Steve Simms's Blog, page 93
June 13, 2023
Freedom of expression
In the midst of all your troubles, pain, and suffering you have been given an amazing ability — the power to open or to shut down your heart. Choose to open your heart to love and forgiveness not to anger and bitterness. If we would express more kindness, we’d receive more kindness.
If there’s no real free will then there’s no freedom of expression or freedom of choice — only humanity’s AI mindlessly obeying IT. However when I decide to observe and use my conscious mind I’m confronted with constant choices to make. To proclaim freedom of choice but not believe in human free will is hypocritical. There’s no freedom of expression without free will.
God offers a beautiful destiny to all people — a destiny paid for through the blood of Jesus. He has given people the freedom to choose or to reject that beautiful destiny of an eternal loving relationship with Him. God is eternal and “knows the end from the beginning.” His foreknowledge enables Him to foresee human choices before they are made. “God is love” so He hates the choices that people make that separate them from His eternal presence and love. He seeks to draw all people unto Jesus. He has mercy and compassion on all who will choose to humble themselves to receive His mercy and the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.
To begin to experience the beauty of the best words beautifully arranged, open your heart to notice the thoughts that God expresses within you. Let Jesus make an eternal impression in your heart, and you will ever overflow with glorious expression. Being natural isn’t what it’s puffed up to be. Let the living Jesus lead, train, and empower you to be supernatural! The most important freedom of expression is the expression of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Let the risen Jesus freely flow from within you!
Open your heart to the fruit of God’s Spirit. It has no harmful side effects — only an amazing sense of blessing and contentment. All who open their heart in surrender to Jesus and trust Him with their lives are empowered to be led by the Spirit. Will you follow? John 1:12/Romans 8:14.
The leadership, presence, vitality, energy, and expressions of the Holy Spirit are essential to genuine Christianity. Christians need to go beyond quoting preachers or expressing our own opinions. We need to speak words prompted by God’s Spirit.
Institutional religion tends to make Christians robotic — following a party line and being unkind to those who disagree. God’s discipline isn’t comfortable but to refuse to accept it is to cut yourself loose from ultimate reality.
My philosophy
I don’t have to express
Emotions and desires
That cause duress
And let them oppress
My life with stress
And compel me to transgress
My conscience.
I’m free to resist them
And to deny them access
To my heart
And my free will.
I’ve learned
An amazing lesson.
I can choose to use
My freedom of expression
To resist and refute
Feelings of depression
And to refuse
To cooperate with them.
Express kindness through
All you say and do.
Then you will find
That you feel kind
And people will be kind
To you.
When I choose to make
My facial expression
Match the way
I want to feel
Eventually I will
Begin to feel
That way.
To empty your face
Of negative expressions
And replace
Them with hope
Helps you
And those who
Have to look at you.
It takes courage
To resist
Bad feelings
That persist
And to insist
That your heart
Be a place
Of purity.
Be courageous.
June 12, 2023
Pride and blame
Pride and blame blur truth. Humility and honesty clear it up. To ignore uncomfortable truth is to resist the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
Unless we let God tune our heart and keep it tuned to His will we’ll easily stray into the discord of self-focus. The more I’m aware of God’s splendorous, majestic, and grandiose identity, the less need I feel to identify myself.
Free will! If you don’t want to see what God wants to show you, He’s not going to force you to exit the darkness. To avoid uncomfortable truth is to distance yourself from God.
The more you focus on yourself, the more you blur your vision of God. Every time you make the decision to close down your heart you blur your inner vision.
When we read the Bible with an open, humble, and receptive heart and let the Holy Spirit speak within us God begins to show us His point of view. When reading the Bible makes you uncomfortable you’re on God’s Light track! Keep reading.
The Bible tells the uncomfortable truth about ancient Israel and about contemporary you. They wouldn’t hear it. Will you? To be sick while ignoring the symptoms and dodging the diagnosis isn’t wise. Let the Bible show you the symptoms and the cure for your sin.
Christ-followers are called to align our thinking and behavior with God’s point of view even when it goes against our own opinions, feelings, and desires. The more I cling to my opinions, feelings, and desires, the farther I stray from God’s.
After decades of observing church, I’ve noticed that Sunday messages prepared and delivered by a studious mind seem to lack the power to transform Christians into powerful and effective men and women of God who continually demonstrate the power and presence of the living Jesus in and through their daily life. It’s time to go beyond church as usual!
