A Heart Untroubled

I've been really focussed on my identity as a believer a lot this year  already.  And this week I was reading the following passage in Romans: ... a nd those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. Now if any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him   Romans 8:8-9 (MEV) Paul is telling believer that they are no longer IN the flesh. I don't know about you, but sometimes that's a hard thing to get my head around.   How many of you find that hard to deal with the idea that if you are a Christian, YOU ARE NOT IN THE FLESH any more?  I can already see what you're thinking  "Abi you have no idea what I've done today!" But the problem is w e look at ourselves in the mirror and relate to the world around us by what we see,  but the scripture tells us that we are to walk by faith and not by sight!    The truth is, if God lives...

Have you ever been confronted with a new situation?  Of course you have.  On a regular basis we encounter things that we've never seen or done before.  That is also true in the Spiritual realm.  Someone asks for prayer for something, and our first reaction is "I've never prayed for that before...". The good news is, that the bible says that there is nothing new under the sun and the Holy Spirit has been around since the beginning of time.  He has seen every kind of miracle imaginable.  Even in the Old Testament we see accounts of raising the dead (1 Kings 17:17-24), God's supernatural protection (Daniel 3:19-27- Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) and healings (Numbers 21:5-9 - The poisonous snake bites healed) and these are just a few examples.  The Holy Spirit was the one who was hovering before the very creation of the World. He was the one that came and went and facilitated these miraculous events.  Now we are blessed that he lives within us!...

What we believe matters.  If you believe that someone is not honest, how you respond to that person's words will be different to how you will respond if you know a person is truthful.  If you believe the weather forecast, you’ll dress one way; if you believe someone is a good driver, you'll be more relaxed; if you believe your friend loves you, you will feel safe and secure.  The same is true spiritually for us. How we see God will determine how we relate to him, and affect how we approach him.  If you don’t believe God is good - then how will you want to come to him in intimacy.      Consider a marriage where the husband is aggressive, hurtful or belligerent.  A woman who  is in an abusive relationship is not going to willingly come and look for intimacy.   She is certainly not going to entrust her heart to him, or run to him for comfort or strength.   When a husband is good to his wife, she can lean on him and she w...

So I was reading the story of the prodigal son again for the thousandth time this week and a new thing struck me!!  Don't you just think that's amazing? The Word is alive and powerful; you can read it over and over and always God can speak to you in a new way. Most bibles with subheadings over sections call the story the Prodigal Son but I like the Passion Translation which calls this "The Loving Father"!  That's a great point, but not the one I am making today. So, hopefully you know the story.  If you don't you can read the whole thing in Luke 15, but I want to look at what happens on the sons return home. Firstly, despite the fact the son basically told his dad 'I wish you were dead!' the father was looking out for him and when he saw him he RAN to meet him.  This is not the conduct of a disgruntaled parent who wants to make sure the child knows how wrong they were! He runs out to meet him and falls on him welcoming him home in both manner and words...

Today at church we sang a new (to me) song and one of the lines was  "If I'm not dead, You're not done, g reater things are still to come."  Sometimes it's hard to see what God is doing, whether that's big picture stuff or little details in your life, we can often get distracted by the cares of this world and forget that God is not done with us yet.   God called us not so we could live a comfy little life, but so that we would be conduits of his power to draw people to him, to demonstrate his love towards others and to preach the gospel!   If you woke up this morning he's not done with you yet.   1) He's not done transforming you.  2 Corinthians 3:18 (MEV)  But we all, seeing the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord. We are never to stop becoming like Jesus.  Every day we wake up is a day we get to be more and more like him 2) H...

I was listening to one of my favourite carols Noel ft Lauren Daigle - https://youtu.be/aBZ6Lqx1OHk   if you want a listen. I was struck by one of the lines "Come and see what God has done" as the angels are speaking to the Shepherds and it hit me that they didn't appear a week before and say 'Go and see what God is going to do'.  They spoke about what GOD HAD DONE.  Jesus was already born and the Shepherds went off to see him.  Often we can look to the future and wonder what God might do, where he is taking us, or how he can take change our current situation, but sometimes, we need to look at what God HAS done and fix our hope on him.  When we look and see all that God has done for us, starting with coming to earth as a baby, growing up to die on the cross and then brining it into our own lives, we can easily say "See what the Lord has done"!  There's most definitely a time for looking forward, but there's also times to remember what has already ...

I was reading a very familiar account from the bible today, the story of the feeding of the 5000.   If you don't know it... a crowd of people (5000 men plus women and children) followed Jesus to listen to him preach.  After a while Jesus says to his disciples that the people need to eat because otherwise they will faint on the way home.  The disciples say they don't have anything, but a little kid offers his lunch- five loaves and 2 fishes, but what's that among so many people? However, Jesus doesn't scoff at the offering.  Instead he takes it in hand and (this is the bit that spoke to me) and let's read what he does... Mark 6:41 (KJV) And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven , and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. He looked up!  He took his eyes off of the stuff and looked up to heaven.  That phrase 'to look up' is from...