Live Delivered

Ok, it’s time for a message. But I will.  In the book of Isaiah 38:17-19, scripture recounts a conversation King Hezekiah had with God when he said “For hell cannot thank You; death cannot praise You; Those who go down to the grave cannot hope for Your Truth. The living, the living man, he shall praise You, as I do this day.  The father shall make known Your Truth to the children”.

King Hezekiah was sick and near death – but he was not going to give up living for God easily.  He was saying to God, remember now – others may not be able to thank you, or to praise you or even to hope in Your Truth, but I will because I live for You.  So I asked myself. What am I doing with this day today? And you – what are you doing with this day today? We are the living today – do we thank the Lord enough to keep someone off the path to hell?  Those in hell cannot thank the Lord.  Do we praise Him enough by the way we live that it will make someone else find in their lives some praise for Him? There are many who are living dead lives – living for themselves and for what they want and praising themselves and nothing more.  And do we by the way we live, reveal to others a hope that is strong enough that it keeps us above the things that take others to their graves? There are many of us who will go to our graves because we lack the hope in God’s Truth to live for or with something we cannot change.  It’s the living – not just those who are alive – but the man whose every breath is for Christ and in Christ.  It is this man who will through his life, praise the Lord louder than his words can do it.

The living man lives for Christ this day, and every new day becomes another chance the man living for Christ can proclaim to be a praise to Him. Others may not thank Him; they may not praise Him; they may not hope in His Truth – But I will.  Because I am a man who wants to live for Him.  Just as King Hezekiah did so before me; I will do so this day.  So what about you?  Live in such a way this day that your life alone will proclaim to the children and to others the Truth of Christ.  Don’t live a dead life. Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

Thanksgiving is a Prayer and a Way of Life more than it is just a Day. Psalm 100 tells us to “Make a joyful shout to the Lord, all you lands!  Serve the Lord with gladness; Come before His presence with singing. Know that the Lord, He is God; it is He Who made us and not we ourselves; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture.  Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise.  Be thankful to Him, and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting, and His Truth endures all generations”.  So we should live in a joyful state praising Him.  Be happy you get to serve Him.  Keep a song in your spirit as you stay in His presence because He made you.  You are His creation and His property.  You are not your own.  So when you get to the gates of His property – enter in a way of life that is a never ending expression of Thanksgiving to Him for all this and for all things that are a concern to you. But don’t stop at the gates, enter into the courts of His presence with a way of life that says to Him – I won’t stop praising You for all that You are no matter where I am or where I go cause You are great and great will be my praise for You.  Have a great day giving thanks to a great God and Creator.  Love you.  

Ok, it’s time for a message. It’s time to start speaking to ourselves.  Why can’t we make ourselves be what we try to make others to be? Why can’t we make ourselves do what we try to make others do?  Why don’t we view ourselves with the same judgment we view others?  We are encouraged to find the answer to these questions in the book of Psalms 4:4 as it says “Stand in awe, and sin not; commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still”.  Sometimes we say this about others “you can’t tell them anything”.  Often time we should be saying this about ourselves – “I don’t listen to myself when I try to tell myself what I want to tell others”.

It is sometimes a hard pill for us to swallow when we learn we have to speak to ourselves about ourselves.  I didn’t like it at all.  But the Word encourages us to do just that and to do it often. And, It gives us a way to speak to ourselves that makes it easier for us to hear and for us to do what we say.

It tells us to stand in awe of God; this means we should live in total amazement of Who God is and in the wonder of His Love.   And when we view Him in awe and adoration, we can better see ourselves for who we are in Him.  Then we stand a better chance to refrain from sin as a way of life.  After this we are encouraged to speak to ourselves – to our own hearts – as if we are asleep on our beds – in the quietness and stillness of life.  God is very specific about this because we tend to compare how great we believe we live to how poorly we believe others are living. We have the standard of measurement all wrong.  We must measure up to how God says we should live before Him and not before men.  He doesn’t need to compare us to a misbehaving person to establish our righteousness. And He doesn’t need show someone else their faults by comparing them to our life. This is what we do; it is not what God does.

So, we are encouraged to speak to ourselves in the quiet still moments of sleep where we can only compare ourselves to His Word.  It is there that we are able to speak to ourselves and to measure ourselves against His righteousness.  It is there that we are able to say to ourselves “The Lord will lift us up when we are down”.  And when we see His work in us, we may be a quiet example to others of how effective His Word can be in the lives of those who learn to slow down, to sit down and to speak to themselves about themselves.  Let’s learn to always speak and do to ourselves what we are always eager to tell others to do with their lives.  Live a Delivered Life.  Love You.

Ok, it’s time for a message.  Peace in the storms of life.  I was once a very fickle person; changing my mind often.  I cared only for what cared for me; I loved only what loved me and worse, I judged most things to be unworthy of my best cause I thought my best was deserved by only the best.  I was like many people whose natures is to run away from our storms and to the safety of the shelters we built for ourselves.

