Steve Simms's Blog, page 98

Seeing beyond the spin

Wherever there is spin, sight is blurred. Christians are called to look for truth without spinning facts to fit our opinions. My interpretation of a fact isn’t a fact. It’s only my opinion, not ultimate truth.

To repent is to re-view life from God’s perspective. God in His kindness shines His light in human hearts. His glorious light causes us to reframe, refocus, rethink, and renew how we view and interpret our daily life. Then we begin to see life from God’s perspective through the beautiful characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-23.)

If we reject or resist God’s light and refuse to see, we stay stuck in the fleshly confines and confusion our own self-based perspective. Our pride, feelings, and desires make it difficult to face the reality that disagrees with them.

The mission of a Christian is to actively demonstrate heart-felt love for God and for people through both words and actions. Instead of “giving a lesson” or “teaching a class” or “bringing the message,” perhaps it’s time to demonstrate Jesus’ presence!

Whenever life seems ordinary and you’re feeling bored, connect heart-to-heart with the living Jesus and you’ll have more excitement than you can imagine. I love to see the glow of joy on the faces of people spontaneously pouring out their heart as they worship Jesus with great gratitude and humility.

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Shrink wrapped Christianity is very confining.

When Christianity is shrink wrapped in religious plastic and boxed up like an Amazon package, it’s not very effective. We need to open it up so God’s Spirit can take control. To be spiritually alive is to be responsive to and led by the inner promptings of God’s Spirit — Jesus Christ living and working in you.

Too many Christians are trapped by religious loyalties, traditions, hierarchies, and programs that keep them from being freely Spirit-led. It’s very rare to find a church service that allows people to be free to follow the Spirit. When the institutional church institutionalized Christianity it made Christians dependent on a religious institution instead of on the presence and power of the living Christ.

Being Spirit-led has nothing to do with sermon-hearing. It’s about daily hearing and obeying the risen Jesus. Nothing can compare to the Spirit’s rivers of living water are rushing through my soul.

Some people say that church is a hospital. To me it’s more of a nursing home. A hospital heals and releases people. A nursing home coddles to their frailty and rarely lets them go.

The purpose of a hospital is to get people healthy and released to freely function without institutional help. The purpose of a nursing home is to keep people institutionalized and to maintain the status quo until they die. Which one do you think best describes the contemporary church?

If Christians have ever needed to be led by God’s Spirit it’s now! You can only be led by “Christ in you” if you’re willing to focus intently on Him and follow Him. The Good News of the kingdom of God is that King Jesus is alive, present, and active in this world and invites whosoever will to surrender to His literal Headship and obey His direct authority in day-to-day life.

To focus on self is to be out of focus. Self-love and self-forgiveness are self-focused, but receiving God’s love and forgiveness is Christ-focused. I can forgive myself a million times, but until I have God’s forgiveness, I’m still guilty. (See 1 John 1:9.) HIs forgiveness frees me from religious shrink wrap!

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Can we be honest about discrimination against skin-color and pre-natal status?

Both abortion and slavery are based on the false claim of ownership of another human life. Much of the disrespect for human life in America that was once based on skin color has now shifted to be based on pre-natal status. Whether based on skin-color or pre-natal status, disrespect for human life is morally wrong.

Current events are demonstrating that when our society is so cold that we can deny the humanity of a child in the womb, we have the capacity to disrespect the humanity of anyone. Human life is too incredibly amazing to be disrespected in the womb or anywhere else!

The womb is no longer a safe place for human life. When life is devalued in the womb it’s devalued everywhere. Legal or illegal, the killing of an unborn baby is cruel.

Legislation can’t change a hardened heart, but the radical act of kindly speaking truth while humbly loving your enemies can. America needs a heart change!

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Being craving controlled is no fun!

A desire-driven lifestyle is dominated by self-focus. People who are dictated by self-focused desires are never satisfied. If you won’t control your cravings, your cravings will control you.

Desire-driven decisions demonstrate a lack of self-control. When people allow themselves to be controlled by cravings, they punish themselves by making pain-producing choices. If you won’t put some brakes on your desires, they will eventually break you.

