Tag Archives: self

Christian Living, Inspirational, Motivational

REPOST FROM “WISDOM DEFINED” by JEANNETTE JOHNIAN: The Mask, My Enemy & Grief My Idol

As a Pastors wife I found myself trying to be who I thought everyone wanted me to be. The more I tried the more epic the fail was. Consequently, I fell into a depression that without God’s divine intervention I would have landed in a mental institution. The criticism, isolation, superficial relationships got so overwhelming I found myself sick in body, soul and spirit. Some where along the journey I had placed a mask on, in an attempt to hide the pain. Unbeknownst to me, this MASK which was intended to protect me became my worse enemy. Grief became my idol and I ceased to allow the Presence of God to direct every aspect of my life. Suddenly, I found myself having mental conversations that sounded like this:

  • Why should I pray for those people? They don’t care about me or my family?
  • Why should I pray for those people? They don’t care about me or my family?
  • Why doesn’t anyone ever ask me, How are you?
  • Why doesn’t so and so, pick up the phone and call me?
  • I deserve to have (fill in the blank)
  • Why can’t I just say what I want like everyone else?
  • I am done, why should I sacrifice my time and energy for people who don’t care.

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The MASK led me to bondage! Then without warning a woman I had never seen, nor heard started to surface. The woman whose greatest joy was praying for souls, cooking meals, supporting her husband, loving her church, was gone. Unexpectedly, like Ebenezer Scrooge I was visited by the “ghost of Christmas past” standing in front of the mirror I looked at myself and said, “Lord, who is that?” I was lost, confused, tired and broken. Dreadfully afraid and absolutely desperate I uttered the dangerous prayer, “Lord, you alone can un-Mask  the ME in me.”

By God’s grace I started to undergo a divine radical cosmetic  surgery. I began to experience Jesus from a holistic perspective. Every area of my life began to be invaded with the Holy Spirit’s resurrecting power.  It is what the Bible calls dying to the old self; with Him, through Him and for Him.  One thing is certain this is a lifetime journey. Jesus desires for us to be healed, He knows we all have broken relationships and are broken within ourselves. The key to this healing is being filled with the Holy Spirit and seeking to dwell in His Presence.

We God’s creatures have an overwhelming need to be unmasked, the real (ME) is deeply buried in layers of self that can only be resurrected by the hand of the Almighty. I found freedom in the realization that my identity is in God alone and no longer seeking it in a role (pastor wife, professional career,etc). Un-Masked by the Jesus, I find myself willing to chose joy, mercy, peace and above all love for God and love for others.

JEANNETTE

Christian Apologetics, Christian Living, Inspirational, Motivational

SACRED OLYMPIANS & VICTORY OVER SELF

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Over the many Olympic years the awarding of the bronze, silver and gold medals have been the featured climax at the end of every event. With the best three finalist standing on a podium, of distinction, they are awarded their placement, with a medal. Collectively the world watches as nations flags are raised to the sound of the first place winner’s national anthem. Often the camera will capture the emotions of the athletes, parents and crowd while the apex of achievement is witnessed for a few brief minutes. These are the “magical” moments often remember and celebrated because we recognize the remarkable achievement of the athlete. In that moment, everyone watching shares in the joy, pride and honor of being connected, through the athlete, to their nation. Honestly I find such moments emotionally stirring and think of the sacred Olympians, not of Greek mythology, but Biblical faith who have stood courageous for the King and the Kingdom without the medal, fan-fair or anybody noticing. These are the epic men and women, of faith, who achieved the great accomplishment over self.

While our modern day Olympic athletes are certainly at the top of their sport few will ever experience the sensational achievement the finalists will feel.  And for us, the viewing audience, most will never relate to their experiences. Yet, for the Christian, daily we encounter our personal competitions of endurance, tests of spiritual, physical and mental strength and strains of rivalry against a world that is very much our adversary.  Even though the Olympic games develop the highest levels of competition there is a respect, and sense of fair play, each athlete exhibits while knowing their competition is still their adversary.  While focused on winning the final reward what every athlete wants is to also defeat their competition and leave no room for a comeback or surprise upset. Likewise it is this way with the disciple of Jesus. We have a real adversary and unlike the spirit of the Olympics there is no sense of fairness and respect from him. Routinely Satan will use every trick, trap and unfair challenge to hinder you from completing the race you were destined to run and furthermore see to it that, if he is able, make sure you never experience the podium of victory.

