A simple message

Property of Simple Saints

A simple message

The message is that God wants us to love Him and our neighbors.  In the Word of God, God asks us to love Him with all your heart, body, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. God has even asked us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Notice the Lord tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, this tells us we need to love ourselves as well!

Sincere profession of faith

Do you realize when you make a sincere profession of Faith,  asking Jesus to be your Lord and savior which may coincide with water baptism, that we become baptized with the presence of the Holy Spirit?  The Holy Spirit who is one with the Father and the Son(Jesus)comes and lives within us. So there should be an outward expression of Him who lives within us and His character is Love!  However, because of the first sin the original sin of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of Good and Evil, we also have a nature that is not of God’s nature and is evil!  The Bible tells us about this nature in Galatians 5:19

“What human nature does is quite plain. It shows itself in immoral, filthy, and indecent actions; in worship of idols and witchcraft. People become enemies and they fight; they become jealous, angry, and ambitious. They separate into parties and groups; they are envious, get drunk, have orgies, and do other things like these. I warn you now as I have before: those who do these things will not possess the Kingdom of God.”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5:19-21‬ ‭GNT‬‬https://www.bible.com/bible/68/gal.5.19-21.gnt

 And the Bible tells us God’s nature in Galatians 5:22.

“But the Spirit produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. There is no law against such things as these.”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭5:22-23‬ ‭GNT‬‬https://www.bible.com/bible/68/gal.5.22-23.gnt

In Galatians 5 it tells us that these two are opposite and opposed to each other! 

Not a list of rules but discernment!

What God has given us in His word is not so much a list of rules as much as Discernment( a way to tell, or determine) between God’s nature which is Good and loving and the nature of our flesh which is evil and can be influenced by the devil!

The Bible tells us that this battle is always wagging within us, however, because we have the Holy Spirit living within us as believers we have won the battle if we practice abiding within the Spirit God has given us.

Remember we have Grace

Remember as believers we have Grace, meaning I’m not perfect and neither is anyone in the Body of Christ, but if we have The Holy Spirit living within us we have the perfect God living within us and He covers us with His unconditional love, mercy and unmerited favor and grace when we mess up and are not the perfect Image of Him who is love!  But He wants us to be more like Him, because love attracts and sin, hate and anger and works of our flesh pushes others away!.  

The word of God says God wants to draw all men towards Him and the way this will be accomplished is through God’s love being expressed through us by the power of the Holy Spirit! This love will draw all men to 

God!

God is Love

Remember God is love and those who abide in love abide in God!  Also remember God says when we abide in Him who is love we can ask anything of the Father and if it is His will for us to have He will provide it for us!  

However, a fruit tree does not produce fruit right away!  You never see a large grapefruit on a grapefruit tree in the spring, the fruit  and the tree go through a growing and maturing season and in that growing season there is good and bad weather. 

The Bible says rain falls on the just and the unjust, meaning good things and bad things happen to good and bad people!  However, if we stay well connected to God and put Him first we will always produce good fruit!

The Maturing Process

The process is similar to a diver that dives really deep into the ocean.  He cannot surface too quickly or he would get something called the bends which is caused by the drastic pressure change.  So the diver comes up slowly stopping occasionally to acclimate (slowly adjust) to the pressure. Step by step he repeats this  process until he reaches the surface!  

In a similar process when God gives us a promotion or answers a promise it is not always right away because God has to prepare us for the fulfillment of the promise by maturing us so we can sustain the promise.

He is maturing us in different ways

One of the ways that God is maturing us is our heart, see He wants our heart to resemble His heart and His heart is Love and remember the fruits of the Holy Spirit our ways of loving!

 Do you realize when you become born again that we are spiritually like newborn babies in spirit and faith!  We have Christ fully mature and Holy living within us, but our spirit even though it is a complete spirit is an immature spirit in nature compared to God’s spirit that lives within us.  In 1Corinthians 12 at the end of the chapter that preaches what love is and what it is not, says when I was a child I spoke like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things.  In God’s eyes anything that is not love is childish!

