Negative Words of Hope
September 6, 2016 Leave a comment
Living, Leading and Loving
August 31, 2016 Leave a comment
There are many reasons to STOP PRAYING for them, genuine, just reasons. Ones that anyone would understand. Primarily, they don’t really think that its useful…and besides, why would Almighty God even stop to listen to someone of whom they think so little, as they do you? I mean, they have it more together. What could you possibly have to tell God on their behalf, that they would not do better on their own – or at least someone else they think is more suitable? They may cause you great harm even to stop you from praying…and gather enough around them to make them feel right about doing so.
God has given me many reasons why I should CONTINUE PRAYING for them. Its not for their applause really…never has been about that. But more about His intent…His True Heart…”For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” John 3:17 NKJV and “The Lord does not delay [as though He were unable to act] and is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is [extraordinarily] patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” 2 Peter 2:9 AMP. It got me thinking, that when I want anything else for someone God created, am desiring contrary to Him…and what does that make me if not an anti-Christ? Hmmm
So this morning He gave me, reminded me, of one more reason to pray for…my family, my friends,, my neighbors, my country, my world, my employer, my colleagues, and yes, even the ones who hate me so much, they would not want me mentioning their names lovingly before God. If I don’t, if I am the only one able to, or even willing to and I don’t, and anything happens to them that could have been prevented by my praying…heavy responsibility…but in His own words…” “I looked for someone to stand up for Me against all this, to repair the defenses of the city, to take a stand for Me and stand in the gap to protect this land so I wouldn’t have to destroy it. I couldn’t find anyone. Not one. So I’ll empty out My wrath on them, burn them to a crisp with My hot anger, serve them with the consequences of all they’ve done. Decree of God, the Master.”
Ezekiel 22:31-32 The Message (MSG)
vipslit@yahoo.ca
August 11, 2016 Leave a comment
Sometimes, the devil throws stuff at you, but God allows you to walk on through to a lovely day. It may be a puncture, a broken heart, a betrayal or two by a friend, financial challenges, an illness, ministry, or work challenges, an eviction, a death – varying degrees of pain and discomfort; it does not have to be fixed the way you desire it to be. But you run to Him, cling on Him, realizing your need of Him…keep your toes and heels level as best as you can, your hand in His and keep walking. Its not yet over, until God says it is.
A broken heel, should never prevent you from getting home…and when you do, in spite of it, you realize that those broken heel days, are actually miracles in the making. I did.
`Thus says The LORD to Cyrus His anointed, Whom I have taken by the right hand, To subdue nations before him And to loose the loins of kings; To open doors before him so that gates will not be shut: “I will go before you and make the rough places smooth; I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars. “I will give you the treasures of darkness And hidden wealth of secret places, So that you may know that it is I, The LORD, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name.`
Isaiah 45:1-3
December 20, 2011 1 Comment
This has been one of those weeks where, my favorite phrase when talking about my relationship and walk with God has been “He has traumatized me into silence and stillness.” And He has. In a great way though.
It has been the week during which I complete the book of Luke yet again and prepare to start the book of Revelations. It has been the week where God finally led me to read a book I borrowed over 10 years ago but had not read, called ‘Finding God’ by Dr. Larry Crabb. [As soon as am done, I will find a way to give it back don’t you worry.] But just its contents and the contents of The Gospel I am reading has shocked me into stillness regarding what I, until this week, thought was a brilliant relationship with God.
I have spent the past more than one year praying about certain issues in my life, and ministry and yet feeling like I was missing something. It was like God really wanted to bless me, but I was asking amiss. He has called me over and over to worship Him but many times, this has been a hard calling. Life has hurt and I did not feel like singing anymore. God reassures me that He loves it when I sing to Him but sing with my whole heart…and this year, has not honestly been one of those ‘whole heart’ years. It has hurt. It has broken me. It has made me someone else. Hopefully, someone who likes God more than likes things. I have felt passion for little more than God. And struggled to strip my life of any passion that even looked like it was competing for space with Him. Yet the passion I have felt for God has been broken at best…and I have longed to be well. To be whole in my worship for Him. If not quickly in a new way, at least to the old familiar ways. But that old way seemed to have vaporized leaving me frantic.
