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Let’s go into next year, and indeed every year and every moment, by asking God WHAT can we be doing?
How can we be helpful and productive in our church?
How can we be serving?
How can we shine to those around us?
How can we open our lives up more to the purposes of God?
How can God use us MORE to demonstrate His love and power to the world?
How can we be MORE activated to change the world?
And let’s make changes. Let’s be inspired to make changes – because when we catch the fire in our hearts it overflows into lifestyle. Guilt and shoulds don’t motivate from the inside out.
It may require us to pray more.
It may require us to sign up and serve in some capacity at church.
It may require us to change some aspect of our personal lifestyle to line up with the Word of God.
Feed your vision. Feed it with obedience and feed it with fertilizer – books, conversations, worship, prayer, podcasts etc. Fuel your fire.
“You stand here as a Christ follower in a definitive moment in time you are an ordinary person called to usher a holy Kingdom into an increasingly fragmented world. Its the perfect scenario for God to move in big ways just as He always has. Just as God called Esther, Joseph and Paul to go before the world’s kings at appointed times to alter history, He now calls you. While everything changes at warp speed, the holy mandate remains to communicate the gospel in the most relevant channels available, here, there and everywhere!” @stickyjesus
Extraordinary moves of God begin with ordinary acts of obedience.
Let’s have a quick look at Moses’ call.
Moses’ first encounter with God is recorded in exodus 3. The way their meeting goes down should be extremely encouraging for anyone who has ever felt super ordinary and insignificant.
The setting is the far side of the desert.
Moses is tending sheep.
The sheep belong to Moses’ father in law.
A bush catches on fire.
Moses walks over to look…
In reality when you peel back the layers… it’s really quite ordinary. Moses is performing menial manual labour. Working for his father in law. Does it get any more mundane and ordinary?
We position ourselves for encounter by walking with Jesus every day. Being obedient and faithful in our ordinary lives. Having regular time of prayer and worship. Reading the bible regularly, if not daily! We position ourselves to be used by God as we live a life that pleases Him, being transformed and making outward the inward righteousness. Taking up our cross, dying to self daily, refusing to compromise and bow to the status quo of the world around us.
In the ordinaryness of our life God can shine – God WILL SHINE – and do amazing things.
Will you turn aside and check out the bush, like Moses did? Will you remove your shoes, draw close, and receive your assignment? Will you give the Lord permission to ignite your ordinary?
Jesus chose ordinary people to be His first disciples. Fishermen. Blue collar workers. Tax collectors. In the same way He chooses ordinary people now to serve Him. One of my “life verses” (a passage that defines who i am and the life i live!) is 2 Corinthians 4:7 – “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” We are but jars of clay. Humble vessels. The great power is of God. The light is of God. The glory is of God and from God and for God and to God!
God’s mandate for changing the world and saving the lost is to use seemingly ordinary people going about their ordinary lives – but we are not ordinary. While the world around is dead – we are alive. While the world around is lost – we are found. While the world around us is natural – we are supernatural. As children of God we represent our Father and are called by Him to tell others about the Good News we have experienced and found ourselves. The invisible element of our lives is the most important part because it’s eternal. Life is just a blink but what is won and done spiritually will last forever. One day the fabric of this world will tear, the sky will roll up and the physical earth will disappear and we will have accurate perception of God and reality.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going. John 14:1-4
this morning my husbands dad died. he was a gracious man who loved jesus and a great father in law who welcomed me into his home. he has been ill for a long time with heart problems so we are glad he is with Jesus but will miss him immensely. prayers appreciated.
A True Story. In 2003, police in Warwickshire, England , opened a garden shed and they found a whimpering, cowering dog. The dog had been locked in the shed and abandoned. It was dirty and malnourished, and had quite clearly been abused.In an act of kindness, the police took the dog, which was a female greyhound, to the Nuneaton Warwickshire Wildlife Sanctuary, which is run by a man named Geoff Grewcock, and known as a haven for animals abandoned, orphaned, or otherwise in need.
Christmas begins the unfolding of the revelation of God’s love and salvation for all of us – it begins with a birth.
1 John 4:9-10 In this the love of God was revealed in us, because God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation concerning our sins.
Some Bible versions say “this is how God showed his love for us…” or “God demonstrated his love for us…” Love is shown in its actions. Its not just an airy fairy feeling, but a doing thing. In the birth of Jesus, in this man, the revelation of God’s love was shown as being real and powerful and personal. We can know that God loves us because of Christmas, because of Christ. Christmas is love living and breathing, active and alive!
Jesus is the demonstration of the love of God for us. He came and lived as a demonstration of WHO God is. Colossians 1:15 says that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God.” Colossians 2:9 says “For in Christ lives all the fullness of God in a human body.” As Jesus lived he showed us how God loves us – touching the untouchable, healing the sick, accepting the rejected, freeing the bound… Jesus not only in his divinity was God wrapped in flesh, but in the way he lived his life displayed the mercy, graciousness, compassion and power of God.
1 John 4:11-12 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us.
As God has demonstrated in the life and death of Jesus his great love for us, so we too should be demonstrators and do-ers of love. As Christians God calls us to be witnesses and ambassadors for Himself. We demonstrate the reality of God through the active ways we love.
People talk about the Christmas “spirit”, the joy, happiness and giving-ness of Christmas. People smile at each other, give seasonal greetings. Christmas shouldn’t begin and end in December – it should permeate every part of our life. That is – the whole thing of God loving us first and giving His Son Jesus so that we can have eternal life and know Him – should be demonstrated in our life at every minute. As God loved us we should go and do likewise.
Your vision will probably flow from something you’re already doing – relationships you’ve already established, priorities you’re already passionate about.
Vision starts with a seed of inspiration that takes root in our imagination. It starts with us being inspired to DO something and BE someone that is then confirmed and pruned and grown by God. When a defining moment happens – like a prophecy or God speaking to us it is usually a confirmation of what God has already planted in our hearts.
Our lives are not our own. We are brought with a price. The blood of Jesus has redeemed us from our sin and death and eternal destruction so that we can now live in connection with God in this life and after earth. And the great plan of God to spread this good news of salvation is to use the people that experience it. We are his advertisements and witnesses. We are living testimonies to His work.
You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2 Corinthians 3:2-3
Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it—not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiselled into stone, but carved into human lives. 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 MSG
You are a walking talking billboard for the reality of God.
You are demonstrations of His love and power.
You are created for something more than just breathing. God has called you to greater things – amazing supernatural encounters – not just personal quiet time ones but ones that shout out to the world HEY GOD IS REAL and HERE!
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