Steve Simms's Blog, page 86

Enough desire-driven Christianity, it’s time to be Spirit-led!

Desire-governed people are hostile when they don’t get what they want. They are dragged along and controlled by compelling cravings and rebellious compulsions.

Desire-governed minds do whatever they want. Spirit-governed minds obey the risen Jesus.

Spirit-governed governed people overflow with inner peace. They soar in the wind of God’s Spirit as they ever surrender to and submit to the realm of the resurrected Jesus.

When sex is presented as a show and a spectacle, as something to boast and be proud about, people become desire-driven and the heart-felt sensitivity, compassion, and commitment that make it special are stolen.

Biblical beliefs without biblical experiences are incomplete. Christians today need to be able to say, “This (what we’re now experiencing) is that (the Spirit-led experiences taught in the Bible).” See Acts 2. If Christians would listen more to God’s invisible teachers, the Holy Spirit and their conscience, and daily read the Bible with an open heart, they wouldn’t feel so dependent on religious teachers and preachers.

When Christians won’t let Jesus be the active leader when we gather in His name, we’re denying the reality of His presence by putting a pastor and a program in Christ’s rightful place. A pastor’s sermon is a poor substitute for the presence and power of the risen Jesus!

No person should usurp Christ’s authority in a Christian meeting and replace Him as the literal Head. When a meeting is said to be Christian it should be led and controlled by the risen Jesus and not by anyone else!

If you honestly look at the deteriorating condition of Christianity today, it becomes obvious that sermons and human controlled church services are not working. Sermons are like training wheels. They should proclaim the living Jesus, train people to continually obey Him, and then be set aside.

It never ceases to amaze me that Christians seem to prefer hearing weekly lectures about Jesus over daily experiencing His presence. Nobody wants to hear a weekly lecture about their spouse. They’d rather just live their life with them. Jesus is my heavenly spouse. Living my life with Him is what Christianity is all about, not hearing Sunday sermons. We need to talk about and obey Jesus, not just hear talks about Him.

If a coffee shop
Would suddenly stop
Serving true coffee
And just be a spot
Where people stop
To hear talks
About the goodness
Of drinking coffee
It would not
Be a genuine
Coffee shop.
"O taste and see
That the Lord is good!"A weekly talk
About water
Can make you think
But it can't
Make you drink.If you lecture
About food
But don't let
People eat
They'll be informed
But lack the joy
Of a good mood,
And when hunger comes
They'll come unglued.[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-36970" />Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

God’s stream of consciousness & flow of Bible verses

These thoughts were spontaneously flowing out of me when I woke up this morning:

* Count on Jesus don’t just collect information about Him.

* Depend on Jesus don’t just describe Him.

* Trust in Jesus don’t just talk about Him.

* Rely on Jesus don’t just respect Him.

* Bank on Jesus don’t just believe that He exists.

* Demonstrate daily faith in Jesus don’t just decide to call yourself a Christian.

* Surrender your heart to Jesus don’t just go through the motion of devotion.

* To be ruled by sin is to be ruined by sin.

* Fight to always keep your focus on Jesus don’t just attend a nice church.

Bible verses zoomed from people’s hearts. I recently lead a Zoom group of 14 people and had the experiencing of people letting Scriptures flow. I reminded the group that Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would bring the things that He told them to their remembrance.” I told them that Jesus has spoken to them through the Bible and that if we all ask the Holy Spirit to remind us, He will bring Scriptures to our mind. I then had everybody pray out loud after me as we asked God to remind us of Bible verses. Then I asked everybody to share with the group whatever Scriptures came to their mind. Bible verses began to flow like a surging river filled with sensitivity and power. Some of us even had tears in our eyes as we spoke the verses that came to us. It was amazing! Gather with one or more people and try it for yourself!

Church too often is a deviation from the priesthood of the believer (the kingdom of priests). It ignores the 50-plus “one another commands” in the New Testament by scooping up all the ministry in a local gathering of the body of Christ and removing it from ordinary people. Then it places all the ministry in the hands of one solitary pastor.

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The joy of “aha” moments!

I woke up this morning thinking about beliefs verses heart “ahas” and those thoughts assembled like this:

Christianity
Without heart “ahas”
Is dead religion.

Where there are no
Active heart “ahas”
People perish
From a lack of hope.

Beliefs
Without heart “ahas”
Are doctrine.

Information
Without heart “ahas”
Is data.

Celebration
Without heart “ahas”
Is hype.

Heart “ahas” transform
Religious “yeah, yeah, yeah,”
Into glorious
“Yes! Yes! Yes!

The first time
I heard people testify
About the living Jesus
My heart went “aha”
And I’ve never
Been the same.