This week, He showed me the progress in some of the lives that I had hurt over, cried for, and then wondered if I was truly praying in His Will. Answered prayer is good, but I am learning not to patronize God by trying to manipulate Him into performing just so I can praise Him. I want to be able to praise Him all the time. Even in the dark days…even this year.
So last night as I prepared to begin to prepare for my end year fast, to seek God about what 2012 would bring, I found myself wondering again if ‘years’ as we know them really matter in heaven. I wondered if I should wait until the 29th to pray, when I didn’t know if my life would extend to then, or just get ahead with seeking God now. I wondered what my prayer agenda would involve because, honestly, I felt the need to know His will for me and those for whom I was praying BEFORE I embarked on that prayer journey. Do I pray for a divorce for so and so or do I pray for the restoration of their marriage and home? Do I pray against that disaster for that nation or is God allowing them to face the consequences of their actions as discipline, loving though devastating discipline? Meanwhile in my own life it seemed to me that everything was falling apart around me – do I pray for the restoration of my children to schools, a new computer, new fridge, DVD player, electric kettle, microwave, a new bed for my daughter, the healing of my son’s mind and health, a house in a ‘safe’ and ‘serviced’ area, the restoration of the love and respect of my birth family, my old friendships? Do I ask God for marriage? Do I ask Him for a scholarship to further my education? Do I? Do I? And at what point do I ask Him for food, clothes, and to rid my house of rats and cockroaches – maybe this is a sign that He is moving me to a better place…it was all so confusing. What is my ministry? Do I publish? Do I train? Do I just be-friend and be a friend? And as I gave myself a headache and sore-throat worrying about whether my life was within the purposes of God His word in Luke 24 stood out for me ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
Silence.
Suddenly it was like I was on the road to Emmaus, worrying about what had been. Refusing to acknowledge that my job was to pick up my cross and follow Christ often content with the assurance that He who was leading me, knew the way. I was lamenting about the things that had happened to me and my loved ones. The financial, marital, parental, spiritual, moral, political crisis that was facing individuals whose faces spun in my head…loved ones, not just by me, BUT drastically by God Himself. I trudged up that road listening to this ‘annoying sense’ being made by a voice inside of me. “These things must happen…and then…There must be a dying to these things…and then….What looks like a bad thing needed to happen…and then…the Glory of God would be our rearguard. Only if I follow Him.”
He was telling me that dwelling on fixing things and restoring them into the state they were in was a futility that did not go well with His renewal of my mind. That I could no longer have the luxury of walking two ways; that I had to make a choice. Was I going to perfume, and preserve the dead mediocrity that defined a canal existence, or was I going to allow Him to bring His Life and His Light into my situation and make my life definable by heaven as ‘Beautiful’? I was no longer able to think of God only in terms of what He can do for me to make my life as comfortable and understandable as possible to those watching me in order to criticize me. And those who genuinely loved me as well. I needed to fit into His Mindset. I needed to bend my knees before Him as I slipped, no, pushed myself and others from the Throne that is His, so we could all worship Him. The dead things, my old broken mindset about what made sense in order to make me normal, needed to have a heavy tombstone rolled over them, so that I could embrace the Resurrection and The Life.
What about you? What is your cemetery dredging story? Why do you insist on seeking Life in a place of established deadness?
vipslit@yahoo.ca
December 15, 2011 1 Comment
‘So often life does not go the way you think it will. You’re given things to do that are too big for you. You are asked to believe things you don’t even understand. You are forced to trust people you hardly know. ‘ The Winter seeking, by Vanita Hampton Wright.
When this year began, I knew it was the year of birthing, as last year was one of new beginnings. I looked forward to it romantically, as though in a cloud, thinking the gleefully of the reaping that would be mine, not realizing that even the act of reaping would be an act of work. I, of all people, forgot the journey of pregnancy, the discomfort and anxiety of the early months, whether the pregnancy is expected and embraced or not. The extra care, the changes in lifestyle demanded by the changes happening to you. The loneliness of the journey, even when one has an active but dedicated husband on their side – the fact that in all the crucial ways, it is the one who is pregnant that must adapt to these changes. The nausea is your own even when someone holds you in the bathroom as you throw up. The fatigue, the unexplained ‘knowing’ of the status of your pregnancy throughout. The feel of the baby’s first kick, the real evidence of its existence when you probably are not really showing yet. The strong unprecedented impulse awakened to protect your pregnancy even when it is considered a crisis in itself. The ability to enjoy your pregnancy even when it compels you to be still. I won’t even start on the effect of your pregnancy to all those that are watching you… that is their story, for another day. Finally the real possibility that the child you bear, would not necessarily conform to your understanding of life – that there are no guarantees even after a successful pregnancy.
