A grand and glorious good morning to you. This morning we give God thanks for the gift of His Son. For God so loved the world that He did not send a committee. He sent His Son. And He continues to send His sons. Moreover He also likes us enough that He gave us fresh hot coffee for the early morning hours. It so helps us awaken to recognize His mercies that are new every morning.
If you are like me, each morning you are looking about and asking yourself, "What can I do for God today?"
Permit me please to give you the answer for today. Absolutely NOTHING !
The writer of Hebrews implores us to grasp and live on the basis of the elementary concepts of our faith. The first of these is the need to turn completely away from lifeless activities. This repentance from dead works is set as our first learning priority because the lifeless activities create for us the deceptive illusion of spiritual life but they are dead, dead, dead ! The problem with feeding horses sawdust and straw is not that either is toxic. They are deadly because they replace the grain and hay that would nourish the horse and give life. In the same manner dutiful fulfilling our religious duties and disciplines creates for us the illusion of being nourished but gives us nothing of life.
Yesterday we spent time with a dear friend. This wonderful Godly person has a resumee of endless service to the church organization. And yet the group chose to bring in a replacement. The replacement is self serving, controlling, and genuinely toxic to the people. Why did this happen ? It happened because the long term diet of religious duties and activities left the group without the spiritual life necessary to recognize the difference between a leader who brings life and a leader who is religious.
Please, my friends, understand. God does not desire your religious performances. Everything God needs done was completed by the second chapter of Genesis. He said so. What God desires is to release you into rejoicing and reveling in a passionate love affair with the greatest lover in the universe, JESUS. That is life !
His, thus Yours,
Stuart
1 comments:
It's so interesting that you would blog on this topic. I just recently had a dream that I couldn't quite understand what God was saying to me until I read this. In fact Ken and I were talking about that dream this morning before we read this. The dream was that I bought a whole pig to feed a bunch of people. I was very excited because it was a lot of meat and I knew it would be enough to feed the people. However, when I cut into the pig, it was full of neatly folded t-shirts. T-shirts that look great folded together and that are not harmful in themselves but are not nourishing to the human body. It goes right along with what you are saying above about feeding the horse sawdust and straw.
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