The Plan for Your Life (2) - Listen

Amos 5.14 Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts.

Last week I talked about the plan for your life. I said that the first stage of finding the plan for your life is to Listen to it. By that I mean to pause and ask yourself "what are the events and circumstances of my life saying to me?"

By doing this we introduce to ourselves a habit of self knowledge. It could be that you keep a journal and are already doing this to a point. But you can take things one step further and ask "Did I seek good today?" - it can be a revealing question. If we didn't seek good just how harmful have our actions been?

The reason people change when they encounter God is because he has a disconcerting tendency to hold a mirror up to our lives - so that we can see ourselves as others do. Sometimes we need to do that in order to recognise what is wrong with us as well as what is right with us. The mirror is there so that we can have enough self knowledge to want to change.

If we are struggling with addiction we can find that we haven't "sought good" because we are so busy looking to feed the addiction. It pushes our time for others out of the way.

But remember that the love that comes from God is a free gift for your life. You can exercise your own will as to whether to accept it. Let God in and he will bring you to an exciting new phase of your life.

There is a prayer that has helped a lot of people over the years.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The plan for your life

The truth is that God has a plan and a purpose that is unique to each one of us. God our creator doesn't want us all to be the same. He calls each one of us daily "out of darkness into his wonderful light." He wants us to be the best version of ourself that we can possibly manage. It might be very hard to believe that today. But take it on your heart.

On my Facebook profile is one of my favourite quotes from St Catherine of Siena."Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire." 

No matter whether your situation is desperate or wonderful. God wants to be able to speak into your life and guide you. No matter what you have done God has a rescuing plan for you to pluck you out of disaster or even from mediocrity.

The first step is to have the strength, or perhaps help from someone, to believe that God is your redeemer.
The next three steps are crucial

• Listen to your life
• Listen to what God has to say about your life
• Take action to change

In the next three weeks I will write more on each of those above subjects.

Meanwhile for reflection I will briefly share what is going on with me. God can be quite insistent to speak sometimes. This week he gave me a very vivid dream about a fire,and in the dream the reading I was given was Jeremiah 4. It wasn't a passage that I was familiar with so I went and looked it up. Here is an excerpt from it.

Circumcise yourselves to the Lord , circumcise your hearts, you people of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem, or my wrath will flare up and burn like fire because of the evil you have done— burn with no one to quench it. Jerusalem, wash the evil from your heart and be saved. How long will you harbour wicked thoughts? Jeremiah 4:4

Just to share with you I feel God is saying to me "put sin under lock" and then you will be able to move into the next phase in your life. That quote is from Daniel 10:21.God says "I have come to teach it to you because God loves you. Pay attention to this word and understand the vision"

I know from past experience if I listen to him - he will change my life

Dear Lord, I sense you want to move us into a new awareness of your love for us all. Help me to hear you and respond and not block you.

Guide us Lord!

“Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit says the Lord of Hosts” Zechariah 4.6.

These words are from the prophet Zerubbabel and have always spoken to my heart. I find them useful as an "arrow" prayer to say at various times. Especially before meetings that look as if they have the potential to be stressful and conflicted. We need to keep on track and not be blown around chaotically by our human desires. The words remind me of what God wants.

It seems this week I have had various conversations about this very thing. How to keep on track! I have problem in that I know what God wants from me I just need to find my way though to the delivery of his vision. It is my human fallibility that can get in the way. The prayer reminds me to put God's way of thinking first. To seek not my own objectives but to look for what God wants. His agenda is so often different to ours. It reminds me that the Glory must go to God and that we don't need to strive in order to achieve that. In fact if we find ourselves striving then we can ask ourself are we seeking God correctly? God has been sustaining the universe for all these thousands of years without me being number one, or head honcho! But what we can bring to situations is our genuine desire to seek God's will and to support it. Are we seeking the right sort of power in our life? I don't need to be first to speak or last to speak. Although God does want me to speak if I can contribute something to the meeting.

Although it was "meetings" that started me thinking - "Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit" applies to all parts of our life. Do we make bringing God's spirit a priority in our life, or do we wake in the morning to play with our gadgets, to plot our finances with the Financial Times? Or to feed our News habit? Or to plan our retirement? Maybe? But although those things might have a right place. God first, our loved ones next is how we should prioritise. Then things will fall into place and we will find a more grace filled living experience.

If we "seek first the kingdom of God" we are putting the Spirit first. In prayer this week also I heard God's voice in Galatians 5. At verse 16 he says "What I say is this: let the Spirit direct your lives, and you will not satisfy the desires of the human nature." - one commentary I read points out that if we focus on the Spirit, God's love and Holy Spirit, helps us to push out the sin in our life. The sin is displaced by the presence of the Spirit. So I feel God is saying have more of the Spirit and you will naturally become less sinful.  That means we need to worry less about our besetting sin and let go of it and run straight toward's our God  who is love. He will give us his love, joy and peace which can't fail to change us.

