LIVING WATER

When my youngest son was two I found him on all fours, drinking out of the dog's bowl. When asked why he said he was thirsty, and he wanted to be like Jessie (the dog).

There are many people like Ethan. They are so thirsty that they'll drink anything, whatever's placed in front of them so long as it looks remotely drinkable, or if they see others drinking it.

And that's the problem: people are so used to seeing others drinking dirty water, that they are prepared to accept it as good enough. When we know that it's not - but we need to let them know about the good water - the living water.

Jesus shared this idea with the Samaritan woman and she went back and evangelised a whole village.

So just how good is this living water: Ephesians 3:16-19:
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

What Paul is saying here is very powerful : Faith brings Christ into our hearts, we then understand the magnitude of his love - his incredible gift to us, and then we can experience his love - this love that surpasses knowledge.

People can know of Christ, people can believe in Christ, but so few people actually live in his love. When Christ calls us to follow him - he's not just calling us to believe in him and submit to his deity, but he is calling us to fall in to his love - he wants to marry us. He wants us to experience the width, length, height, and depth of his love. When we do this then people will truly see what it's like to drink the good stuff, and then water from the dog's bowl will never be good enough again.

My two year old drank from the dog's bowl because I failed to recognise that he was thirsty and offer him a better alternative. It is our responsibility to demonstrate the love of Jesus to others, by allowing Jesus to love us.



Precious Lord Jesus. We thank you for the incredible sacrifice you made on the cross at calvary, and we thank you for the remarkable opportunity you give us in our life now to not just love you, but to allow ourselves to be loved by you. To truly experience the fullness of the incredible love that you have for us.

We submit to your deity Lord, but also to your love lord, and we ask for the conviction Lord to share this love with others. In your precious name. Amen.

RAISING UP CHRIST

John 3:14-16: Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

There are a number of takes we can make on the image of Christ being lifted or raised up and all of them are appropriate. Christ was lifted up on a cross at the crucifixion, Christ was lifted up to heaven at the ascension, it is our responsibility to lift Christ up in our everyday lives – especially in our conversations with others.

When Moses raised up the bronze snake on the pole – any Israelite who had been bitten by a snake and looked upon the bronze snake lived.

When Christ was raised upon the cross any who chose to believe in him and repent their past sins received new life, being born again into a beautiful, new spiritual existence.

When Christ was raised up to heaven at the Ascension he heralded the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the spreading of the Gospel throughout the known world.

When we, in our everyday lives, raise Christ before us for everyone to see we create the opportunity for others to give their hearts to the Lord, to be saved and to receive eternal life.

Father, We thank you for the gift of forgiveness for our sins and the promise of eternal life that we received with the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We recognize that your call to raise Christ up in our daily lives is not an option but an essential condition for growing your Kingdom, and we undertake to seize every opportunity to do this.
Amen.

DEFENCE IS THE KEY

I spent yesterday afternoon driving my children to all of their afternoon activities. The tedium of this constant driving was only relieved by the opportunity to listen to the broadcast of my favourite football team (The Manly- Warringah Sea Eagles) demolishing their opposition. Apart from the obvious delight I distilled from their victory; a statement by one of the commentators got me thinking about my faith:
Manly’s defence was the key to their victory.

Defence is the key to victory? What a thought. I considered the number of articles and comments I had read recently, both through the media and blog-sites, describing circumstances where Christians have been under attack. From the scathing criticisms directed at those fighting for the preservation of the life of Terri Schiavo, through violent attacks on Christian communities in the Middle East, to reports from pastors of being denigrated, undermined and/or sacked by their own congregation we are seeing a powerful, if not unprecedented, move against the spiritual strength of the Church.

How do we defend against such things?

In pondering this issue I was reminded of Great Britain during the early years of World War Two.

In June 1940, after retreating from devastating losses on the European mainland at the hands of Nazi Germany, the small island of Great Britain waited anxiously for the blistering attack by the German Luftwaffe which was sure to follow. Outgunned, outmanned, isolated, and with morale at an all time low, the government of that nation met to contemplate surrender. However, on June 4th, 1940 the Prime Minister, Mr. Winston Churchill, rallied the British parliament (and people) with one of the most famous speeches ever recorded:

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans;
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing
strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever
the cost may be; we shall fight them on the beaches,
the landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills.
We shall never surrender…….