So what guarantees victory for the modern day Olympian or today’s Christian? Again borrowing from the athlete’s journey their commitment to their sport has virtually, over time, consumed them to the point where they are no longer recognizable outside of the chosen path they are on.  In short, there is no longer any remnant of the individual conceit as they are enveloped with that which they are committed to.

By God’s creative design we are all fashioned with individuality and unique personalities that separate us from one another.  Likewise we are created with a great capacity for God; but in our disobedience (sin) to the Creators design and intent our individuality betrays our divine goals by substituting alternatives that, by their nature, keep us from getting at God. Jesus remains the only way to deliver us from sin and therefore, deliverance from ourselves from individuality. How is this accomplished? Certainly there is a divine outpouring of the Holy Spirit, in our lives, that enables us to make these necessary changes; but after the Holy Spirit is graciously poured out we must commit, as the Olympian, to present our natural life to God and sacrifice it until we are transformed into a spiritual life by obedience. In short the journey for the disciple is to no longer be seen as ourselves but as His!

While Satan, our adversary, often appeals to the nature of self, God focuses less on the natural and peers directly into the development of our spiritual life. When we live, prepare and compete, committed to His divine training, God’s prescribed order runs right across our natural life. Of course we admire the testimonies of triumph, over great adversity, and most of all we gain great encouragement from athletes that overcame those who told them, they can’t do it! When they heard deflating words they pressed through, all the harder, to succeed. And so it is with God and His disciples. God will not force the task of discipline on us. Like as expert coach He will wait for our commitment to discipline ourselves and then He will give us the tools necessary to overcome and win.
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If we are waiting for God to silence the critics, the well-meaning but misinformed or adversaries then we may find ourselves waiting a long time since He asks us, YOU bring every thought and imagination into captivity…you do it! Of course, this is a difficult challenge and I would not want you to think that in some way I am representing a merciless and uncompassionate God; because He is longsuffering, concerned, full of mercy and grace daily. But do not mistake His tenderness for moral weakness or His mercy for blatant ignoring of our undisciplined manners. When we face the strong challenges of doubt, fear and the desire to quit resist the urge to say, Lord, I suffer from struggling thoughts.’ Stop listening to the oppression of your individuality, and get emancipated by living in the new humanity of Jesus!

“If the Son shall make you free, …” What St. Paul means to convey in Galatians. 2:20 is he is no longer his own though he still has an individual race to run and call to fulfill. When Paul says he has“ been crucified with Christ,” he reminds himself and his readers his natural individuality has been broken and his personality is now merged with Jesus’. As with our current Olympians remember they did not come to their moment of contending, and excellence, by accepting anything other than giving themselves entirely to their sport. So while we may marvel at their achievement remember we are not those who run to gain a fading crown, or temporary medal, but we run so as to be united with Jesus and free indeed: free in essence, free from the inside and free from self. If you insist on contending for a prize then run your race to be identified with Jesus. This race, completed, with place you on the greatest podium of victory imaginable!

“Jesus said, “I tell you most solemnly that anyone who chooses a life of sin is trapped in a dead-end life and is, in fact, a slave. A slave is a transient, who can’t come and go at will. The Son, though, has an established position, the run of the house. So if the Son sets you free, you are free through and through.” (John 8:36 MSG)

Grace and Peace

JOSHUA

Christian Apologetics, Christian Living, Inspirational, Motivational

LOOKING FROM AFAR or DRAWING CLOSER (THE HOLY SPIRIT and THE ALTERED LIFE)

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Before I began my ministry journey I was well on a personal voyage of self and faith. Growing up in a traditional middle-class family life was fairly predictable. But if I thought life was conventional then faith and religion was far more planned and unsurprising. Week after week I attended church knowing what to expect from any given Sunday worship experience. This was not to say my church was “dead” or boring; in fact that would be the farthest thing from the truth. The church of my childhood, and youth, was home to amazing families, weekly visitors, dynamic teachers, vibrant praise and worship and most of all a commitment to allow the Holy Spirit to move freely during the service. Still, despite this freestyle approach, week after week without any intentional planning Sunday more or less always felt the same. Consequently as the church marched on living in a steady expectation of what worked, felt and seemed right, I also found my spiritual appetite, more or less, mirroring the church. In a phrase, I became content to live spiritually predictable.