Desire-driven decisions like to detour around wisdom. When your craving for self-gratification is greater than your hunger and thirst for righteousness, you’ll make unwise rebellious choices.

Human beings weren’t created to be cravings-controlled puppets. People have the right to follow self-focused cravings, but they don’t have the right to demand that you approve of their choices.

Desire-driven Christianity avoids being Spirit-led. Craving-controlled people have lost their freedom. The living Jesus can restore it! Christ-followers are called to be led by the Spirit, not controlled by cravings. See Romans 8:14.

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If you want to be with Jesus in Heaven, why wait?

If you want to be with Jesus in Heaven, why wait? Begin to openly interact with and obey Him now, right where you are.

When you love a person you don’t spend your time studying and analyzing them and listening to talks about them. You openly interact with them heart to heart. It’s time for Christians to love Jesus like that!

I’d like to take a selfie with the risen Jesus, but I can’t. That’s because He’s invisible and I hang out with Him in my heart.

Christians are always wanting a Bible formula or technique to make to Christianity easier. But there’s no formula; just this: “As many as are led by the Spirit are the children of God.”

Don’t be a spectator Christian! Spectator Christianity is a convenient way for Christians who are afraid of God’s light to feel better about themselves.

The job of pastor too often makes Christianity a mere spectator event. Instead of being a person whose primary job description is to compassionately serve and disciple people heart to heart, being a pastor has become a job to plan, control, and then lecture during a church service.

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Jesus is the Good News!

Bad news abounds as demons disturb our inner peace and destroy our mental health by tormenting us with temptations, accusations, worries, and fears all around us and within us. Education, psychology, technology, religion, politics, medication, meditation, science, self-help, social engineering, and even money have all demonstrated that they have no power to cleanse and purify the human heart.

Is there any good news anywhere to give us hope that we as hardened insensitive self-focused individuals and as a wicked and corrupt generation can be brought to sanity? Yes! There is an invisible way of escape that eye can’t see or ear can’t hear but is revealed within the heart and can be followed to peace and purity. Jesus, the Creator who became a man is the glorious Good News who can continually roll through your soul making you awash with His presence and power so that you are ever renewed. Get online with Him and forever zoom with His Spirit!

Hands full of technology and hearts full of hardness produce a society full of confusion, conflict, and chaos. Whenever you feel downcast let the risen Jesus give you an upgrade. Too many Christians are a dead limb instead of a living branch.

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Ongoing Bible-based experiential Christianity

It’s time for ongoing Bible-based experiential Christianity. The passive Sunday spectator version doesn’t seem to be working very well!

The miracle of Bible-based experiential Christianity drives out despair and replaces it with inner healing and joy. Spectator Christianity has little to offer other than a religious show, but Bible-based experiential Christianity abounds with hope and power!

The New Testament isn’t a systematic set of teachings like the Old Testament laws. It is testimonies and accounts and words of encouragement, exhortation, and explanation from Spirit-led people who lived out ongoing experiential Christianity and filtered their experiences through the Scriptures to avoid demonic deception.

Here’s hope for the “burning house” of our culture: I woke up today with this poem being written on my heart:

Make room
For gladness . . .
Drive out
Sadness
By greatly appreciating,
Madness
By always forgiving,
And badness
By deeply repenting.

Jesus has given us the right and the authority to cast out the inner demons that make us downcast and to refuse to let them torment or influence us again! He calls us to confess our sins, to experience God’s forgiveness and freedom, to go spread His love, and to sin no more as we let the Spirit ever lead us by God’s still small voice within our heart.

The purposelessness of our consumer culture is keeping multitudes of people downcast with discouragement, despair, and depression. Consumerism is meaningless. It never fully satisfies and always leaves people wanting more. Only the risen Jesus can satisfy a human heart.

Bible-based
Experiential Christianity
Is the hope of humanity.
It can overcome our vanity
And restore us to sanity
Much more effectively
Than mere churchianity.

Continually seek God’s face
And His amazing grace.
Let Him replace
Any hardness in your heart
With “Christ in you”
And remove every trace
Of pride and rebellion
As He leads you
By His pace
And not your own.
2 Chronicles 7:14.

The kingdom of God manifests when people are being led by the Spirit.