Britain made a stand against the onslought of the enemy and turned the tide of the war. But this is not the only historical precedent from which we should draw encouragement. Jump back almost 2,000 years and transpose the besieged island of Great Britain with the beleaguered church at Ephesus. Replace that great orator Churchill with another renown speaker: the apostle Paul. Now substitute the British House of Commons with the young, inexperienced and struggling pastor Timothy and you get a sense of the emotional backdrop against which the 1st epistle to Timothy was written.


The Book of One Timothy is an encouragement to a pastor under siege.


Throughout Asia Minor and the Mediterranean; churches were growing and the church structures were becoming both complex and corrupted. Things were particularly problematic for the church in Ephesus. The city of Ephesus was the occultic centre of Asia Minor, and its evil was infiltrating the fabric of the church, manifesting as false teaching and worship modalities that combined Christian with pagan practices. Heresy had increased markedly, and apostasy was rampant. Timothy, who Paul had entrusted with this difficult and important ministry, was struggling to hold it together.


Paul, like Churchill almost 2,000 years later, is attempting to rally Timothy to prevent him from breaking from his responsibilities and succumbing to those forces that are working against him.

This was a critical moment for the Church in Asia Minor. Retrospectively, we know that the Church in Ephesus became the cornerstone of Christianity in the region for the next two centuries. But, at this particular point in time, Timothy could not know that. All he knew was that the Church under his administration was under serious spiritual attack, and he was losing control of it fast. He wanted to run.

The letter to Timothy, like Churchill’s message to the British Parliament, (and like coach Des Hasler’s message to his Manly Sea Eagles) is a lesson in how to stand firm under severe spiritual and personal assault. Paul’s first letter to Timothy is often cited as an example of how to instill pastoral leadership; but it’s more than that; it provides a strategy for waging spiritual warfare against Satanic attack.

Winston Churchill said “never give up”. Des Hasler’s instructions are to “tackle, tackle tackle”. Paul’s instruction to Timothy was to confront the problem head on, to never lose faith, to be patient, to build a team around him that would do the job not just say the right things, to lead by example and to pray- to ask for the binding , empowering support of the Holy Spirit – the greatest defence of all.

So lets get our defence in order and “never give up”, just “tackle, tackle, tackle”

SPIRITS OF THE LIE - PART TWO

I asked Shoefoot through interpreter Mike Dawson, Joe's son, who grew up among the Yanomamo, how he would answer a skeptic who thought his experiences with the spirits were nothing more than hallucinations brought on by the drugs he took. Shoefoot's 70-something-year-old eyes sparkled at the question; he enjoys responding to challenges by skeptics, especially when he speaks to university anthropology students. Its ironic that this "primitive" man considers the highly educated anthroplogists who study his people, are, at best, deceived. He told me of knowing shamans who had many of the same spirits he had had, yet, unlike him, they did not come to know them as a result of taking drugs. Whether the contacts were made with a clear mind or in a drug-induced state, descriptions and details were nearly always identical; they all communed with the same spirits.

Mike added that we of the sophisticated West have trouble relating to a culture in which spirits, i.e., demons, are a real, everyday part of life. However, that doesnt mean they're necessarily exclusive to the dense jungles of the Yanomamo. He said that on one autumn trip to the U.S. with Shoefoot, he was shocked as his friend, the former shaman, continually pointed out representations of spirits he had known being featured across America as it celebrated its most financially successful holiday: Halloween. Some time later, Shoefoot was given a sampling of TVs Saturday-morning cartoon characters and power figures. It was more of the same. He was not aware of the worldwide popularity of the Harry Potter books, which introduce children to sorcery and encourage them in the practice of witchcraft. As Mike explained this series of books to him, he was grieved that so many young people were being set up for the suffering and bondage that had tormented his own people.

Shoefoots subjective experiences in a culture dominated by lying spirits are readily substantiated when compared with other demon-driven lifestyles throughout the world. Furthermore, they are consistent with what Gods Word says about such spirits. The prince of "the rulers of the darkness of this world" (Eph 6:12) is a devourer of human souls, who also delights in their physical destruction through depravity and disease. The technologically advanced societies on this planet may be able to ward off the latter, but they will reap the far worse temporal and eternal bondage of their souls.

The culmination of this will take place under the demon possessed and empowered Antichrist. However, the preconditioning for that event, which began in the Garden of Eden and has become widespread in our day, will manifest itself in an increasingly demonized society and an apostate Christianity, as the Apostle Paul warns: "Now the [Holy] Spirit speak-eth expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils" (1 Tm 4:1). The world, blinded and bound by "the god of this world," is ripe for every form of contact with spirit entities and will reap its horrendous consequences.