Then some years ago I saw in scripture just how fickle this was of me.    The book of Isaiah 38:17-19 says, “Indeed it was for my own peace that I had great bitterness; You have lovingly delivered my soul from the pit of corruption … For you have cast all my sins behind Your back”.  This is what I learned.  Challenging stuff is part of learning how to live a challenging Life for the Lord.  His way with us is to strengthen us to live boldly for Him in many of the things we try to run from.  Great peace happens in the middle of the pits of our struggles; great love happens in the middle of the sense of being unloved.  And stability and faithfulness and truth and mercy and justice and all that is great of the Lord happens in lives where He can manifest those things to people and in places where they seem to be missing.

I learned that running from my situations didn’t change me.  Instead it often weakened me because I was emboldened to remain as I was when I ran.  I wanted what I needed which meant I didn’t want what the Lord wanted in the storms I faced.  The only things that change things is to learn to live faithfully and dependently and to lovingly right where you are.  We must learn to allow the Lord to turn our fickleness into a picture of faithfulness for Him.  The praise of a person on the run is not the same as the praise of one who lives strong and steadfast right in the middle of the storms of life. Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

Ok, it’s time for a message.  Lips that cannot stop moving.  “The Lord said; for as much as this people draw near Me with their mouths, and with their lips they do honor Me, but they have removed their heart far from Me” (Isaiah 29:13).  The more we talk, the less we listen.  The less we listen, the more we become our own counsel.  The more we counsel ourselves, the less counsel we receive from God.  And with all this, we ultimately grow to follow what is in our hearts – hearts that now have been counseled more by ourselves and by the world and less by God.  We remove our hearts from God when we come to feel like we know how to live our own lives and to solve our own problems.  With our lips we may still say “I prayed and the Lord told me this or this”.  But in reality when our hearts are removed from Him, we pray and we tell Him what we want Him to say to us.  We do not listen to Him or for Him because we have closed our hearts to hearing Him.

A heart that listens to God will not listen to counsel from anywhere else. Don’t be as those who pay lip service to God with lips that cannot stop moving.  God is a discerner of the heart of man.  It is really important to understand how easy it is to talk too much and so to get your counsel from yourself or from others but not from God.  God wants to speak to you about your situation; He doesn’t want you speaking to Him about what man has said about people like you who have your situation.  Man’s idea of what is fair for you and right for you and appropriate for you is not the same as God’s.  Man cannot get close to God by what he says or by his own standards of righteousness.  In fact the empty heartless words of mouth are a deception; man may deceive man but he can never deceive God.  When our hearts are removed and set on the things we believe we want and ought to have, we would rather talk about knowing God because we do not want to hear Him speak.  We do not want to hear Him speak because we do not want to hear Him tell us to do something different from what we want.  The more we talk then the less we can hear God talk because our minds keep our hearts under control.

Our one desire should be to truly honor God in all things.  This must start in our hearts because God speaks to the heart of man and a man hears with his heart.  “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness” (Romans 10:10).  We do not then believe with the mind but with the heart.  And if in our hearts we do believe God, then His righteousness will be manifested in the way we live.  Pray that God would make your heart a home for Christ His Son and you will be led to say less and to live more.  Fill up your heart with the life of Christ and He will cause what you do say with your mouth to be a reflection of the fact that He is enjoying the day living in your heart.

Live A Delivered Life.  Love you.

Ok, it’s time for a message.  Anxiety robs confidence!  Hebrews 13:5 says “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have.  For He Himself has said “I will never leave you nor forsake you””.  A few years ago I studied for six months and took a 400 question, six hour test for a professional certification I needed for my work. There were over two hundred people gathered together with me on the day of the test.  Half of them walked out of the testing center after only two hours- discouraged because the test was not easy.  I was one of the last people to finish.  At first I was overwhelmed at the magnitude of questions and the things I needed to know.  But I knew I had diligently studied and prepared myself; I was happy going into the test so I knew I would be happy coming through it.  I passed that test but I learned more from the Lord than from the test.  He is always by our sides during the times we are tested; we are not alone.  He generally does not talk while we are taking the test; we cannot hear Him clearly when we are noisy; and our anxieties and our angers and our emotions generally make it more difficult to get through the tests we face.  We cannot find the solution to some things because our anxiety and emotions robs our confidence.  Finally because we react and respond to our problems as if we are alone, we look in all the wrong places for solutions to problems that are not there.  The Lord is not our test; but He is our answer and He is always there.  When you feel like you are being tested, as much as is within you – remain calm.  Your Teacher is always there.  He has given you three things that will ensure you get through your test; a Spirit of power that will enable you to humbly overcome; and a Spirit of Love that will change your attitude and remind you of who you are and a Spirit of a sound mind that will help you focus on the right things.  These three He gives you because He will never leave nor forsake you.  Anxiety, anger and emotions make you forget who you are, so you forget what you know, so you don’t know what to do.  The Spirit of Power and Love and a Sound mind helps us understand that with Christ, we don’t get out of things but we go through things.  And these are things that make us better as we make things around us better. Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

