You get hammered in life, but you get hammered into interesting shapes.
Like most, I'd prefer my blessings to come without disguises! And then Life happened.......
A son discovering the reality of God as his Father.
Words that do not become flesh in us remain "just words." They have no power to affect our lives. If someone says, "I love you," without any deep emotion, the words do more harm than good. But if these same words are spoken from the heart, they can create new life.
It is important that we keep in touch with the source of our words. Our great temptation is to become "pleasers," people who say the right words to please others but whose words have no roots in their interior lives. We have to keep making sure our words are rooted in our hearts. The best way to do that is in prayerful silence.
The Cross of Christ was a triumph for the Son of Man. It was not only a sign that our Lord had triumphed, but that He had triumphed to save the human race. Because of what the Son of Man went through, every human being has been provided with a way of access into the very presence of God.
'Until the crisis-dis-illusionments come into our lives, the greater-higher purposes of the Father remain hidden.' (totally obscure to us)
No assembly, no church, no movement, no testimony, no fellowship, is justified in its existence from God's standpoint except insofar as Christ is expressed by it.
We who preach the gospel must not think of ourselves as public relations agents sent to establish good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
The Dominion of Opinion Make it your aim to be one in the Spirit, and you will be bound together in peace. There is one Body and one Spirit, just as it was to one hope you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is the one over all, the one working through all and the one living in all. (Eph. 4:2-6 Phillips)
I would be very interested in any feed back regarding this article by Milt Rodriguez from his blog.
Religion is an insidious and diabolical attempt to establish an identity independently from the creator himself. There never has been nor will there ever be anything within the spawn of religion that remotely has anything to do with being the “church” which IS His body. I grow weary of the erroneous notion of those re-birthed by God the Father emphatically saying or implying they have left the “church”, what they have left is an entity fostered out of the sick madness of one known as Satan who inspired the first man to embrace, to taste his doctrine of, “you shall be as gods” (you shall not surely die.
On the other hand I love where in scripture it says, “that he Jesus by the grace of God should taste death for every man.” Simply having exited the bondage of a religious establishment is not synonymous with now being free, anymore than the Jews led out of Egypt into the wilderness sadly discovered that the ingrained matrix of religion, that which had polluted there former captors was very much a fixed identity within their hearts.
The tiniest iota of law commingled with grace becomes the food rooted in the doctrines and teaching of demons. A little leaven will totally corrupt just as a mixture of half truths is in reality a recipe for disaster. Men seem to love religion and its many expressions; it is no different today than it was in the very beginning of the church, here is but one example where Paul is imploring the believers to take heed to what is going on right under their nose. “For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves! For you bear it if someone makes slaves of you, or devours you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that!"
Also here where Paul is speaking to the church, “Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ's hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.”
The harnesses that men have in mind for the believer who has vacated the premises of any religious establishment have no idea of how many other entrapment's yet await him, not so much from without, but from within!
For those wondering where Rich is, well I'm still here. It's not that I have nothing to write about or share, quite the opposite, I have way too much to write about. I'm simply in awe of my loving heavenly Father and how he continues to burst through the veil of the seen and continues to open the eyes of my heart to gaze upon the unseen which is so much more real than that which is here today but then gone.
Something has undeniably happened and continues to be happening deep within my heart, as I recently turned the corner and discovered I was now 60.
Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
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The Dominion of Opinion
