way
For agape,
God’s compassion
In selfless action.
Heartfelt prayer
Will help you care
And even see
Your enemies
With empathy.
The world needs people who listen to others, share their pain, speak the truth, and boldly demonstrate Christ’s love to them. Be one.
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My Parents’ Tradition of Not Going to Church
View all responsesI grew up in a place and time called the Bible Belt where the majority of people had a family tradition of going to church, but my parents didn’t. Adults would often ask them, “Where do you go to church?” but they didn’t. Sometimes kids would ask me that question and I would be embarrassed to admit I didn’t go to church anywhere.
The odd thing was that I believed in God and talked to Him every night for as long as I could remember. I wanted my family to attend church and would beg my parents for us to all go. Finally, when I was 10 or so, they started regularly attending a church. I was shocked. The Sunday service was boring, and everybody acted like God was a million miles away, but now I was stuck attending a meeting that made me feel further away from God. (Once there was a quick small earthquake during church that didn’t cause any damage, but a lot of the attendees ran out of the building and didn’t come back. Meanwhile, the preacher just kept on with the religious program.)
When I went to college I stopped going to church. It was there that I met some students who were thrilled about Jesus and through their testimonies I encountered and grew to know Christ personally living and working inside of me. Decades later I’m stilling enjoying and seeking to follow and obey the living Jesus every day!
After meeting the risen Jesus I tried to go to church but it always felt like a formalized step-down from my daily personal relationship with Him. I eventually went to seminary and became a preacher thinking I could help lead a church to lay down formalism and human programming and train people to follow and obey the living Jesus instead of just passively hearing a sermon.
I read a blog post this morning that said that Jesus “wants nothing to do with the church industrial complex—ancient or present-day.” After decades of trying to compliantly fit into church and other times of trying to reform it from within, I’ve finally moved beyond it and focused instead on listening to and being led by God Spirit instead of by religious formalism. I finally laid down the tradition of going to an institutional church.
Here’s my alternative. I stopped calling the body of Christ the church and shifted to the word Jesus used. Church is a religious organization that claims to be based on the Bible. However, if Jesus “wants nothing to do with the church industrial complex–ancient or present-day,” it must not be what He said He is building.
The word Jesus is quoted as using in Matthew 16 is: “I will build My ‘ekklesia.’” Ekklesia is the proper name of the participatory town hall meeting in ancient Greek cities where anyone present could share what was on their heart. It was a participatory, interactive gathering, not a classroom setting. By building His ekklesia Jesus wants to create an environment where people can actually hear, see, and personally experience God’s Spirit working in and through each another, not just hear a lecture about religion.
Now I look for opportunities to hang out with other Christ-followers in an environment where we are free to openly pray together and share with each other what Jesus is saying and doing in our lives. I find such opportunities several times a week in small groups (of me and one or more other people). We sometimes meet in person, sometimes on the phone, and sometimes on the internet. In such an environment I’m thrilled to see Jesus living and working in and through my brothers and sisters in Christ. The tradition of not attending formal religious churches has set me free to follow and obey Jesus and help other people do so as well.
People matter.
Treat them well.
When you disagree
Do it kindly,
With empathy,
And their heart
Will open.
And soon you’ll see
Your shared humanity.
January 25, 2024
Go To Hope!
View all responsesLeisure time is a great opportunity to divert your focus away from stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and despair. There are so many enjoyable activities that can be diversions from the inner pain we carry day by day. However, I’ve discovered that it’s important that I avoid diversions that cause me to feel guilty, because even though they give some short-term relief, they add to my long-term stress and despair and can easily become addictions that control my life. However:
When I fix my sight
On God’s insight
My heart overflows
With great delight
And fear takes flight.
Drinking old wine spoils the taste of new wine and causes people to say, “The old is better.” But is it? Taste can be deceptive. Here’s some insight into how a strange activity, fasting, can actually lead to joy.
Perhaps fasting helps us go beyond routine religion and to acquire a taste for the Spirit’s new wine. When we deny ourselves food so we can focus intently on praying and seeking God, we realize that the old wine of religion and tradition offers little comfort during our body’s desperate cry for food. Routine religion’s lack of supernatural power and life-changing comfort may be why present-day believers in affluent countries struggle so much with moderate, healthy eating.
When it comes to our appetite for food, it’s just us and Jesus. The act of fasting makes us desperate for His presence and supernatural comfort, so if we stick with it, we begin to cry out in prayer like never before. We realize, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick,” (verse 31) and that because we are not yet fully aligned with God, we are still battling spiritual sickness. We become aware that Jesus in His love for us is calling us to ongoing repentance (verse 32) and to always seek first His kingdom and His righteousness.
When that realization and desperation burns in our heart it causes us to more deeply surrender to the risen Jesus. Then we more fully receive and embrace God’s Spirit living and working inside of us — changing us from glory to glory and giving us an overwhelming hunger and thirst for the righteousness of Christ’s new wine.
Step out in faith.