So in our spiritual growth we might go through a baby stage, a toddler stage, a teenager stage, a young adult stage, adult stage and a mature adult stage.  At each stage we continually should be growing into the image and stature of Christ, to the point when I look into a mirror and the image I see is not my own, but Christ!  

Good Stewarts

God also wants us to be good Stewart’s of what we have already so we can be good stewards of what He wants to give us.  Let’s say I gave you something I really cherished and loved and you balled it up and threw it over your shoulders into the trash, I would be really hurt!  God feels the same way, He continually gives us gifts and sometimes, not all the times we throw these gifts away!

But God is not looking for us to be perfect to receive the promotion, or promise He wants to give us. He however wants us to be at a certain maturity level so that we won’t throw away the gift he wants to give us!

Maturing after the promise!

Question if I gave you a brand new Jet airplane and you were planning to fly from Ohio to Florida would you give the keys to your five year old toddler and tell him to fly you there!  No, of course not. He is not mature enough and has no experience flying a jet plane. 

But let’s say because you are a very good parent your child matures to eventually become a license pilot who is capable of flying your jet, now of course you would let him pilot it!! 

 Question:  when he or she(your child)first begins to fly are they going to be the best airplane pilot they could be, of course not!  Over their career of being a pilot they are going to mature and learn new piloting skills. In the same manner when we receive all that God has promised us, or receive that great promotion we are not going to be the best husband, wife, manager, or preacher we can be. However, over time with experience and being guided by the Holy Spirit we are going to mature into the promise and that promotion. Over time becoming greater stewards of what God has given us.

Until the promise is fulfilled

In the word of God there is a word called KAIROS  whose meaning is in God’s timing! It is not in our timing and the works of our own flesh that the fulfillment of the promise will occur.  It will be in God’s timing and by the works of the Holy Spirit that the promise will occur!

“And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

‭‭Galatians‬ ‭6:9‬ ‭NKJV‬‬https://www.bible.com/bible/114/gal.6.9.nkjv

The Body of Christ is a spiritual network 

One of the biggest revelations the Lord has ever given me is this!  As the Body of Christ we are all spiritually connected! The lord made it clear to me that he means literally and is not, I repeat this is not a metaphor!  

What connects us you may ask? It is the Holy Spirit that indwells in all those who have asked Jesus to be their savior and our born of His spirit!  So whether we are Black, White,Hispanic, Asian, Native American. Methodist, Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, First Church of God, or any other Christian faith of born again believers.  We are all connected by the one and only Holy Spirit!

 Life changing revelation!

Do you realize what we do to each other as believers affects the whole Body of Christ?  We are all literally brothers and sisters in Christ! We are a family, and Jesus is our family tree.  Yes, whether we are Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American we are one in Christ if we are born of His spirit the Holy Spirit.  

 We as the Body of Christ are a spiritual network, each one of us are interconnected by the Holy Spirit that indwells within us.  Paul in His metaphor uses our Body to explain this interconnection. So here is the big question and answer that changed my life forever and how I view the church! 

Here is a Question to you that God asked me that changed my life.  If I do anything to you whether good or bad, who am I doing it to? Of course I am doing to you, but do you realize I am literally doing to myself as well!  I am also doing it to God the Father and to the Son(Jesus) as well! In Paul’s metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12:26 using the Body as an example of this spiritual network, he says that if one part of the Body Suffers we all suffer!

An example of this in scriptures is Paul at his conversion moment!  While Paul, who was Saul before his conversion, was riding to Damascus to persecute believers,  A bright light from Heaven shone down on him and he fell to the ground. The Lord said “Saul, Saul why are you persecuting me”.  See Saul was not persecuting Christ's physical body because Jesus had already risen, Saul was however persecuting Christians that had Christ living in them in the form of the Holy Spirit, so Saul who is Paul was persecuting Christ!  In a different scripture in Acts Jesus says to Paul you are only kicking against the goads. Basically what Jesus was telling Paul was you are only hurting yourself!

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