Ok, it’s time for a message.  You need my self-awareness.  In the book of Matthew 7:3 we are asked “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye”?  One day I stopped to answer this question.  I found I was more interested in building myself up by tearing others down cause I was quick to share their faults and misgivings but my own I did not see.  I was fooled – when we look upon things through a dirty lens, sometimes what we see is more of ourselves than what is before us.  That speck we see in our neighbors behavior is sometimes a reflection of speck on a plank of bad behavior sitting in our own lives.  You see, God is always trying to tell us something.  Sometimes He uses what seems like a dirty dish in a way you would use a mirror to reflect back to each of us something about our own lives and behaviors that should be cleaned.  I learned that you need me to be very self aware of me and of my own faults so that I understand the impact I really have on you and the things I encounter.  I learned that God often let’s me see what I believe are faults so that I will be more willing to allow Him to sanitize my ways to His desires.  With me, He can remove the spot and the plank and even my whole eye if it will keep me from living in the pride of myself and in the sin of looking down at others.  Maybe God is trying to get you to see something too.  Live a Delivered Life.  Love you

Ok it’s time for a message.  What am I living for?   In Philippians 3:14, Paul tells us this about himself – “I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”.  With all that we have going on in life and in living every day, it’s easy to never have real focus about why we are here.  Paul is telling us he knows why he is here and he is focused on that one thing – the call of life with God in Christ.  Nothing in life is going to distract him from that.  So what about you?  What are you living for?  Hear this – in the world we set goals so we can have a reward.  The goal and the reward are not the same.  Sometimes we may believe the goal is too difficult or the reward isn’t enough to keep us pressing on so we give up.   But with God, our goal should be life with Christ and our prize is that same life with Christ.  He doesn’t want us to give up or to lose focus – the goal is too important and the prize is too important.  So don’t worry about your circumstances – things may be difficult for you right now or things may be great for you – either way if life with Christ is your goal, He will help you live that life through your circumstances – keep your eyes on Him and and not on yourself .  If you do that He will take care to favor the things that are focused on you.  So commit today to understand why you are here; let your past be your past;  live today as if you are meeting Christ for the first time and then Press On with that goal and with that prize in mind.  Live a Delivered Life.  Love you

Ok, it’s time for a message.  Where are all the good people?  In Psalm 37:23 we are reminded that “The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord; and He is delighted in his way”.  I struggled with this verse until I found it saying to me  that I was pursuing life for me in all the wrong ways.  I had to stop following my own ways for me; I had to  stop following my own understanding; to stop living from my own provisions; and stop depending on myself for my everything.  I was to start living like Christ lived in me and that meant most I had to live for Him and for others.  When I decided to do this, Christ took over and ordered my steps and my path and my going out and my coming in and all my doings.   And it was then that He found delight in my ways.  It was Him Who then said “man it is good” that you have decided to give up your ways and to pursue My ways.  Then I learned the Lord never leads us into failing.  His ways and His paths are better and surer for us than our own.  I was looking to be a good man who followed Christ only to find that following Christ was the thing that I needed to make me good in His eyes.  The good man is not found in just good places; the good man is found in tough and difficult and self centered places where the good of Christ is needed.  If you learn to let Him order your steps He will make all your tough places easier and He will make your crooked paths straight.  Live a Delivered Life.  Love you.

Ok, it’s time for a message. Beyond Understanding! In the book of Proverbs, 3:13, scripture tells us “Happy is the man that finds wisdom, the man who gets understanding.” One of the greatest things we can have in life is to learn how to live with what we do not understand. We will never have enough knowledge to problem solve our way to success; we will never have enough knowledge to pass every test we encounter; we will never understand all the things we face daily. But we can learn how to live happily with what we do not understand. It is wisdom that can teach you that just because you do not understand something doesn’t make that thing a harm or threat to you. Wisdom is something to have so you don’t have to live in fear and under the control of what you cannot control. You can get more with wisdom than what you can buy with gold or silver. With our own understanding we will spend all we have trying to find answers when wisdom simply wants to teach us how to live long happy fruitful lives with unanswered questions. Often those that seem like they are the greatest among us are not always wise nor does age bring understanding to everyone. But within each of us is the Spirit of the Lord; it is through Him that the Lord Almighty brings us wisdom and understanding so that we can live in peace and in fulfillment right in the middle of our lack of understanding. Don’t allow the blessings of this message be beyond your understanding. Live a Delivered Life. Love you.