When God’s word
Not just as legislation,
Your heart becomes a place
Full of amazing grace
And the flowing light
Of living insight
Makes doing God’s will
Pure delight,
Joy unspeakable
And full of glory!

I wake up almost every morning with insight being birthed in my heart. It blazes within me like a burning bush. It’s such a blessing to be still and know that Jesus is alive and wanting all of us humans to be led by His Spirit.

The kingdom of God is Spirit-led order, not outward rules and religious regulations. (See Romans 8:14.) If you’re not doing the will of God from your heart, you’re rebelling against His kingdom. To keep first things first the kingdom of God (being led by the Spirit in your everyday life) must be your number one priority.

For the kingdom of God to become more than a mere theological concept to you requires that you continually submit to the risen Jesus as your literal King and the Ruler of your daily life. If the kingdom of God isn’t ruling and reigning within you (if God’s not the monarch of your heart) you won’t ever be able to find it anywhere else.

The kingdom of God isn’t about religious rules and rituals. It’s about being continually led by the Spirit into God’s righteousness, peace, and joy. It’s not about religious talk. It’s about supernatural power to love (even our enemies) with acts of kindness and a heart full of God’s grace and compassion.

The best way to know the Bible is by doing it, not by hearing talks about it. Bible study is good. Daily letting the Holy Spirit use the Bible to deeply touch your heart is better.

Human beings way overestimate our power and reality, but we way underestimate God’s power and reality. The more Christ-followers are willing to allow themselves to be led by the Spirit, the more the kingdom of God is manifested in, through, and among them.

Many Christians trust more in sermon hearing than they do in having a daily walk with Jesus. Too often a pastor is like a governor on a rental truck that limits the speed it can go. Pastors, let God’s people go as fast and as far as He wants to take them. Jesus wants to lead us all to the great spiritual heights of the kingdom of God!

Let the Holy Spirit be your leader!

When I tune in to, wait for, and focus on God’s still voice and obey the inner nudging of the Spirit’s whispers in my soul, without regard for outcome or personal desire, amazing insight comes to me, and I am awed by the presence and reality of the risen Jesus. Jesus graciously calls me to welcome His inner presence and leadership as a greater and greater part of my everyday lifestyle. One way I do that is to listen throughout the day, write down the insights that He gives me, and do whatever He prompts me to.

The New Testament doesn’t tell us to be led by religious leaders but by the Spirit. See Romans 8:14. The early Christians were Spirit-led people. Only Spirit-led people can light and spread fires of inner awakening. Jesus wants you to let the reality of His presence be part of your daily personal experience.

It’s the inner content of your life (not the outer content) that determines whether or not you’re happy. If you won’t pay attention to what’s going on inside you, you won’t be aware of God because He is working in you to get your attention.

Too often a pastor is like a governor on a rental truck that limits the speed it can go. Pastors, let God’s people go as fast and as far as He wants to take them.

Too many Christians have abandoned Spirit-led discipleship and put their trust in church attendance and a one-time “sinner’s prayer.” If Christians were as good at being led by the Spirit as we are at being led by preachers, we’d see continuous revival and spiritual awakening.

Church is a cracked up religious system that has shattered into tens of thousands of independent denominations around the world that proclaim their theology and their way as the best way. Perhaps it’s time to abandon the independent, human-led religious ships and instead embrace the direct Spirit-led discipleship of Jesus the living Way.

Is God just or merciful? Most people want God to be about justice when wrong has been done to them and about mercy when they have done wrong. Here’s the paradox. Everyone is accountable to God’s justice and everyone is offered His mercy. Unfortunately, many people think that they are too “good” to need God’s mercy, so they pridefully reject it and opt out to face His justice without His mercy. The end result of this choice will not go well. Lord, have mercy on me a sinner!

Spring forward

New life conceives
As trees fill up
With leaves
And everyone who believes
Receives
Hope
From what God weaves!

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My statement identifying as marriage-sexual

People today identify as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and even transsexual. I’m marriage-sexual. I believe that sex is designed for marriage (a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman) so they can develop lasting heart-to-heart intimacy and produce children who will be raised in a stable loving home.

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