Bearing a child that Herod the Dragon wants to kill is extra risky. That was the plight of Mary, and our plight today as we submit daily to God’s purpose of designing us. To reach that point in your life, where you tire of all the mediocrity and cry out to God for the realization of your purpose to live. I am realizing now, that it is God in His Grace that sparks off that hungering and thirsting for an authentic life. AS He turns towards us, with the realization of just WHY He made us, we suddenly feel duped into that situation. We know, without first seeing what is in His Hand, what is being proffered our way, that it is something much bigger than we see ourselves to be. It is a rock that either crushes you or you can stand on as your solid foundation. And you are almost sure it with be the former only. I have realized through my own life, that the rock has to do both for you to enter into your purpose. First, you must die… be crushed into the dust from which you came, and allow the Hand that molded you in the first place, to do the work of re-making you, and breathing His life into you. You realize, that both your frame and the Spirit in you are borrowed from God, and yet, by this posture of humility and acceptance, you completely own that life. We are given a choice at every stop, to rise to a life higher than us, dependant on The Rock from which we are carved, or stay dead beneath its weight. Many choose the latter, sadly, because there is a lot of company there, and it makes more sense.
Choosing to have the child, comes with the risk and the reality of daily death. Others know it too. That is why there is this scaling up of assault, why even when they themselves chose death, they poke their decaying claws into your wounds and talk about the smell of them. They think your choices are mad and gather beneath the rock to mock and laugh at your wounds. They justify wounding you, because to the blind it distracts them from their own and each others’ decay. Talking about you, brings in them the only passion they can muster: planning worse things for you, allows them some kind of sordid pleasure. I want you to remember though, that you are alive, and that you become like the thing you focus most on. Choose wisely therefore, who will hold your gaze? Is it God, Who is Lord even over the ragging sea, or is it to those with the gusto, who really have no control over their very lives, but are reaching out to try define yours and reduce it to levels they can manipulate.
You have a high calling…so walk through this pregnancy. Your calling does involve trampling over snakes and scorpions, but not anyone that Christ died for. It calls for a humble posture, it calls for joy in the midst of the storm, and it calls for searching through the winter for the One that would give you life. Finding Him and then searching again, for the life of the child you bear, the destiny given to you, that you realize is bigger than you, depends on the depth of your surrender. Your high calling is captured in the words of a song by Josh Brandon that I was listening to last night
You raise me up so I can stand on mountains,
You raise me up to walk on stormy seas,
I am strong when I am on your shoulders,
You raise me up to more than I can be.
Mary started her walk with a glorious visit from an Angel… but her destiny involved the risk of death from the beginning. Even though Joseph married and cared for her, it was she that endured the final moments of her pregnancy in labor on the back of a donkey, far away from home, praying for just one miracle – space to be relieved of the wracking pain and deliver the child safely. When the miracle came, it involved laying besides the animals in a stable and opening her most vulnerable self to bring salvation to a world that did not understand the importance of the child in her arms. She began her postnatal journey with this child, scaling a continent to find safety, and her broken heart climaxed when she stood at the foot of a cross, where love for those who hated Him kept him submitted to their mockery, rage, and hilarity at finally getting Him on a spot He could not wiggle from. She must have seen Him upon His resurrection and ascension, but for 34 years, she nurtured a ministry that she knew would break her heart. And Elizabeth, after praying, then probably giving up all hope of a miracle, God gives her a child many must have thought was nuts. He took of to the wilderness, lived on fruits and nuts, and words of his cries seemed so unwise because they rattled the comfort of the authorities of the land, by never letting them stew in their sin. What could have been on Elizabeth’s mind had she known the truth; that the head of the miracle she had waited a lifetime for, would be paraded for the merriment in the courts of those who opposed his ministry?
