The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. – C.S. Lewis
Is there a simple way to live a holy life? Is holiness something that simply comes to us when we accept the gift of salvation or is holiness something that we must pursue? Hebrews 12:14 makes it clear that holiness isn’t something that simply drops out of the sky. It isn’t something that comes to us because we confess that Yeshua is the Messiah.
Holiness comes when we pursue it. Holiness comes with work. Hebrews 12:14 tells us to pursue two things: peace and holiness. If it were something that was inherently within us, then there would be no need to pursue it.
As we pursue holiness, it’s important to understand what holiness is. The technical definition of holiness is total devotion to God. And in scripture, we learn that God Himself isn’t just Holy… but Holy, Holy, Holy. God is so holy, that His Holiness is repetitive. And so, logically, we become holy when we become like God.
If you want to be holy, live as Yeshua lived. Walk, speak, give, think, and love like Yeshua.
But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do- 1 Peter 1:15
Peter didn’t want to go to a Gentile home. It wasn’t customary for a Jewish person to visit the home of a non-Jew. It wasn’t how that society worked – but God had a different plan for His church. His church wasn’t going to be a restrictive club that was unwelcoming towards people who looked a certain way. He wanted His Church to be a group of people from every nation… from all backgrounds and ethnicities.
God changed Peter’s heart, and Peter went to the house of Cornelius.
Peter was no longer bound by social boundaries or ethnic and racial parameters – God gave both Peter and Cornelius visions of His love for all. His desire is that all are saved – both Jew and Gentile.
God loves people. He died (and rose) for people. He doesn’t just love nice, friendly people who are hospitable and care about animals. Or people who volunteer and go to church. Or people who work with children or the elderly. God loves everybody – including the grouchy people who kick dogs and curse at others in traffic.
God expects impartiality from His followers – He doesn’t want us to treat people according to worldly standards, but by righteous standards. We must ignore the appearance, influence, wealth, status, ethnicity, race, personality or any other factors that we use to judge people by worldly standards. Like God, we are to look at the heart.
Via StockSnap – Sleep Paralysis is a Demonic Attack
Several years ago, I suffered from an episode of sleep paralysis. I hadn’t suffered from an episode of sleep paralysis since I was a child, and even then the episodes were not frequent, but instead only occurred twice. Both episodes left vivid memories. When I was 11 or so I suffered two attacks on the living room couch. The first time that I suffered sleep paralysis, I knew there was a supernatural undercurrent. I understood that it wasn’t just my mind playing tricks on me and my brain hallucinating, but instead, it was something deeper and spiritual that I didn’t understand.
The only way that I could articulate to my mother what was happening to me was to explain it as a ghost.
Several years ago, I suffered from my third episode of sleep paralysis. This time, I understood the spiritual components of this attack a little better. At the time of the attack, I was in a season of Divine Rain. My walk with the Lord was intense and the spiritual attack at this time made sense.
During this episode of sleep paralysis, I was, of course, sleeping in my bed when I woke up and realized what was happening. I understood that the sleep paralysis that had taunted me those two times on the living room couch had returned. I could both see and feel the evil that permeated the room and then the most amazing thing happened. I had an out-of-body experience.
If you’ve ever dealt with sleep paralysis or if you’re currently dealing with sleep paralysis, there are a few things that you need to know.
1. Sleep paralysis isn’t just physical – it’s spiritual. There are countless testimonies of people who have suffered these attacks and found release only through prayer. There is power in the Name of Jesus, and speaking or even thinking His Name causes the attack to cease.
2. When you’re under spiritual attack, you are either doing something right or doing something wrong. There is little middle ground here. If you find yourself under attack during a time where you are praying, fasting, and reading the Bible more, then press in even further. If you are attacked while you are living a life of sin and plagued by guilt, it’s time to repent and stop the torment.
3. All demons are subject to God. Satan is powerless to do anything against God. God is greater, higher, and the Creator. He rules over all. If you believe in Christ and you are filled with the Holy Spirit – the Holy Spirit in you is greater than any demon in the world. Take comfort in knowing that God is greater.
Acts 3:1 – One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer–at three in the afternoon.