Lord, give us a love for the truth, and a heart to rescue those in bondage to the lie.
TBC.

I first heard this story as a radio interview on Focus on the Family. What struck me was the comment that although many of the demons that Shoefoot was familiar with were evident to him in his trip to the U.S, the Great Spirit was not apparent anywhere. Food for thought. Perhaps its time to revisit the Book of Jeremiah and bury ourselves in the Gospel.

SPIRITS OF THE LIE - PART ONE.

I love this story : Spirits of the Lie. T.A McMahon.
I recently interviewed a man who had spent most of his life communing with spirit entities. There is no doubt as to his "authenticity." He was a shaman, a medicine man and chief of his Yanamamo tribe, which resides deep in the Amazonian rain forest of Venezuela. At odds with the lie promoted in anthropological circles that the lives of primitive tribes-people are pure, natural and Eden-like and therefore best kept from outside influence --Chief Shoefoot and his people’s violent, fear-filled existence is documented in a book titled "The Spirit of the Rain Forest", written by Mark Ritchie (available from Island Lake Press 1-800-245-1022).

As a young boy, Shoefoot was singled out as one sensitive to the spirit realm and subsequently initiated into the sorcerers world. Again, a shaman is one who, through knowledge and power obtained from the spirits, heals and guides his people. Although the initial process of enabling him to contact the spirits was brutal, involving days of food and water deprivation and having someone force hallucinogenic drugs into his system by blowing them up his nose, the spirits he met were at first benign and curiously captivating. His initial impression was that many of them inhabited and spoke through plants and especially through animals (reminiscent of the ploy first introduced in the Garden of Eden and supportive of the lie of evolution that all living things are related and equal). Shoefoots desire in all of this was to serve the needs of his tribe; therefore, he followed the counsel of the spirits, even when to do so seemed at odds with common sense.

At the beginning, help from the spirits was somewhat encouraging, yet it always seemed tainted with unresolved problems, or worse. For example, sicknesses among the Yanomamo children, which the spirits too often had trouble healing, were usually blamed on powerful curses placed on the village by a rival tribe. The usual spirit-provided solution to offset the curses was to murder, rape and pillage the suspected foes. The abduction of women was commonplace for such raids. Yet whether it was to retrieve their stolen women or simply to exact revenge, violent payback was only a matter of time. The knowledge supplied by Shoefoots spirits often proved to be less than trustworthy, causing his tribe to live in confusion and constant fear of their enemies.

Not only did Shoefoot grow weary of the excuses from the spirits when their counsel went awry, but some spirits were of such a vicious nature that they wrought mayhem and death among his people. During drug-induced rituals where these spirits might make their presence known, the men needed to hide their weapons to prevent the spirit-controlled warriors from killing one another. At one point of near hopelessness concerning his inability to improve the deteriorating condition of his people, Shoefoot increased his drug intake in order to go deeper into the spirit world to find more trustworthy and benevolent spirits. That led to even more wicked spirits (Lk 11:26), greater frustration, and intense despair.

However, during his dark spiritual journey, he was made aware of a powerful Spirit, who, he was told, was the enemy of his spirits and his people. Ironically, the location where this Spirit, Yai Pada, dwelled was a beautiful place of abundance and peace, the very blessings Shoefoot desired for his tribe and for himself. Since he had been lied to so often by his spirits, he was driven to know if they were telling him the truth about Yai Pada.

Fulfilling His promise given to all humanity through the prophet Jeremiah, "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart" (29:13), the Lord led Shoefoot to a missionary named Joe Dawson, one of the very few foreigners able to speak the Yanomamo language. Joe taught Shoefoot about Yai Pada, the God of the Bible. He taught him that sin made us all Gods enemies, yet Yai Pada loved us so much that He sent His Son to pay the full penalty for our sins, and by admitting our sinfulness and putting our trust in Jesus and our faith in what He accomplished for us, we could have peace with the God of Peace. Moreover, he was told that all who believe in Jesus will spend eternity with Yai Pada. Shoefoot’s testimony (found in detail in "Spirit of the Rain Forest" and in a rough but powerful video, "Ill Never Go Back!" A Shamans Story from Don Shire Ministries 715-484-2017) of how Jesus delivered him from his bondage to sin and to his spirits is a testimony to the truth of Gods Word.

To be Continued....

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY.

"God afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted". I don't know who wrote this but I love it!

WHERE WOULD YOU RATHER BE?