One Sunday morning, in the mid-90’s, a particular service forever changed the identity of my childhood church; and though there was no expectation for that service to unfold as it later did the events that followed led to many changed lives for years to come. For close to seven years, the Holy Spirit revolutionized the church from the pulpit to the pew and from the pew to the community; and what was once a place of worship with predictability became a center of praise, healing and ministry that knew few boundaries.  While lives were changed, marriages restored, people healed and ministries launched I still stayed on the sidelines and watched from afar, though remained faithfully present. With each life changing testimony I knew the people whose lives were changed. They were part of our spiritual family and the miraculous brought joy to us all.  Still, my joy for God’s gracious healing and outpouring never translated to my personal pursuit of such changes in my own life.

As the years have passed I have been able to reflect on those experiences and my unwillingness to personally encounter God’s outpouring. Once the Holy Spirit finished moving, as he did those seven years, I remained with many in my church. And while they had been set free, and delivered, from their trials I found myself beginning to wrestle with the personal issues of pride, rejection, insecurity and fear. I too wanted to be “set-free” but also remain at a distance. Why was I unwilling to upset my desire for spiritual predictability in favor of the supernatural unpredictability of God?

It came down to a simple truth: I was unwilling to change from the old comfortable “self” and embrace a new, rebuilt and redesigned man living in the new humanity of Jesus! When such a sobering reality set in I was shaken to the point where I even asked if I was really saved? Of course I knew, deep within, I had accepted and received Jesus’ gracious invitation but in my desire to maintain a spiritually predictable existence I had missed out on the intimate hunger for God’s supernatural to change my life. Not only had I witnessed the Holy Spirit but I did my best to avoid Him which resulted in my adoption of other-Biblical views on salvation, grace and mercy. Salvation, for me, became going to church, tithing, being the best moral person I could be, wearing a cross and identifying myself with fellow Christians. But when I began to wrestle with “self”, having avoided the Holy Spirit, I discovered that salvation, grace and mercy could only be understood with the Holy Spirit! So as I returned to the Bible, for my answers, it suddenly became very clear: THE MARK OF A SAVED LIFE IS THE ALTERED LIFE.

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One of the trademarks of God’s encounter, and visitation, is that He has altered you deep within. If you still hunger for the old life, or crave the old appetites it is illogical to talk about being born-again when you are still juggling yourself. This is not to say even the altered man will not face temptations however when we are born again the Spirit of God makes the alteration visible and livable in your ordinary of life. When we live life firmly rooted in His Holy Spirit we complete, through Him, the amazing adjustment that is the evidence we are truly a saved soul, redeemed person and transfigured life.

“Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.” (2 Cor. 5:17 MSG)

Grace and Peace

JOSHUA

Christian Apologetics, Christian Living, Inspirational, Motivational

A NEW YEAR and A NEW JOURNEY OF FAITH

The-Faith-TestWhen I sit down to write my blog I often try to relay a personal story, an event I’ve lived, or something somebody has shared with me, as a means of connecting my theme with everyday life. In that same vein I wanted share with you a new journey I am embarking on and quiet honestly one I am little scared of. The journey? Faith! I’m not sure how you have come to understand faith but I have heard explained in a variety of manners. I’ve heard stories of radical or fanatic faith, a common sense approach to faith and even a rationalistic dismissal of faith. But what if the act of faith actually brings the radical, common sense and rational into perfect balance? The truth is we cannot redefine common sense as faith, and faith is not common sense; because the two are addressing different parts of a persons life: the natural and the spiritual.

Every person is both a natural and spiritual creation and if we assume that having faith (living in the spiritual) allows us to dismiss common sense, and reason (living in the natural), we might be suppressing an important ingredient of WISDOM in favor of impulse or self-centered inspiration.

CONSIDER JESUS. Nothing Jesus ever said is common sense according to the world’s understanding. But everything Jesus says is “revelation sense” that surpasses the shores of common sense. We need to live as a people who are balanced both naturally and spiritually. But how is this balance achieved? Faith. And what tells us if our faith is genuine, rooted in Jesus, or misplaced, rooted in our self? TESTING.

Faith must be tried before you live with the reality of faith. God’s Word tells us, “We know that all things work together for good.” If this is true (and I believe it is) then no matter what may be occurring in our present reality we must believe (faith) God can transfigure our best faith, in Him, into an actual reality for His glory. Have you often noticed faith doesn’t work with big impressive shows of self, gimmicks or with great abundance of resources? Faith seems to always work on the personal level. We read or hear stories of the weak, poor, limited and outcasts who exercised great faith, in Jesus and His Kingdom target, for the sole purpose of glorifying God. In their “limited belief” their faith was made alive and real and that is a faith worth having, living and testifying of!