Hungry for more “ahas”
I read a book
Full of testimonies
About Jesus Christ
And reading the Bible
With a hungry heart
Caused many more “ahas”
To pop in me
Like popcorn.
I read it daily
For ever more “ahas.”

I search for people
Who talk about Jesus
Like He is alive
And their true stories
Keep the heart “ahas”
Flowing from within me.

Now my life overflows
With thrilling “ahas.”
It dances with revelation
That keeps my spirit
At a high elevation
To experience
On going glimpses
Of God’s glory.

Testify to triumph. Tell what Jesus is saying and doing. Spread His victory everywhere! Romans 12:11. Christians too often want to structure, formalize, and institutionalize community, but for community to be genuine it must be built on heart-felt relationships, not on programs.

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Experience the reality of reminders from God’s Spirit

Jesus told His disciples that the Holy Spirit will remind them of what He said. If you have ever read from the Bible, ask the Holy Spirit to remind you of what you read. Then notice which Scriptures come into your head. That’s God’s Spirit speaking to you.

This is also a powerful thing to do with a group of Christ-followers and then let them share out loud the Bible verses that come to them. Some people will be visible moved by the word of God and the group will be collectively aware of His presence.

When the Scriptures stop coming ask if anyone feels led to pray about the verses they have heard. Then Scripture inspired prayer will fill the gathering.

I did this with a group of believers on Zoom yesterday and this morning I’m still basking in the glory of it. Do it today. You don’t need a crowd. You can even do this with one or two other people (in person, on the phone, or on Zoom).

(If you want someone to experience this with, I’m available. Just leave a comment and tell me how I can contact you so that we can set it up.)

Without ongoing active animation by and continual close connection to the inner life of the rivers of God’s Spirit, a human soul is homeless, helpless, broke, and broken. It might outwardly appear fine but inwardly it is bankrupt and empty. It is running on the fumes of pride and denial, overcome with debts it can never repay, and often unaware that it desperately needs a bailout from its hopeless situation. A soul that won’t awaken to its huge need for never-ending unconditional surrender to the living Jesus will miss out on the world’s greatest news–“Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Every day, with an open heart, read the Book that can awaken your soul to Christ’s inner animation and His “joy unspeakable and full of glory.”

Christians are called to seek an ever-stronger relationship with the risen Jesus by making Him our literal Head, Lord, and Master by surrendering our will to His in all of our day-to-day decisions and choices.”

Christ’s town hall meeting
Lets God’s wind freely blow
And His rivers flow
So His people will grow
Beyond what they know
And be Spirit-led
And inwardly fed
With Jesus as their Head

Too much administration
Even in a Christian congregation
Will cause people to close their heart
And merely coexist in isolation.

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Are we barking up the wrong tree?

Depending on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil rejects the humility that can receive direct supernatural revelation of God’s love, mercy, and grace and replaces it with the pride of human evaluation and self-protection.

The book of Revelation reveals three weapons for overcoming the enemy’s attempts to keep us eating from the wrong tree and entrapped by guilt and sin. The three spiritual weapons that will build us together in Christ on the rock of direct, personal revelation from the living God are:

1) Continually relying on Christ’s blood alone for forgiveness and freedom from guilt and sin.
2) Telling people how Christ has forgiven us and is freeing us from guilt and sin by His blood.
3) Abandoning self-protection and fear when we are faced with feelings of rejection, humiliation, persecution, and even of being threatened by death.

“They overcame him (the devil) by the blood of the Lamb (Jesus the Christ, the Creator made flesh and dwelling among us) and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.” –Revelation 12:11 (NKJV)

(Here’s a testimony: I woke up this morning with these 3 revelations running through my spirit. Then I went to a blog I frequent, Wake-Up Call and they were a great match for today’s content.)

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Beyond Easy Listening Christianity

Easy listening music is defined as: “a type of music that is not complicated, serious, or difficult.” That sounds like easy listening Christianity.

Easy listening
In a congregation
To a Sunday talk
Seldom brings genuine
Heart transformation,
But personal revelation
From the risen Jesus
Will directly change
Your inner situation.
Open your heart to hear
Jesus the Christ today!

Easy listening sermons seldom pop anybody’s bubble, rock anyone’s boat, or save someone’s soul. They just keep the same ole rhythm and blues rolling along. They say soothing sentences that won’t shake up a lost soul.

Easy listening sermons are quiet, agreeable talks that don’t require much of your attention. They sift through the Gospel and soften it so they can shelter people from the life-shaking sound of God’s voice.

Easy listening Christianity is sweet and soothing and never intruding. It’s polished and packaged to be palatable for passive people. Easy listening Christianity is an undemanding backdrop and mood setter that makes people feel comfortable about their spiritual condition without feeling a need to do anything about it.