Pride, guilt, shame, and blame are symptoms of sin. Medicating, blurring, or boasting about the symptoms won’t cure the disease.
To medicate
And blur your pain
Is to abdicate
The opportunity
To receive
God’s supernatural comfort
In the midst of it.
June 11, 2023
It’s hard to follow Jesus and be morality-phobic
And obey Christ's command
In a pleasure-seeking land
If you only hear second-hand
Information about Him
Through a preacher's sermons.
Wholeheartedly seek
To hear Jesus speak
And to always be aware
Of His "still, small voice"
And His glorious presence.
Make Christ the essence
Of your daily life!Dare to say to the living Jesus:“Wash me, cleanse me.”Admit you’re not “fine.”Open your heartAnd let God’s Light shineOn the things that you hideAnd have often denied.It’s hard to be healedUnless you let it be revealedWhere you’re hurting.When Christians
Give up the daily search
To know Jesus better
Their faith becomes
Little more than
Going to church.Although few people
Will admit
That they are
Morality-phobic
It's really quite common.
Christianity without Christ’s presence and power is a dried-up flower. Christianity’s so much more than experiencing a one-time flash in your spiritual pan and then attending a weekly religious talk. Because Jesus is living and working in all of His true followers, He doesn’t need a hierarchy or a go-between to communicate with and direct them.
Morality-phobia makes it hard to hear your conscience. Courageously listen to and obey it anyway! To “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” you have to overcome morality-phobia.
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A delinquent culture needs exuberant holiness
It takes courage
To open your heart,
Courage to let people
See you cry,
Courage to trust God
When you’re hurting
And don’t know why
But that courage
Produces exuberance
That you could never buy.
Exuberant living
Requires the inner light
Of heart-transforming insight
That produces true delight,
Not outward attempts
To disguise the dark night
That’s consuming your soul.
A delinquent culture needs exuberant holiness — not outward rule keeping but inner transformation. True transformation is of the heart. Changing a person’s body without healing their hurting heart is just cosmetic.
Aligning your life to feelings and desires that tell you to deny logic and reason is bondage, not transformation. Unless your heart is transformed, your life may look different, but internally you’ll still be the same.
Self-focus kills exuberance. We need a vision beyond self-interest and self-comfort to make life meaningful and joyous. Boasting about desires that torment and control you and seeking people’s approval of them won’t produce transforming inner peace.
To keep your heart always open to the risen Jesus is stay plugged in to the experience of exuberant living. If Christ isn’t producing ever-flowing exuberance inside you, there’s a disconnect somewhere. “Rejoice in the Lord always!”
To let Christ continually expose, forgive, and heal your inner dark spots is to experience the exuberance of supernatural transformation. If Christians aren’t trained to open their heart, speak up, and freely express Christ’s exuberance in church, where will they learn how to do it?
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The first two people chose to ignore God’s initiative.
In the Bible the first two people choose human analysis and their own initiative instead of trust in and obedience to God. Not much has changed. Unless we begin to notice and follow the initiatives of God’s Spirit we may embrace religion, but we won’t be led by the Spirit. Christ’s initiatives, His sparks in human hearts, are too often ignored.
If Christ is in you be ever conscious of and guided by His presence. Train yourself to be sensitive to and appreciative of the initiative of God’s Spirit. Learn to let the Holy Spirit continually initiate and motivate your thoughts and behaviors. When we lay down our initiative and fully cooperate with Christ’s, we begin to experience the Lord’s prayer–God’s will being done on earth as it is in Heaven.
Many people have never heard that Jesus wants to initiate hope and healing in their heart, so they gravitate away from Him. Instead courageously open your heart to ponder and meditate on the presence of Jesus. Cooperate with Him so He can initiate and establish His will deep within you. Let the initiative of the Spirit (not your own desires) guide and direct you day by day.
Bravely notice the movement of God within your heart. Then be courageous enough to align yourself with and surrender to His will for you. Religion tends to sedate people. Jesus wants to initiate a supernatural way of life in your heart. Be courageous and let Him.
Resist, refute, and reject anything inside you that tries to hinder your ability to be conscious of and cooperative with the initiative of God’s Spirit. Dare to let the living Jesus initiate and navigate your decisions.
Theology presented in a sermon without the theology of directly encountering the living Jesus is empty words. Many people can’t see the living, daily present Jesus because church has blocked their view.
