My first blog

Last night at work I was trying to decide what 'ultimate' faith might be like.

Remember where Jesus says "such great faith I have not seen..."
But imagine the centurion had faith to know that God could see his servant all the time.
And his servant could not be sick unless God had allowed him to be.
And so, through faith, didn't ask God to reverse what He had allowed.

Imagine finding out you've got cancer, but knowing for certain this hasn't come upon you without God allowing it to be so, and trusting completely in God's Love for you, and having zero emotional reaction to the cancer.

And if your friend wins the lottery and gives you a million, again, no emotional reaction.

And imagine 100% believing that God, if He wanted to, could pluck you out of the world right now and put you in paradise for 5 minutes while He rewinds the whole of creation 10 years, and then put you back onto the earth.

And so, if we could achieve that kind of faith, then the worst atrocities should cause no emotional reaction in us, because God has it all covered, and, if He wanted to, He could instantly supply endless food to all starving children.

So, then, why doesn't He feed them?
Is it perhaps to see what we, His children, will do with all the Lazarus's at our gate, according to the capacity that He has given us?

It seems that Love grows inside our soul like a tree.
And its growth depends on us maintaining the umbilical-cord of faith. (or the invisible wi-fi hook-up of faith)

And that would seem to me to be the whole point of this Creation,
That, given the opportunity to grow to full maturity in Love through faith in Jesus Christ, we do.

And so in the end, once the tree is mature, we can put away the scaffolding of our Christianity, and freely pour out love into the world, like pouring water on the ground, which always fills the holes nearest to it first, selflessly giving ourselves away as servant of all.

So, today I went out into the big wide world wearing my 'Jesus' T-shirt.

And a man who you wouldn't let look after your kids came to me and asked me if I was a Christian.

If anyone wants to know the rest of this story (which is fairly boring), just ask.



I don't think there can ever be too many smiley-faces in this world!

I like to drink beer and play poker and listen to pop-songs on YouTube.
I wish I didn't communicate with people when drunk.
because I can be challenging and difficult and demand to be treated fairly according to my perception of 'fairness' at the time, which might be very faulty.

Perhaps it is immediately, fundamentally wrong to just 'assume' that our body and our life is ours to freely do with as we choose.

Certainly there doesn't seem to be any immediate penalty to ignoring the Lazarus at our gate.
And there always is a Lazarus at our gate.
And animal instincts make animals fight against 'odd' members of their species.
But we do not have to be animals.

People with abundance like to live their happy lives and ignore Lazarus, 'casting in from their abundance', for their own sake, to ease their own conscience.
Society and law is even geared to protecting their happy lives, as though everything is all 'fair' and 'ok' and all is 'as it should be', Just forget the Lazarus.

And maybe beer, poker and YouTube is just my own personal acceptance of the 'happy-life'-deal which says "the system is ok, let's continue to keep ourselves happily distracted from Lazarus, until we die."

But,

Perhaps we need to wake-up, and perhaps we need to say...
- I cannot rightfully claim to own my body or its days,
and the truth is I simply find myself to be a steward of them.
- I don't know how I came to be here, or what, if anything, will happen to me after I leave this place.
- I recognize many are suffering, and I do not want to turn my back on their misery, and, as much as I have the capacity to relieve their suffering, I would like to do so. It seems 'right' to do so.

Perhaps, greater Love hath no man than he lay down his life for those who are suffering.

And loneliness is a very great form of suffering.
many starving people are not alone.
many in pain are not alone.
many with a terminal-illness are not alone.
simply because I work with many people who accept me, I am not alone.
Lonely people are starving, for the simple bread of company.

Do not address the problems with your behavior, but, rather, first clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

embracing stewardship.

we are all unjust stewards.

we have been given stewardship of a body and days in which to show our true-colours.

we have no true foundation to assume ownership of our bodies or days.
we simply do so because we follow the pattern of those around us.

but if we accept we don't 'own' them, then we can humbly and joyfully take stewardship of them.

and the first thing to do might be to start looking after them properly. healthy foods, adequate sleep and so forth.

and then, seeing the misery in other people's lives we can employ our body and days to minister to their needs according to the capacity we have.

and if we see others who live indulgently and neglect the misery of others we can go to them and suggest they reduce their own debt of unjust-stewardship by some proportion.