Easy listening should be a genre of music, not a format for church. When Christianity embraced the easy listening Sunday morning format it shifted from being Spirit-led to public opinion driven.

For church to be instrumental in changing people’s hearts, it needs to be much more than a weekly, easy listening sermon. It needs to be raw, real, and Spirit-led! If we aren’t willing to listen to and be led by God’s Spirit when we gather with brothers and sisters in Christ, we won’t have the courage to listen and be led by the Spirit when we are around anybody else.

Most Sunday morning church sounds are easy listening. There’s rarely an electrifying bridge to effectively rock and roll a stoney heart. (Some people even make a playlist of their favorite easy listening sermons.)

The Bible isn’t easy listening. That’s why many people avoid reading it or hearing what it says. If you want people to hear the Gospel, you must first capture their attention. The Bible way is not to bore people with the Gospel but to transform them with it! Easy listening Christianity doesn’t do that.

Do you want more than easy listening? Try this: When you are truly in Christ, you remain in the world but are no longer of the world. In Him you live and move and have your being. Although you reside physically in the world, you are called to abide in the living Jesus and in every issue to be always on His side, not the popular side, even when it makes people decide to reject you. To be in Christ is to be an outsider–a stranger and pilgrim who abstains from the spirit of the world–a citizen of the kingdom of God, seated with Jesus in heavenly places.

Words that say
All is well
Clear the way
That leads to?

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Be ware of religious lip-sync

Giving God
Some lip-sync
And a quick wink
Shows that we lack
A strong heart-link
With Jesus the Christ.

When our heart
Is out of sync
With the living Jesus
And our life
Is going down the sink,
It won’t help us
To merely lip-sync
Nice religious words.

To many Christians lip-sync their faith, but Jesus calls us to the real deal! Christian lip-syncing is far from the kingdom of God.

When Christianity sinks into simply lip-syncing praise lyrics, it has no power to change lives. Let Jesus sync your heart to His. Praise and worship music should never be lip-sync songs!

Jesus doesn’t like religious lip-sync–moving your lips with words about the Lord without God’s praise overflowing from deep within your heart. Jesus said: “You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.'”

Let the Bible seek deep into your heart. Don’t just lip-sync it.

A lip-synced sermon that comes from the mind instead of overflowing from the heart is never very powerful. Church shouldn’t be a lip-sync competition about who can best quote the preacher’s words and most enthusiastically praise his performance.

Impurities in our heart will cling to us forever unless we let Christ’s blood cleans us and make us holy deep inside our innermost being. Go beyond lip-sync and be made whole!

A church needs more
Than a minister
Who lip-syncs like a pro.
It needs hungry hearts
That want to grow
Closer to the risen Jesus,
Not just to know
More data about Him.

A church service
Shouldn’t be lip service.
It should avoid
The lip-sync stink.

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Dead wirters’ books (and their lively work in my heart)

I love books, especially those written through the centuries by men and women of God whose words burn in my heart. God has led me to hundreds of such books by Christ-followers who have been promoted to the glories of Heaven. I walk into a bookstore, a library, or even a yard sale and a book shouts my name. I take it home and reading it changes my life!

It’s hard to let books like that go, so I watched my book collection grow and grow. And I treasured it. But one day God told me to let it go. So, finally I gave it to a Christian ministry, and they said they would send it to Christian leaders in a poor country. Many months later I was in their headquarters, and I asked someone if they had shipped the books that I gave them. This person said he thought that they were still in a closet down the hall. I opened the closet door and there were my former books dumped in a big pile, tattered and broken. I was disappointed that their journey had ended in such a way. Then I heard God say, “What those books have done and worked in you will never go away.”

My heart still burns with their words and as time goes by God continues to bring more books from saints gone on, for me to soak up in my spirit. I love words from my brothers and sisters in the past that match what God is saying and doing in me and inspire me to be “useless before God” and to let Him have His way.

God shows me His way through the greatest book of all. I love it so much I rarely miss a day of partaking of its glory, insight, and delight–the book of many writers but one author. God’s Spirit, “The Comforter,” continually heals my heart when I absorb the living words within it covers.

If you’re convinced
You need a zone
To find comfort,
You’ve missed the point
Of God’s Spirit,
“The Comforter.”
Holy Spirit,
Be my comfort!

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Following the Head of Christ’s body

Jesus Christ is able to be the present, living, and active Lord, King, Leader, and Director of HIs followers as they gather in His name to each one listen to and obey Him. May we surrender all human control to the eternally resurrected Jesus so that He can be gloriously revealed in our midst to be the literal Head of His body and not just a figurehead.

(I witnessed this happening at the Asbury awakening. Lord, let it continue in gatherings of Christ-followers around the world!)