When I first heard of praying the hours, I thought it sounded mystical – I assumed it was a spiritual practice associated with monastics or nuns. I was a little surprised to learn that praying the hours, also known as fixed-hour prayer is one of the oldest forms of spiritual disciplines, which roots back to Judaism.
Most people in the modern Protestant church are unfamiliar with the idea of praying the hours – or having a set, disciplined schedule of prayer. Yet praying the hours is a beautiful ancient practice seen in scripture.
King David perfectly understood the idea of praying the hours. In Psalm 119 (the Psalm of renewal) we learn that he prayed seven times a day.
Some might argue that by forcing yourself to pray each day (at appointed times) you are practicing vain religion – but I would counter that prayer at set times – even if it feels devoid of deep, emotional meaning is a way to become spiritually stronger.
Praying when you don’t feel like it isn’t a useless spiritual vanity. On the contrary, this is precisely when we need to pray – when we don’t feel like it.
Millions of people go to a gym each day, even when it’s tough, even when they’d rather stay home, even when their body is tired, and they would rather sleep longer. However, millions wake early for the gym because they understand that if they force themselves to go they will become healthier, slimmer, and stronger – praying the hours has the same effect.
Yeshua woke His disciples as night drew near. He forced them awake to pray. They were tired, exhausted even. However, Yeshua wasn’t going to wait for the disciples to feel motivated. He wasn’t going to wait until ‘inspiration’ struck and the disciples felt compelled to pray – He woke them to pray because the hour was nigh.
These are the last days.
The hour is nigh.
Let’s wake up and pray, even when we don’t want to.
People understand that if they’re injured in some way – if they burn their hand, cut their foot, bruise their leg – there are steps that they should take to make the injury heal quicker. A wise person wouldn’t pour salt into a cut or poke at a bruise expecting it to go away.
But when it comes to emotional injuries people usually do nothing at all or they exasperate the wound, making it worse. Sometimes people behave as if the injury doesn’t exist which allows the wound to simply fester. There’s a saying that time heals all wounds, and I believe that this is true. I think time can work for those slights, little insults, and small events that we run into that aren’t good for our emotional health. But some emotional cuts run much deeper than others. There are times when an emotional injury is substantial.
If you would go to a hospital, physical therapist or grab your first aid kit to deal with a physical injury; why wouldn’t you do the same for an emotional one? Below are three steps that you need to take if you are emotionally injured and need healing.
Step One
The first step that you need to take is it acknowledge that you’re hurt. Ignoring the injury is not going to make it go away. The injury is still there, and if it’s a big wound it won’t get better over time, it will simply turn into something worse.
Take anger for example. If you allow anger to linger in your heart, eventually it will create a root of bitterness. Roots run deep, and they are difficult to remove. If you are hurting, you need to acknowledge that you are hurting. Acting as if you’re not hurt won’t help you recover faster. It’ll only make things worse.
Step Two
The second step is prayer. Prayer heals. Contrary to what the self-help movement proclaims – you cannot heal yourself (emotionally) by your own power – it doesn’t work. You need God to intervene. He is THE healer of broken hearts. A heart surgeon cannot give you a new heart or even heal your heart. He can only use stents, pacemakers and other devices to make the organ run a little while longer. But God is the Great Physician, who can heal emotional wounds completely.
Pray and ask for healing. But don’t just pray for yourself, also pray for the person who injured you. I find that when you pray for the other person it makes it much easier to do the third step.
Step Three
The third step is to let it go. You need to forgive. You can take steps one and two and achieve emotional healing, but without forgiveness there’s an ugly scar that’s left behind. Forgiveness removes that scar. So if you want more than just healing – if you want to remove any trace of the injury, then you have to forgive.
I think I should begin by saying that when I met my husband, it wasn’t the first time that I found myself in an interracial relationship. I had dated guys from all sorts of background and races – black, white, Asian, Hispanic – and I never really had any problems with people being negative or hurtful towards my relationships. Nor were there any internal feelings of discomfort.