Until Christians are trained to open our heart and be vulnerable, Christianity will be mostly a head religion. Are you aware of what Jesus wants to initiate in your heart today? Why or why not?
Embracing the messy brokenness
Of the way of the Cross
In your own life
Leads to astonishing connection
To the power of Christ’s resurrection
Working in you
To will and to do
What you could never do
Without Christ living in you.
June 8, 2023
Hope for a soiled heart
There’s hope for your soiled heart. Let your soiled heart be good soil for God’s word. To let your heart harden is to distance yourself from both God and people.
An open, tender heart can be gloriously led and shaped by God’s Spirit. A closed, hardened heart stays stuck in a shell of self-protection. It takes no courage to let your heart harden, but great courage to keep it open and tender.
A hard heart tries to be fortified and justified through pride. A tender heart bows down in repentance and humility.
Let your heart become good ground. Receive and nurture the falling seed that the Sower is ever sowing in your heart. Direct it off the path of self-will, away from the stones of spiritual hardness, beyond self-focused desires, consumerism, and worries. Warmly and tenderly embrace the seed of God’s Word with humility, repentance, and brokenness. Let it grow and flourish inside your innermost being and transform the ruins in your heart into a glorious garden overflowing with an abundance of the fruit of the Spirit.
Ruins rising up as the fruit of the Spirit become foundations of supernatural hope. Find the place of tenderness in your heart. Cultivate it and let it grow so you can courageously embrace compassion and caring.
God wants to tenderize
Your heart
And give you
Tender eyes
So you can see His love
And be comforted
In your pain.
June 7, 2023
Poems for awakening — Asbury 2023 and beyond
June 6, 2023
Daring to define “unconditional love”
Love unconditionally but never approve unconditionally. If you approve of everything I think, say, do, and believe, you may flatter me , but you don’t love me.
Unconditional love:
Cares deeply even when it disapproves.Doesn’t passively approve when people mistreat themselves or others.Alerts people when they’re making harmful choices and tries to help them go in a better direction.Continues to care deeply about people even when they label its warnings and concerns “hate.”Doesn’t delight in people’s destructive decisions or their distorted desires.Wants to rescue people from darkness, not to help them keep the light out.Doesn’t encourage people to wallow in guilt-producing behaviors.Is willing to disrupt deception by compassionately speaking truth and shining light into darkness.Disapproves of people’s pain-producing and self-harming choices. Wants people to be set free from deceptive desires.Cares enough about people to risk their rejection by trying to help them see when they’re off track.Doesn’t blindly defend people’s self-produced pain but tries to help rescue them from it.Isn’t pleased when people put personal pleasure ahead of honesty, integrity, responsibility, and caring and compassion for others.Doesn’t offer unconditional approval but openly disapproves of people’s self-harm and self-deception.Tries to help people avoid guilt by encouraging them to avoid the choices that produce it and to turn away from those choices if they’ve already made them.Is saddened when people take pride in hedonistic choices.Never demands approval but allows people the freedom to reject it.When people demand unconditional love what they’re really demanding is unconditional approval. To applaud and approve while people self-destruct is a loveless act. To applaud wrongdoing is to reject unconditional love.
When someone is asleep in a physical or emotional fire, unconditional love warns them loudly. When someone is about to be run over by a bus they don’t see, unconditional love shouts out in alarm! When people are swimming in a world of hungry sharks, unconditional love tries to pull them out.
Approving of and applauding people’s poor choices isn’t unconditional love. It’s a self-focused way to avoid their hostility. If we don’t approve of everybody’s choices, viewpoints, and behaviors then we have no right to demand that they approve of ours.
My parents loved me unconditionally. They cared enough about me to warn me when they thought my life was off track.
To demand people’s approval of your choices and behaviors is to demand that they abandon their conscience and values. If we really believed in God’s unconditional love, we’d surrender unconditionally to Him.
Tomaz Salamun, a late 20th century poet born in Yugoslavia in 1941, exposes the fallacy of demanding unconditional love. He wrote: “I demand unconditional love and complete freedom. That is why I am terrible.” Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!
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Grace isn’t half time show Christianity.
Football players follow their coach, not the leader of the half time show. Follow and obey Coach Jesus! If you’re stuck in religious half time, get back in God’s game and play your heart out every day for Coach Jesus!
