DAVID'S TO-DO LIST

 

Seems like, when it comes to God, we have a tendency to think we get to do all the receiving from Him. After all, we can't "earn" our salvation, or "work" for our salvation. All that's left is for us to sit back and rake in the blessings. 

I think maybe there are some maintenance steps that we need to be aware of that will aid us in not drifting away (see Hebrews 2:1 and 3). i have found that when I get lax in my daily walk, I tend to get off the road and into the weeds. At first the weeds are not any trouble to  navigate. But the farther I get away from the road, the higher and deeper the weeds get until I can't tell which way is up. Then I find myself doing a lot of "Oh God...Oh God....Oh God" praying.

I love Psalm 37. To me it is a check list of things I need to do and be aware of in my daily life. The very first verse knocks the ball out of the park, so to speak. David begins the chapter by saying three little words that plague us all....Do Not Fret. Do not worry. Do not let your focus be drawn away from God. O.k....we're off with a roar as we move through the next few verses.

Oh yeah...just a matter of reminding you, why would we be told "not to fret" unless God knows that we will. So it's not so much the fact that we find ourselves in a place of worry or fretting as it is taking captive the worry and giving it to God.

The very next verse, after telling us not to worry, David writes, "Trust in the Lord." Isn't that the remedy for worrying? I think maybe yes. Trusting God that no matter what we may face, He has it. He is in control. 

After we begin trusting God, David writes that we are to "do good." Kind of an open ended statement and doesn't give a lot of direction, but as I see it, doing good means that you get outside yourself and point your efforts to others.

Next we read where David wrote "Dwell in the land." Of course this is a reference to the place that God had provided for Israel to live. Now we are not called to a promised land, but we are called to a promised life. Here is where we are to dwell, and not allow ourselves to be drawn away and enticed by the world.

Feed on His faithfulness is the next directive. Take the faithfulness of God into your Spirit as you read Scripture. In fact, the entire Bible is about a God who is always faithful to His word, and a people who aren't. Let the thought of His promises and blessings fill your thoughts.....flood your heart....and take root in your mind. Give no room for the things of this world. I know...easy to say, hard to do. Maybe the reason it is so hard is that we keep trying in our own flesh, strength, ability and effort instead of resting in God.

Gotta run...I'll try and finish the rest of Ps. 37 tomorrow.

God on you.....

Michael b.

I AM AN OLD WINESKIN

 

I'm an old wineskin.

When we read the passage from Luke 5, where Jesus talks about old patches and old wineskin's, we tend to discard the old. Jesus even says that the New and Old cannot mingle. It doesn't work. But no where does he say that the Old is not fit for consumption.
Now before you go all theological on me, I do understand that the passage in Luke is talking about the New covenant coming to replace the old one.

But this morning, I think God will give me liberty to apply it in a different way. Apply it to something that is relevant in my life today.

The wine or call on my life has been born from two different movements that affected me tremendously.

The Jesus people movement that took place in the late 60's....

and the renewal that happened back in the early 90's.

Both of these visitations by God's Holy Spirit had a tremendous impact on my life and shaped it so that who I am today is a by product of those times.

When I say "impact" that is truly what I mean.

It shaped my view of God and His Holy Spirit.
It introduced me to the works of Christ and that I was called to "do the stuff" as John Wimber use to say.

My wine has been aging for a number of years.
Anyone who knows anything about wine knows that aged wine is richer and fuller.

Does that mean we should ignore or discount what God is doing today?
Never.

Recognize God at work and bless it.

Recognize that others are having the wineskin's filled with the wonderful presence of the Holy Spirit.

But it doesn't mean that your wineskin has lost it viability or importance.

It doesn't mean that you need to discard what God has filled you with to run after something new.

Here's the tricky part.
If God so leads you to be filled with this "NEW" wine, then go drink it up.

But only if God is leading.
Don't let your taste or your own desire be the motivating factor that would cause you to chase this.

If you have been called to drink this new wine, this fresh move of His Spirit, then do so in humility.