In Rome, the Pope dies and over a billion Catholics throughout the world grieve the loss of their “Holy Father”. Every television station, radio station, and newspaper around the globe report and broadcast his funeral.

In Windsor, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles marry, repenting, by proxy, their adultery. Thousands line the streets leading up to the Town Hall where they are married, and the wedding is broadcast world-wide.

Meanwhile, at a school hall in Helensvale, a pastor preaches on evangelism, the tiny congregation welcomes a family back to the fold, and two children turn up voluntarily to Kid’s Church just because they want to be there. No television station broadcasts it, no newspaper reports it, but the Angels sing.

WITNESS TO OTHERS NOT JUST EACH OTHER.

Many years ago, during my unsaved youth, I attended a party at which large quantities of alcohol were being served. I, like everybody else, imbibed liberally and, like everybody else, suffered the consequences. Some, however, suffered more severe consequences than others.

One such victim was a young friend who was rendered unconscious by the liquor. In a gesture of valiant compassion I and another friend, hoisted this young woman to her feet, threw an arm around each shoulder and started up the driveway with the intention of escorting her to the comparative safety of the roadside where we could hail her a cab. However, on reaching the summit, my friend and I discovered that our arms were around each other and we had left our unconscious friend lying prostrate at the bottom of the driveway. In our alcoholic haze it felt like we were helping our fallen comrade, but in reality we were embracing each other.

Sometimes we Christians can be a bit like that. We kid ourselves that we're helping the world, when, in reality, we're just focused on each other and leaving the unsaved behind, face down in the dirt.

Don't get me wrong, it's very important for us to be there for each other. Witnessing Christians get hammered and need the support of like-minded people. Jesus commands us to do this: John 15:12-14:
My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

But then he follows it up with this in John 15:26-16:1;
When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning. All this I have told you so that you will not go astray.

"We also must testify”. As committed, practicing Christians we have to be so careful that we don't fall into the trap of just focusing our care and attention on the easy targets : each other. Christ commands us to testify about him. To each other? Certainly. To encourage each other. To remind each other that Christ is there working for us, even when it doesn't feel like it. But also to witness to others: Mark 16: 15-16: He said to them,
"Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned."

That's pretty clear isn't it: "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation". The apostle Paul elaborates on this in 2 Corinthians 5:18- 20;
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

You are not an ambassador if you are representing Australia to Australians or Christianity to Christians. You have to represent your kind to a different kind. Christ to the unsaved.

Father, we thank you for this ministry of reconciliation that you have bequeathed to all of us. We ask you, Lord, to strengthen our resolve in bringing the gospel to the unsaved in our community, in reconciling the world back to you. Amen.

PASTOR JOCK ON PRAYER

HELLOOOOO ALL YOU BLOOGERS OOT THAR!!! I’M BAAAACK!!!!!! Hoot Mon! I think it’s time I sprrrruced this site oop a bit! I mean all this whingin’ aboot the courts and injustice. We knoooo that’s the case! The Bible says thar’s nothin’ new under the sun!!! It’s always been like that! What we’ve gotta do is stop whingin’ aboot it and doo something aboot it - like pray!!! Duh!!! Am I the only thinkin’ Christian around here?!!!!!

I mean, some of us Christians do go on a bit. We sproot aboot this perrrson and that perrrson, this poppet and that poppet, this injustice and that injustice, we’re fooll (full) of righteous indignation aboot the state of the world but we don’t actually DO ANYTHING ABOOT IT!!! We say stoff like – “It’s wrrong but what can I do!!!!” “WHAT CAN YOU DO??!!!!!!” Are we Christian’s or aren’t we? Do we have the power of the Holy Spirit workin’ through us or don’t we? The thing is that as Christians WE DON’T HAVE TO DO IT BY OURSELVES! The best thing we can do is ask God to do something aboot it or help us to do it. THAT’S WOT PRAYER IS!!!!! Why is it that so many Christians doon’t seem to remember that? BECOS’ THEY’RE NOT PRAYIN’ THAT’S WHY!!!!!

OOH! I’m getting’ a bit hot under the collar!!! I think I better go burn off some of this righteous anger –

I knoo I’ll do the Highland Fling…. Oh No… I fergot aboot ma goot!!

I knoo I’ll go toss the caber around!! Oh No … that’s how I got the goot in the first place – I dropped it on ma fooot.

I knoo I’ll sing a song….. When the wind blows high and the wind blows low, through the streets in ma kilt I’ll go, all the lassies say hellooo!! Donald whar’s yer troosers!! OI!!!