==================
imagine we loved playing poker and drinking beer.
and imagine we had an autistic neighbour called lazarus who was in misery and whose only joy was to be read one particular children's story over and over again.

if we believe we 'own' our body and days then we may through pity read to him occassionally to ease our own conscience, but with some resentment and no true joy.

but, if we believe we are only stewards of another man's things, and if we compare, reading to lazarus for 10 hours a week and also having the freedom to go for walks in the countryside with not existing at all or being confined to a small prison cell for 24 hours a day, then we might find the true joy of stewardship.

"By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another." - ( John 13:35 )

The Will of God is that every soul should love both Him and every other soul, just as He loves all of them.
But you cannot make someone love you by force.
So God made a way for us to freely choose to have genuine love for both Him and every other soul.
And that Way is to do the hard work of belief in Jesus.

If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. - ( 1 John 4:20 )

And they too will reply, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’
Then the King will answer, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.’ ( Matthew 25:44&45 )

If someone we loved was hungry or lonely, wouldn't we minister to their needs?
And so if there are people we won't do this for, isn't that proof we don't love them?

"By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another." - ( John 13:35 )

The more we do the work of belief, the more our joy will come from love and not the world.

Unless we have entered by the narrow gate we don't 'know' God.

Instead we 'know' good and evil, as a result of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

in the day Adam and Eve ate of that fruit we were removed from the presence of God, which is to 'know' Him and have Life.

and, so, in the day they ate of it they truly did die, though their bodies were still alive.
and so our current state is also 'dead'.

and, back then, the tree of life, which can restore us, was barred from us.

and now we have all seen for ourselves what being dead does for mankind and the earth.
we truly now 'know' good and evil.

and now God has made a way for us to eat from the tree of Life, and to have 'eternal Life' and to 'know Him' and to 'have' Love.
And that way is to eat, breathe and live Jesus Christ.
And if we endure at this, we will pass into Life and 'know' God.

God has placed the tree of life in our midst, but, just as Adam and Eve chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so, we must choose to eat from the fruit of the tree of Life.
And if we don't eat that fruit, we thereby testify that this world which is under the sway of the wicked one is preferable to us, and we prefer darkness rather than Light.

Dear brethren, let us gorge ourselves on Jesus Christ today and every day that we may escape having that testimony as we draw our final breath!

Father in heaven, please open our eyes wide to the truth and give us the time we need to grow into Life through Your Son Jesus Christ.

after we have done all that was asked of us, which is to do the hard work of belief in Jesus until we have gone in and gone out and found pasture,

then, call ourselves unprofitable servants.

the will of God is our sanctification, and no doubt our sanctification is a great joy to Him,
but, ultimately, we have not made Him a profit.
we ourselves have become more through growth in love,
but He has not become more than He was.

when we realize He didn't 'need' us to read a book of fairy-tales to an autistic man, because He, in the blink of an eye could change that man's brain to the most well-functioning brain on the planet if He wanted to,
but rather, He has given us the privilege to exist and the privilege to reap great joy by knowing for ourselves the flow of Love through us, manifesting compassion, patience and all His other virtues into the world.

It is grasping this truth which sets us free,
and that, of ourselves we are nothing, and are stewards only.
And so, we should conduct ourselves properly in this truth that we find ourselves in.

It is grasping this truth which makes the inside of the cup clean, and therefore naturally the outside is made clean too.

it is our duty to keep mindful of this truth.

And as well as not knowing why we find ourselves here with a body and days, we don't know how many days we have left. nobody is promised tomorrow, and it is healthy to keep mindful of this also. We should always conduct ourselves today as though we knew we were meeting God tomorrow.

be servants who are always waiting and watching for His return.

It is interesting that there exists an almost "passive" love that we have (or I have seen it in other believers at least) for others. I think this passive love must be cultivated into an "active" love.

I can passively care about people and want good things for them, but I have to actively actuate it. NO ONE loves like the Lord, but as we ask for new opportunities and grow in his love, I have found that my heart is big enough to look past some rather egregious things. It sounded all well and good to "love the sinner, not the sin" when I was younger...a tad cliche. Walking it out, and loving people past their sin, almost "not seeing it"...is something The Lord is still working on me with