Don't lash out at those who have come before you as being of no relevance.

A great price was paid by a lot of people so that you could, in fact, drink this new wine.
Honor those who have come before you for their sacrifice and diligence in keeping the wine and not wasting it.

Pay homage to those who are filled with the old wine.

They haven't carried it for this much time and not grown in wisdom and maturity.

Yes sir! I'm an old wineskin and proud of it.
My wineskin still bulges with the fruit of the Holy Spirit working in me.
I continue to pour from my wineskin on those who are broken and hurting.
I pour liberally not afraid of running out or being selfish with it.

Yes sir! I'm an old wineskin.

God on you....

mb

IS YOUR TRUST DETERMINED BY YOUR CIRCUMSTACES

 

O.k......Now I am going to include myself in this one because it is such a sneaky idea that seems to invade every human heart. What is this heinous idea?

The idea that if things are going good in our life (money in bank, cars are not breaking down, no one sick in the family) then we have God's favor resting on us. But let things go South, and we automatically put the blame on our enemy, the devil.

Well, what if we weren't listening and obeying God like we should have, and He put roadblocks, stumbling blocks, and all manner of blocks in our way to keep us from heading in the wrong direction? Does God really move in this manner?

Reading in Scripture, I see where Paul had a desire to go to Macedonia. God had other plans and would not let Paul go. "But Lord, we could do such good work for you there!," I could hear Paul reply. Could Paul have gotten up and headed on off to Macedonia? Probably. But the trip would not have been under the grace and direction of God.

I hear a lot of folks proudly proclaim, "I believe in God." But you don't hear too many shout out, "I believe God!". In other words, no matter what God may say (especially when it goes against the grain of what we want) I will believe Him. I will follow His direction. I will give no place for my flesh. I will not compromise with those dark voices that try to entice me to seek my own way, rather than follow God.

very familiar passage: Proverbs 3:5-6:  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not depend on your own understanding. Trust in!! Trust in the Lord. First off, Jesus has to be Lord of your life. Your life has to be submitted to Him and His good plans for you. There are two words that can never go together.....NO LORD!" The moment you say "No" is the moment He is no longer Lord. You have pushed Him aside to become Lord of your own life.

Trust in the Lord.........Trust in what He says to you.....Trust in what you read in Scripture.....Trust in His plans for your life. Trust when everything in your life is going great.....and trust when it seems like the wheels are coming off of your life. In the dark times, trust and hold His hand a little tighter.

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Greene Street Letters: Until nex time....God on you!

Michael b.

I'M IN CONTROL! YEAH...RIGHT

 

STEP # 7 -  We humbly asked Him (God) to remove our shortcomings.

Step # 7 really flies in the face of addiction. Addiction is all about control.
Controlling others...
Controlling events...
Controlling the past as well as the future, with no thought about today.
Now here in Step # 7 we see the word "Humble."
Humble?
What does that mean......."humble"?
"I don't know if I like that word or not."
When some people think of being humble or the act of humbling themselves, they see it as a state of defeat. I have lost and now I must humble myself. I have to grovel and beg someone for something. I must be humble.
Well, that may be the way you see humble, but not me.

Humble means to agree with God who God says I am. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Humble means I have the ability to follow directions.
Humble means I can be in a crowd and..........be in a crowd. I don't have to stick out or be the center of attention. I am humble.
Being humble is at the heart of being powerless.
I no longer have to be in control, because the evidence of my life shows that I am incapable of controlling anything. I live under the self-delusion that I am in control.
Here's the tricky part.
We have become so use to calling the shots, that we will ask for God's help as long as he does it the way we want it done, on our terms.  Well......guess what? God doesn't work that way. That is why being humble is so important.