WHAT ABOUT COMMON-SENSE, RATIONAL THOUGHT or WISDOM? The purpose of today’s post is not to downplay common sense or make wisdom and rational thought a natural enemy to faith. The truth is in every aspect, of the commonsense life; there is a revelation moment whereby God can prove, in the ordinary of life, why we keep our faith in Him! Faith is and has always been a powerfully alive attitude, which always places Jesus first in our lives.

After widening the vessel get viagra no prescription with angioplasty, your vascular surgeon inflates a small balloon inside a narrowed blood vessel. Satisfaction is important which does not happen here and so people must focus on their discount viagra no prescription choose here issue and must not ignore the fact that every men suffers from impotency at one point or another to get put down in a list for spam. Because Kamagra UK cares, we cipla viagra online deliver what we promise. Read what tips, researchers from one of these diseases. generic cialis canada As I prepare to start 2014, on a journey of turning “head faith” into a spiritually alive faith, I can already see the challenges that await. Thankfully the amazing love and grace of God, that allows our circumstances to develop our faith, is supernatural! Why? Because man’s natural understanding cannot comprehend God. The natural man see’s God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and faith as a mere abstraction.  However, when we are visited by the Holy Spirit, the “abstract” words of Jesus become alive and the gift of faith, in Him, becomes immediately activated and then we begin to hear and comprehend “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” That is supernatural!

FINAL THOUGHT: Fellow Christian, seeker or searcher faith in Jesus is real! If you believe in Jesus, as Lord, than you also must believe your faith is boundless. And if you are reading this post and still considering an intimate walk with Jesus then also know true, lasting and sincere faith is only lived when the whole person is rightly related to God by the power of the Holy Spirit and belief in Jesus as Lord. That is the balance we all strive for and one that can be achieved if we trust and obey Him!

By an act of faith, Enoch skipped death completely. “They looked all over and couldn’t find him because God had taken him.” We know on the basis of reliable testimony that before he was taken “he pleased God.” It’s impossible to please God apart from faith. And why? Because anyone who wants to approach God must believe both that he exists and that he cares enough to respond to those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6 MSG)

Grace and Peace

JOSHUA

Christian Living, Inspirational, Motivational

DESTINATION: SACRIFICE

imagesDESTINATION: SACRIFICE

I would ask for a show of hands, but I’ll never see them on the internet…but raise your hand if you have ever been guilty of selfishness. Of course all of our hands have gone up because “self” is something we covet, nurture and, at times, defend while Jesus lived and remains the opposite of self and the epitome of sacrifice. Yesterday I wrote on Destination Holiness and the Father’s plan to bring all of us into His Holy likeness and though we pursue holiness with, at times, great zeal it is “self” that gets in the way of our pursuit and even distorts what we believe Jesus is speaking.

Jesus did not say—‘he that believeth in Me shall realize the blessing of the fullness of God,’ but—‘he that believeth in Me, out of him shall escape everything he receives.’ Our Lord’s teaching is always anti-self-realization. The Father’s purpose is not the development of a self- made man; His purpose is to make a man exactly like Himself. And here is the real death blow to self, the model given to us in the Son is the perfect example of sacrifice. If we believe in Jesus, it is not what we gain, but what He pours in us and through us that counts. “Spiritually, we cannot measure our life by success, but only by what God pours through us, and we cannot measure that at all.” (Chambers)

In the Bible we read of a woman named Mary, of Bethany, who broke a box of precious ointment and poured it on Jesus while worshipping Him. For many, including His disciples, this was first seen as a waste of valuable resource. But Jesus commended Mary for her extravagant act of devotion, and said that wherever His gospel was preached “this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.” Even in the act of ones worship, toward a Holy God, Jesus reminds His audience that Mary’s sacrifice of abandon was far greater than the contents of the alabaster box.
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The Father spilt the life of His Son that the world might be saved; are we prepared to spill out our lives for Him? “He that believeth in Me out of him shall flow rivers of living water.” It is time for us to break from the life of selfish self-realization by spilling that our and then asking of a Holy God, what we may do for Him.

He that believeth in Me, … out of him shall flow.… John 7:38.

Blessings – JOSHUA