When Christians gather
In Jesus’ name
And begin to train
To listen to Him
And let Him lead,
He begins to reign
And rule among them.

To be Spirit-led
Is to let Jesus
Be your living Head.
He’s no longer dead.
You’ve read what He said.
Now it’s time to do
What He says to you.

To be asleep is to be without conscience awareness. Wake up to conscious awareness of the risen Jesus.

John 3:16 is the loving call of the God of both mercy and justice for those who have rejected His love and chosen to rebel against Him to allow Him to rescue them from the dreadful consequences of their choices and actions through His substitutionary atonement. Whosoever will, let them come to Jesus and be forgiven, rescued, and restored to harmony with God. Lord, have mercy on me a sinner! The theme of God wanting to rescue people from their rebellion by offering mercy and grace is woven throughout the Bible.

Scripture teaches that God’s omnipotence doesn’t override our free will and make us robots. His love and grace beckon us to lay aside our rebellion and submit to His will, but He doesn’t force our obedience. Human free will is not stronger than God. It is a gift from God that we humans greatly abuse. God wants sons and daughters who return to Him of their own choice (like the prodigal son), not as robots who He forces to love Him.

That Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God made atoning sacrifice for humanity is a major theme of the New Testament and was foreshadowed throughout the Old Testament. My heart overflows with gratitude for His substitutionary atonement!

Disagreeing with someone’s belief system is far from judging them or being unloving. Several people who love me disagree with some of my views, beliefs, and lifestyle choices. I would never accuse them of judging me.

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Experiencing the joy of direct inner government by God

The kingdom of God is government by God not by people, for God not for people, and of God not of people. It’s about God’s purposes, not ours. It’s His kingdom, not ours. You can hide from human government, but you can’t hide from the kingdom of God. He knows everything that you think and do.

The kingdom of God is the direct government of God that bypasses human leaders, hierarchies, and political systems. It happens unobserved because “the kingdom of God is within you.” When Christ-followers allow King Jesus to actually rule and direct them from within then they begin to experience the present-day leading of the Holy Spirit as “Christ in you, the hope of glory,” and their citizenship in God’s kingdom becomes a practical reality, not just a theological concept.

The kingdom (direct government) of God must be established inside of you. Every choice you make, every action you take, brings you closer to the direct government (kingdom) of God or leads you away from it. When the kingdom (government) of God is present in a human heart there is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

To experience the direct, inner government of God requires that we cultivate an honest, tender, open, submissive, humble, vulnerable, and compassionate heart that is willing to continually and freely receive God’s grace and correction. Without that kind of heart, we can experience religion, but we will be far from the kingdom of God.

Direct government by God and government by self cannot both be in control of a human heart at the same moment. The calling on a Christian is to decrease the influence of self and to increase God’s direct government of all their thoughts, feelings, opinions, and desires — to obey King Jesus more and more and king-self less and less. Christians are called out of the kingdom of self-focus and into the kingdom (direct inner government) of God.

Self-focus will always resist the direct, inner government of God. To experience the kingdom of God, self-focus must be abandoned. You were born to be a “supernaturalized” citizen of the kingdom of God voluntarily living under His direct inner rule, not to be ensnared and abused by the kingdom of darkness determining your thoughts, feelings, and desires.

God’s grace empowers us and invites us to voluntarily submit to His direct moment-by-moment government of our life. God doesn’t force us to obey Him against our will. Because in the direct government of God (His kingdom of light) there’s no way to cover up truth, human nature is to avoid the kingdom of God. For the kingdom of God to reign within, the strongholds, imaginations, and desires of self must be cast down and brought into obedience to Christ Jesus.

When self rules, bondage and misery reign within even when self lies and denies that they exist. The direct government of God occurs within you. It doesn’t come from outward authorities. When the direct government of God is allowed to take charge of a human heart, Jesus calms the inner storms and peaceful rivers flow.

People can’t be forced to obey God. Human political systems can’t be the kingdom of God, but they can maintain social order while God builds His kingdom inside human hearts.

“Don’t forsake the assembling of yourselves together,” means don’t avoid opening your heart to Jesus as you hang out and interact by God’s Spirit with other Christ-followers as Christ’s ekklesia (town hall meeting).

Christ’s ekklesia is called out of systems of human hierarchy to function in obedience to His active Headship and direction and thereby manifest the kingdom of God. When Christianity became churchish it lost the freedom of Spirit-led, heart-felt spontaneity that was characteristic of the earliest Christ-followers who met like the ancient Greek town hall meeting called ekklesia as described in 1 Corinthians 14:26.

The direct inner government of God is available to you. Are you available to the direct inner government of God?

For God’s kingdom to come your kingdom needs to go. There’s only room for one king inside of you!

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