Dear Lord, help me to have more of you in my life. I seek you Lord, show me your face. Amen

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Jesus for real

“I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” John 21:18

When we are young we understand Jesus in a very different way to the way adults understand him. Part of this is a conscious decision by adults to only tell the softer stories to their children about Jesus. But it does mean that a lot of children grow into adults with a sacharine image of “gentle” Jesus “meek and mild” wafting around that is nowhere near the character of the real Jesus. I can understand why it happens. As adults we sometimes decide to package information differently that we deem is too hard for children to understand.

What set me thinking about this was remembering an email that my cousin had sent me about the Little   Plastic Jesus. She has given me permission to quote her.

“I was 4, I remember walking into a large room, it was dark, it had old dark furniture and it felt like stepping back in time! In the centre of the dark room behind a huge dark desk was a tiny old lady dressed in black. I remember thinking she looked so, so old with the wrinkliest face I had ever seen......but It was a kind face. I wonder whether I remember this in detail because my mum was probably going through the formalities of me joining the school and I had chance to just stare! Sally, my sister had been at the school previously, there seemed to be no issue with a non catholic family sending their children to Manor House convent. My place was pretty much guaranteed.

“Mother superior chatted to me, I can't remember what about but as we made to leave she gave me a gift- a little plastic Jesus in a little plastic manger. The little plastic manger didn't last long, it had flimsy legs and soon disintegrated. After a while Little plastic Jesus got put in the drawers under my bed with all my other toys. Like most children the drawers under my bed soon became filled with broken toys, toys that had been grown out of, art projects from school, old plasticine and crayons!

“Mum insisted that the drawers under my bed were subject to periodical sort outs......I would pick up Plastic baby Jesus, invariably found hiding in the far back corner amongst the plasticine and crayons, I would pick him up and he would get the same mental wrestling each previous item had received .... 'Live another day or be relegated to the rubbish pile' Everytime I had a strong feeling ' I can't throw away baby jesus!'

“The thing I find most amazing is the clarity in which I remember being given the gift of plastic baby Jesus -  I also find it amazing that he carried on to survive in the backs of drawers until I was 31 when I became a Christian.   

“ I know recently I have been putting Jesus into a back drawer. little plastic Jesus is a good analogy That's why I wanted to share the story with you. But it has also made me think how I have been chosen by God and how amazingly patient he is waiting for the right time for us to grow. I don't think I could ever throw little plastic Jesus away, I couldn't throw Jesus away. But I was in great danger of relegating him to the back of a drawer.”

What strikes me is that my cousins story illustrates what happens to so many of us. We have to find a point in our lives where we discover that the Plastic Jesus of our childhood is not the only way of thinking about Jesus. That the real Jesus is waiting for us to see him as he is. Son of God, fully human and yet fully divine. Revolutionary, itinerant, prophet, teacher, rabbi, friend, wonderful counseller, lover, challenger, penniless and homeless. This Jesus challenges us to grow from believer to disciple. This real Jesus we can discover and encounter in the Gospels but also in our daily prayer life and the sharing of so many people.

Is the Jesus you know the childhood safe one? Or is it the real Jesus who invites you to be his follower and disciple? Moving out of your comfort zone to travel with him to where you know not. He is the one who challenges us to live a spiritual life in addition to the  material life, thinking beyond what’s next to buy in Ikea  and other shops!

This Jesus is the one who loves you and wants you to discover him. To stay in relationship with him.

Dear Jesus, may I fully discover you! Send your wisdom and love into my life. I need it so much. Amen

Let the Spirit Direct your lives

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart find favour in your sight, O Lord - my redeemer, my rock! Psalm 20:15

The above is a good prayer to start a prayer time with or even to use as just a short plea to God asking him to guide our day.  After all what we say and think are precursors to our actions.

My perception is that my days are better if I have made time to think and pray in the morning. The truth be known it might even make me better tempered!

St Paul advises us to "Let the Spirit direct your lives" (Galatians 5:16) and if we are going to do that we need to find the time to let that happen. We so easily fritter our lives away watching adverts or waiting for computers to boot up or gazing at the back of a cereal packet. All things we have chosen to do in a way albeit unconsciously perhaps. Can we find a little time for God in the midst of this?

But if we take St Paul's words seriously the Holy Spirit should be what gives our lives strategic direction. And listening for it's guidance should be what makes our Christian life move into a more authentic level of being.

In this life when we have so many choices, may one of them be to try and listen to the Spirit.