I love the story from Jeremiah18:1-6. This kind of highlights what i refer to as "The Divine Pecking Order." In other words, God is God...he's in charge....I'm not.
Let's take a look at the passage from Jeremiah.
The LORD gave another message to Jeremiah. He said, God down to the shop where clay pots and jars are made. I will speak to you while you are there. So I did as he told me and found the potter working at his wheel. But the jar he was making did not turn out as he had hoped, so the potter squashed the jar into a lump of clay and started again.
God is the potter and, you guessed it, I'm the lump of clay.
God has plans and intentions for me, to shape me and mold me.
I don't like his plans, so I become stiff and unyielding to him.
God wants me to be a flower vase. Me? I want to be a cereal bowl.
Who wins?
No brainer. God! I must humble myself as I work the steps and allow God to remove all my shortcomings. One thing that the step doesn't tell you is that whenever God removes something.............he always puts something back better than the original. God doesn't simply leave me empty handed. The more I can see that this entire process is for my good...then I can choose to humble myself and allow God to work in me.

Again we look to Jeremiah 17.
This is what the LORD says, "Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans and turn their hearts away from the LORD." Looking to our own strength and ability to bring change to our hearts. Like I always say....."If Step # 1 states that I am the problem....the how can I also be the solution? EUREKA! I can't. Enter....HUMBLE! I turn to God and Step# 7 is on. Removal kicks in and I continue on through the Steps.

Turning our life over to God means that we are placing our hope and confidence in him instead of people. People who can disappoint us. When I look to my own ability or strength to make my recovery work, it like expecting a tree to grow and flourish in a barren desert.

Turn loose....
Humble yourself....
Let God!

God on you....
Thanks for stopping by today. I mean it!

mb

THEM THAR THOUGHT WARS

 

Galatians 5:16-17
So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves. The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other, so you are not free to carry out your good intentions.

Have you ever had one of those days where life is a constant war that seems to be taking place inside of you?
A day where doubt, fear, uncertainty seemed to have grabbed you by the throat and all three of them are  screaming, "Listen to me!!!".
Kind of hard to move forward when such is happening.

Funny part is that your heart is telling you something contrary to what your mind is saying.
The heart is communicating truth to you.
It may come in the form of a verse that you suddenly remember....
Or something someone else may have told you in the past that helped you....
No matter which, it is as though the mine is telling you to discount what the heart says.
"Pay no heed to what your heart is saying!" So you have this struggle between mind (sinful nature/ flesh / Paul refers to it as the "OLD MAN"....and your heart. Now of course when I speak of your heart, I am not referring to the muscle that keeps life's rhythm, in your chest. I am referring to the very core of your being. The center of who you really are. The place of the spirit, intellect, emotion, and world view of life. 

Yesterday was a day where I was battered on every side by doubt. Really had no reason for such to be happening, it just was. Every time a wave of thoughts would come to knock me off my feet, I would recite a verse.  One wave would consist of  "Who do you think you're fooling...you're not really a follower of Jesus. If you were, you'd be kinder and more attentive to the needs of others." I would counter with Ephesians 4:21-23 - Throw off  your old sinful nature and your former way of life (which includes the former way of thinking), which is corrupted by lust and deception. Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God----truly righteous and holy.

Hannah Whitall Smith, in her book The Christian's Secret To A Happy Life, writes "Our fight is to be a fight of faith, and the moment we let in doubts and fear, our fight ceases, and our rebellion begins." A rebellion that will encourage us to not listen to the Holy Spirit, but rather our sin nature. Remember what Paul wrote in Ephesians 4..."Do not give the devil a foothold." In other words, do not let him rent space in your mind. God has provided for us, through His Holy Spirit, power to deal with these wrong thoughts that seek to pull us away from following Him.

II Corinthians 10:4-5
For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every though into captivity to the obedience of Christ.
Did you catch that?
Bringing every thought (and what falls under every "every"? Why every thing, of course)
into captivity...in other words,  through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit at work in us, we have the authority AND THE POWER, to take our thoughts captive and  not allow them to roll around unopposed in our brains. Now that is some kind of good stuff. So the next time you get beat up by your old nature trying to draw you into some kind of spiritual funk....rise up and say, "NOPE! Ain't gonna happen."

God on you....
mbb

SAVE US FROM OUR PAIN

 

There seems to be two camps among the faithful.