Go to hope.
Show love.
“Christ in you,
The hope of glory.”
January 24, 2024
A Wake-Up Call For Y’all
View all responsesThere’s a blog I read daily. It’s called “Wake-Up Call.” It’s published by a group called Seedbed that is headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee and is very close to my home in Nashville. However, I’ve never gotten around to visiting Seedbed’s headquarters in person.
Today’s post resonates with the thoughts that were developing within me this morning as I stayed in bed and paid attention to them. The thoughts didn’t seem to be Christ focused. I kept trying to redirect them in a more spiritual direction, but they persisted in what appeared to me to be a political track, where I didn’t want to go. Finally, I surrendered. I got up and posted them on Facebook. Here they are:
“Cruelty and hate
Have never made
A country great.”
“If we make America hate again, we will push it into uncontrolled cruelty, violence, and self-destruction. Is that what we want?”
I don’t like being controversial and getting hostile feedback from people, but I feel compelled from within to pass on what occurs to me. As I wondered about those thoughts I came to today’s Wake-Up Call thinking that there’s no way those thoughts will be aligned with it (as my early morning thoughts frequently are). However, they did match today’s Wake-Up Call about the attitude of the Pharisees that too many Christians are embracing today. After reading it, these thoughts came to me:
“You can’t force people to be honest, kind, and un-self-focused. Without a change of heart, they’ll just rebel.”
“Forced compliance
Leads to defiance.
Without reliance
On heart-felt kindness
We’ll stay stuck
In cruel blindness
And our fate
Will be far from great.”
“People of faith need to cultivate their awareness of the presence of God to the point that they begin to be inwardly led by His Spirit and thus demonstrate to other people that the risen Jesus is also available to heal and reveal Himself in and through them as well.”
“The snooze alarm can be dangerous, but fasting and the hunger that it produces within us is a powerful tool to help us cultivate our personal awareness of ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory.’”
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Lines That Roar From Within Me
If you think that you have all of Jesus that you need, you don’t! Seek Him.
Remember and openly declare what Jesus has done in you and for you!
I stay excited about life because of what Jesus has done and is doing in me!
If you’re not as close to Jesus as you once were, you’ve drifted away. Return!
I’ve noticed that people who think that they’re good people do bad things.
No one is a “good person.” There’s a mixture of good and bad in all of us.
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View all responsesThere’s nothing like worshipping God in Spirit and in truth. I love to put on heart-felt worship music and pour my heart out in adoration to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as I sing along. I’m thrilled when I pray in tongues (languages that I don’t know) and experience God’s Spirit flowing from deep within me like rivers of living water. I’m excited when I gather with other passionate Christ-followers and together we listen to the Holy Spirit and then each one say and do what the Spirit prompts us to. I love to listen to God’s still small voice speaking inside of me, then writing what I hear and posting it on my blog, on Facebook, and on X. I really enjoy the challenge of reading the Bible with an open, humble heart while letting the words burn in my heart and then trying to live them out and obey them in my daily life. (Bonus #1) I love praying out loud over other people and being amazed at how God’s love for them pours out of my heart. I know that it is supernatural because His compassion overflows from within me even for people I’ve never met before.(Bonus #2) It fills me with great peace and joy to focus on the living, ever-present Jesus throughout the day and night and to be led by His Spirit as I experience what the Bible calls, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” When people are taught about God before they have encountered the risen Jesus Christ, they have head knowledge but don’t know how to be led by the Spirit. To be led by God’s Spirit we must be aware of, attentive to, and activated by His presence.
Let God’s Spirit prompt
(“Hear what the Spirit is saying,”)
What you do and say
(“Walk in the Spirit,”)
And soon you will stomp
(“The God of peace will soon
Crush Satan under your feet,”)
And drive fear away
(“Perfect love casts out fear,”).
January 22, 2024
Thoughts About Jesus’ Words About Fasting
The Fast Track (Matthew 6:16-18)
“When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
I’ve fasted, sometimes regularly, more often occasionally, and sometimes rarely. When I fast, I usually want to just hurry through it.
I’ve discovered that it’s hard to have a happy face when I’m hungry from fasting and while I’m trying not to look like a somber hypocrite. It’s difficult not to try to be rewarded by letting other people know that I’m dodging food for God, so that they can give me some sympathy, admiration, or encouragement as the case may be.
For some reason grooming my hair and washing my face doesn’t feel like it’s going to hide the fact that I’m fasting. Still, I know that God knows that I am trying, and He has promised a reward. Maybe that reward is the humility and brokenness that fasting brings to my awareness. Perhaps that’s what King David meant when he wrote: “I humbled myself with fasting and my prayer was genuine.” (Psalm, 35:13.) Or what James meant when he wrote: “Humble yourself before the Lord and He will lift you up.” (James 4:10.)
One other thing. I’ve discovered that I don’t get to personally know Jesus better by hearing a weekly talk about him, but by honestly opening my heart to Him. Fasting helps me do that.
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