Too often as modern Christians we pick and choose what we want from the Bible. Then we celebrate our choices like a Super Bowl Sunday half time show. Afterwards we declare ourselves winners while we walk away and ignore the second half (the parts of the Bible that we don’t like) by living according to our own desires rather than according to what God desires. There’s nothing super (or spiritual) about that. If you call yourself a Christian, it’s time to stay in the game and be a grace-filled and Christ-filled spiritual playmaker throughout the week, not just a spectator for a Sunday morning religious half time show and a no-show for Jesus during the rest of the week.
Half-hearted Christians prefer a Sunday half time show more than the Spirit-led teamwork of daily discipleship. However, playmaking with the risen Jesus is much more exciting that watching a religious half time show.
Fear fades away when you leave your half time comfort zone begin to live your life in the Spirit-led zone! (See 1 Timothy 1:6.) The second half of the Christian life is learning to courageously follow and obey the risen Jesus with a humble childlike spirit.
Grace empowers Christ-followers to be Spirit-led playmakers not just religious bench sitters coasting toward death and Heaven. Real players prepare for the second half while the spectators watch the half time show. A Christian half time show won’t teach you to be a Spirit-led playmaker. You have to stay in God’s game and play your heart out to learn that. Be a Spirit-led playmaker, not a spiritually dead spectator.
When Christianity is presented as little more than dutiful and passive church attendance, it’s no wonder that few Christians are visibly and passionately excited about the living Jesus throughout the week. Church too often puts people on religious autopilot and causes them to trust in their Sunday attendance more than in the risen Jesus.
You can’t see light when your eyes are closed. Open your eyes and behold Jesus, the Light of the world! The clearer your perception and awareness of Jesus, the more you will experience His love, His power, and His presence and the more you will want to be a Spirit-led playmaker on Team Jesus!
Grace makes following and obeying the risen Jesus a full-time heart calling, not a weekly hour for attending a religious program. It doesn’t eliminate our need for repentance and forgiveness. It reveals it to us.
God loves us unconditionally, but He doesn’t accept us unconditionally. If that was the case Jesus wouldn’t have needed to die on the Cross to pay the penalty for our sin. Accepting us into His presence was very costly for God as He demonstrated His great love for us by dying to rescue us from our rebellion against Him.
Grace knows that it’s not unkind to disagree with people, but it is unkind to demand they agree with you. When people demand approval of their behavior in the name of tolerance or grace, they’re being intolerant. No one has the right to demand that you approve of their behavior. To believe that church attendance annuls your indulgences in wrongdoing is to miss out on the reality of God’s grace.
Unconditional approval of people’s behavior isn’t love. It’s denial. God’s grace, however, empowers a person to no longer live according to his own desires but according to what God desires.
Set self aside
And power glide
To be a playmaker with Jesus.
June 4, 2023
Listening to and relying on Jesus
Religious compliance without daily reliance on the living Jesus falls far short of true Christianity. Learn to daily rely on the risen Jesus not just to outwardly comply with religious roles and rules. The kingdom of God is the place of complete reliance on and surrender to the living Jesus. Find that place in your heart. True Christianity is about Christ-reliance, not about self-reliance.
The human mind and heart are easily deceived by fallacies and illusions. Listening intently to your conscience and the risen Jesus will keep you on the path of honesty and truth. Listen to God’s still small voice within you! Say, “Speak Lord for your servant is listening.”
It takes courage to rely on the risen Jesus and to deny and defy your own desires, but that’s the calling of true Christianity. Christ-reliance is essential for a Christian lifestyle. Letting Christ continually live and work in you produces abounding hope, but self-reliance produces pride, alienation, exhaustion, and disappointment. Christians who neglect to train their mind and heart in Christ-reliance often wonder how they get so far off track.
Self-forgiveness relies on self-effort and self-perception. God’s forgiveness is freely given to those who turn away from self and rely on the risen Jesus and His sacrifice on the Cross.
“Self-forgiveness” without the ongoing experience and inner cleansing of God’s forgiveness is psychobabble. “Self-forgiveness” tries to erase guilt by denial or will power, but God’s forgiveness removes guilt from those who will humbly and remorsefully confess what they have done to cause it and rely on the living Jesus Christ instead of self to forgive them. 1 John 1:9 and Romans 8:1.
Human reason is unreliable. Look at the mess it has led us to. It’s time to rely on the risen Jesus and be led by His still small voice. To listen to and rely on Jesus is an amazing adventure!
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