I can promise that doing this will change your life, lifting it to a different level. Letting God's love break in.

There are plenty of examples in the news of what happens when people make decisions without listening to the Holy Spirit. It's easy to look at the extreme examples of violence and hateful behaviour and say it's clear that whatever they were listening to it wasn't the voice of God. Inevitably too there are cases of so called religious people doing hateful things. Let's make it clear that kind of action is from the deceiver and is the opposite of what God wants.

To listen to the Spirit is to listen to the voice of God who is love. He will inspire us to walk joyfully in his peace, to love as he does.

Dear Lord, help me to see that your Spirit is for me! Help me to listen for your voice for my life and above all help me to respond. Amen

Follow the way of love, the example of Christ who loves you

Some parts of the bible seem to speak to me because of their brevity and truth. It seems God's first messengers discovered a penchant for text message length 'sayings' long before we did. I think some of this is due to God's clarity in communication. He doesn't like to beat around the bush. But quite often these short sayings are really a summary of a longer teaching and meditation on them opens the mind to a whole profound and rich area of thinking.

At an evening meeting this week we used a reading  from Ephesians 5, out of it I plucked the sentence   ^"Follow the way of love, the example of Christ who loved you" - and have been thinking about it since.

It is a phrase that needs unpacking. What for example is the "Way of Love" that is referred to? Love after all is a many faceted thing.  But  Gods way of loving is to show his abundant love to all of humankind, and even creation. This love manifests itself as a sort of unfathomable good will shown to all without exception. This is because God wants the whole of creation to succeed and flourish, including you and me, and also the extreme poor as well as the rich. This demonstrates that the economy of God's world operates differently to the economy of the commercial world.  Life in all it's entirety is given without charge and the conditions to sustain it come readily from the world's resources. And what God requires of us in recompense for all this is that we too should be just as loving in our turn. A radical thought. That we should love in the same unconditional way that God has already loved us.

"Follow the way of love" -then can mean then that we should live our lives with the same kind of radical good will that God manifests. To have an automatic care and concern for other people that is contrary to the way that the world looks at things.  This is the sort of love that Jesus showed after all.  How challenging that is!

The world says charge for everything! Sell your labour and your produce for a good price. Sell your second hand goods. But what God wants for us is subsistence in material terms and super abundance in mercy, love and kindness.

We love a God who challenges us not only to love the loveable but also to turn our efforts to love even our enemies! The way of love challenges us to have a complete heart conversion. “If you happen to see your enemy's cow or donkey running loose, take it back to him. If his donkey has fallen under its load, help him get the donkey to its feet again; don't just walk off. Exodus 23:4-5 GNB

Whereas the prophets challenge those who are rich even further, telling us to not be stingy. Amos particularly warns against over harvesting the world's resources if that means leaving nothing for the poor to pick up. In God's law the gleanings were to be left for the poor.

The way of love requires us to hear the cry of the poor. To no longer live in the hardness of heart that makes us deaf to their appeals.

Dear Jesus, you called me out my darkness. I have been tempted to continue walking in the dark. I have fooled myself into thinking it was easy for you because you are the Son of God. But now I see how completely you surrendered to the will of the father. Call me out of the darkness of my selfishness into your wonderful light. Give me an experience of your love so that I may share it to the ends of the earth. My brother, my saviour Amen 

"Let the one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD." Isaiah 50:10-11

Watching for the invitation

There have been times in my life when I haven't believed in God. But somehow God has always brought me back to himself. How this happens is I think through the invitation of God. He continually invites us into relationship with him. In my unbelief I always stumble upon one of these "invitations" and can't help but respond.

Jesus is one of these invitations. If we study his life and sayings, his behaviour. What he says and does is so extraordinary that it stands out that he is quite unlike any other prophet that ever lived. This is because he ministers to us as God among us. His ministry goes beyond that of prophet. He is messiah, king, Son of God, teacher, revolutionary all rolled nto one.

Other invitations can from friends or family or circumstances of our life. One musician was converted when he was gazing at a painting in a church. Somehow God chose that moment to break through. 

We are told in the psalms "the fool has said in his heart there is no God." This seems harsh in some ways. But I think that depends on how we think about it. My feeling is that it means that we are a fool to deprive ourselves of the good that true faith in God can bring into our lives. What good do we do ourselves to deny God a chance to speak into our life. Especially if when he does come near he brings good gifts which enrich our love.

The words of one of Jesus followers always stick in my memory as a kind of prayer of belief and praise.

Simon Peter, says to Jesus "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life.  And now we believe and know that you are the Holy One who has come from God." John 6:68-69 GNT

Dear Lord, I pray that I may see your invitations to me and respond. Your presence can rescue me  from despair and bring me into fullness of life.