One is about a pain-free God.

The other is about a pain-filled God.
I think maybe the real truth of the matter is found somewhere in the middle.
That there is a God who leads His children through what we have come to know as "Life".
Life happens.
It's messy.
It's fun.
It's happy and sad (sometimes at the same time).
It's hard and you want to run away.
It's satisfying and you want to live forever.
It's call life.
And in the middle of it is this voice. The voice of the Lord bidding (calling) those who would, come. Simply come to Him.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote......Christ bids us to come and die. Nothing more. For in the dying we find true life. A call to simply follow Him.  Don't forget that in Psalm 23 David wrote that "God lead." Sometimes by still waters where we can find rest. Sometimes through the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death. The main thing to remember is that no matter where life is taking us, if we follow Him, He is there to lead us through whatever we may face.


Upon the shoulders of this one we call CHRIST....resides the Spirit of the Lord. He was chosen and sent here to this world to preach the gospel to the poor. Poor in material possessions and poor in spirit. He was sent and empowered to heal the brokenhearted. Those who had lost hope and wandered aimlessly at the mercy of the master of this world.


Jesus was sent to proclaim with a loud voice and with deeds and signs that let it be known beyond any doubt that God had, in fact, invaded time and space and declared war on the kingdom of darkness.


Jesus came empowered to give sight to the blind..........both those who had lost their actual ability to see and those who were taken into spiritual darkness.


He was sent to set free those who were oppressed. They may be held down by the system of this world, but nothing..........no government, no group, no ruler can ever bind and stop the spirit of God inside of a believer.


Jesus proclaimed that this was the acceptable and favorable year of the Lord.

Thank you Lord for life and I pray that I seek you out at every turn today so that I can follow your direction and live life in the manner you desire me to.
Blessed be your name,
and may you bless everyone who has stopped by Greene Street today.
In Jesus name....
Amen.

God on you..........
mb

HE IS A COMING DOWN GOD

 

First cup of coffee always get my brain a moving. Today is no different as I sit here at my computer. My thoughts turn to the reason that Jesus did all that He did while He was on earth. Motivated first by love for His Father, and second by love for humanity, His Father's creation. But what is even more impressive to me is the fact that the people were drawn to Him. There was an emptiness in the souls of those who lived at that time, and this emptiness was stirred by the Holy Spirit that was in Christ. They may not have had language for what they were experiencing, but something told them that Jesus had the answers they were searching for.

"When He was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him."...Mt.8:1

Jesus, upon completing the Sermon on the Mount, came down off of the mountain.
He left a place where the view was not bad. The wind was fresh and soothing. The crowds attentive and listening. He left that place.
He came down from the mountain to a place where sick people were. Maybe they couldn't make it up to where Jesus was. Maybe their illness prevented them from traveling. Were their needs any less than those of the multitude who had made the trek? I don't think so, and here is where I love the heart of Christ. He came down from the mountain to meet these others right where they were. He met the leper. Jesus encountered the Roman soldier, away from home in a land he probably didn't want to be in. Living among a people he did not understand, who had strange customs and ways. Yet this guardian of the Roman Empire sought out Jesus because of a servant lying ill at his home. Jesus came to these.

It is one thing to not want to follow Jesus up the mountain where he taught. It is entirely different when you can't follow. In these cases Jesus came down to them. Isn't that an incredible thought? That Jesus sought out the sick and afflicted. He searched for those who were demonized and ostracized from society. He brought healing to them. Does that mean I get to simply sit and wait for Jesus to come to me? Heavens no! We move in the strength we have. Like the leper, we too must go and meet Jesus and be completely honest in what we desire for him to do. I think sometimes I try to play games with Jesus in an effort to get him to do what I want. It's almost like a religious "twenty questions." When I should be stating the obvious....Gee! I have leprosy...what do I want? TO HE HEALED!!!!!" Believing in faith that Jesus will reach out and heal me.
Cool beans....
until tomorrow.
God on you....
mb