When you think of your high calling, what is it that comes to mind? Are you confident of your commitment to walk the course, even when the glory of that which you bear is considered by some, as a shame. My comfort is knowing that the strain of the mountains and the fear of still and stormy waters, will be quieted on the shoulders of Him Who would again share His life and death through my own. Have a blessed winter.
vipslit@yahoo.ca
December 13, 2011 Leave a comment
“Now it happened on one of those days, as He taught the people in the temple and preached the gospel, that the chief priests and the scribes, together with the elders, CONFRONTED HIM and spoke to Him, saying, “Tell us, by what authority are You doing these things? Or who is he who gave You this authority?”…So THEY WATCHED HIM, and SENT SPIES who pretended to be righteous, that they might SEIZE …ON HIS WORDS, in order to DELIVER HIM TO THE POWER AND THE AUTHORITY OF THE GOVERNOR…But they could not catch Him in His words in the presence of the people. And they marveled at His answer and kept silent.”
Luke 20
So…we have followed Christ, bearing our crosses daily on our shoulders daily. Each day hoping to see some glory, something of what we had hoped our following would do for us. Still…there have been many wonderful things that we have witnessed, and yet, not everyone has loved Him…and as He PROMISED US, those that wouldn’t Him, wouldn’t us either. But we forgot that too. And are not able to interpret the times? We thought if we followed perfectly, and loved excellently, blessed exceedingly we would be loved by all including the chief priests and scribes…not to mention those ‘monitoring spirits’ the spies. They aim to arrest us and cause us to feel the bite of a power created carnally, so somewhat shame us into subservience to the Governor.
All this is irritating…the questioning on who licensed you, if you are legitimate, why you don’t conform to the standards set previously by the saints marched on…the attempts to conform you to standards and mindsets that you have died so many times to…and we are tempted to think it has happened only to us. When we follow Christ, this is the path to the Cross…and that shabby Cross is the doorway to unimaginable glory – a glory bought by humble surrender to a lesser power than you, leading to a dying and a resurrection and an eternal ministry before The Mighty Throne, laying down the symbols of canal and eternal applause at the Feet of He without Whom, we have come to understand we could not have made it home. Do you understand the season you are in? Be still, THE LORD, HE IS AND REMAINS GOD. Shalom.
vipslit@yahoo.ca
December 8, 2011 Leave a comment
I have noticed to my dismay and heartbreak that many of us take delight in speaking negative remarks, sometimes factual but not necessarily so, about our nations and our relationships. Tongue in cheek wicked [yes I used that word] statements about that which we love and trully want the best for have become interpreted as humour, or as Truth even. In a way it makes us feel like we are freed from the inhibitions and are part of an in-crowd. What we may know and choose to ignore is that our words are life and death. And when two agree over ANYTHING on earth it is santioned in Heaven. AND IT IS DONE FOR US.
So when we agree that our spouses and our leaders are irredeemable and get just one other person to agree with us, it simply becomes fact. More so when we say it to them. When we state that our countries, regions, continents, families, races are a certain way and agree with that notion with finality and get just one other person to agree with us, it becomes fact.
Perhaps your home and your nation are not changing and becoming the best that God created them to be because of your words. Dont look anywhere else, I am addressing YOU. Perhaps…Perhaps your work situation remains as it is because you have spoken life into a decayed situation in order to perpetuate it. We are called to extend God’s Excellence, Purity and shalom in every aspect of our world; to plead His Kingdom to come. If only two of us can agree that it is Truth – then Africa, Asia, Australia, The Islands, The Americas, Europe, every land will reflect God’s Kindgom. Your home will reflect God’s Kingdom. We of cause like Abraham acknowledge that which is against us but dont stop there…we then declare that God Can. After all as Hebrews 11:3 says “By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.”. He made everything we see now, from what cannot be seen.
Lets do something True for our nations and our homes. Lets speak Light into every dark situation. If this month and the next we get into the moment by moment habit of saying in God’s Spirit to every dark situation “Let there be Light’ we will testify to the Light in our lifetimes….and we will make it difficult for the darkness within and around us to remain. Let there be Light in Jesus’ Name in my country Kenya, my continent Africa, in my relationships and in my home and situation. Go on declare light over your region…
AND REPENT for your words in the past that have perpetuated the situation you think yourself above. For God’s Word says in Mathew 112:36 “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken.” A Word to the wise….
vipslit@yahoo.ca