I have to credit my environment – I was raised in a pretty multi-cultural environment. Even though I was in a small suburban town stuck in the 1950’s, the town was incredibly diverse. I was exposed to all kinds of cultures and races. From kindergarten to high school, I was never just with white, black or Hispanic people – but a mixture of everyone. I never thought that racism was something that I struggled with internally.
With that said, the relationships I had when I was “dating” boys of a different race were in high school and quite superficial. After all, it was high school – you talked on the phone and maybe held hands if you saw each other. The relationships lasted anywhere from a few days to a couple of months.
Years later, I met my husband.
Suddenly, I found myself deeply in love, and I wanted our relationship to evolve. We both felt the same, but then something started to rise to the surface – and that something was racism. I started to realize that I had my own misconceptions and preconceived notions of what I thought people of my husband’s race were like. Even though I grew up around all people, there were parts of me that held bitterness and resentment. I had no idea that this was stuff was hidden in my heart… it was buried deep.
Either I was in self-denial, or I hadn’t spent enough time in an intimate relationship with someone of a different race to realize that it was even there. And then God began to pull back the layers and expose the hatred and all the wrong misconceptions. As the layers were pulled back from the wound of racism, the wound began to breath. As the wound began to breathe, it also started to heal.
As I was experiencing these issues and going through the emotional healing, I was a professing Christian. I know what you are probably thinking. You might be thinking “Well, you weren’t a real Christian because you had racism in your heart.” But I would argue quite confidently that I was indeed a Christian.
In the book of Acts, Peter didn’t have the best perception of Gentiles. He thought of them as unclean, but God came to Him in a vision and removed the veil of racism covering Peter’s heart. God exposed it and then healed it. Peter’s racism and prejudice were erased when it dawned on Peter that God loves Gentiles as much as Jews. Peter was the kind of man who loved what God loved. He couldn’t hate and call unclean what God had called clean.
Can you be Christian and racist? Yes. Racism is a result of imperfect love. The opposite of hatred is love. When you love people, you can’t hate them. You can only love or hate, but you can’t do both – a love-hate relationship is oxymoronic.
When you have a perfect love – the kind of love that God has for people, it’s not possible to hate them. The book of 1 John speaks of perfect love and how perfect love drives away fear because those who fear haven’t perfected love. This is an amazing verse to describe someone dealing with hatred and racism. Racism is driven by fear. People fear what they don’t understand and when people don’t understand or can’t relate to a group of people, the fear often develops into hatred. Much of racism is simply fear and misunderstanding.
Perfect love drives away fear. When we no longer fear, we can finally love.
When Yeshua entered Jerusalem on the donkey and the people started to cry Hosanna, the Pharisees’ immediate response was to tell Yeshua to tell the people to stop praising Him.
Yeshua’s response to the Pharisees is interesting. He tells them that if they don’t worship Him the rocks will cry out. This is intriguing for many reasons. First, it’s interesting because rocks really can cry out, scientifically speaking. Researchers who dug into the mysteries of Stonehenge discovered that there was acoustic energy in the stones. They called them sonic or music rocks.
Rocks speak.
Sound is vibrational energy – and for some strange, metaphysical, geological reason – rocks CAN hold sound. Yeshua was geologically accurate when He said that the bricks would talk because the rocks around Yeshua were carrying the praises of God.
Yeshua wasn’t just a man, but also God in the flesh. I can’t imagine the infinite pool of vibrational energy that must have exuded from Yeshua. Even His clothes carried a divine energy that repelled sickness and disease. Everything about Him and everything around Him was affected by His Presence… including objects that are otherwise ‘inanimate’. Yeshua brought so much life to the earth that even His clothes held the life of healing.
The second thing that’s interesting about Yeshua stating that the rocks would cry out is the humbling realization that God doesn’t need our praise. Everything that has breath praises God – we know that. But here in Luke, we see that even that which has NO breath is capable of praising God. When the Psalmist said that all creation praise the Lord, he wasn’t just speaking of people – but literally meant ALL creation – the trees, plants, water, and even the rocks.
I keep a snippet of a short article on my desk that I received from a Missionary Newsletter. The article talks about how blessed the missionaries are for one profound reason – they saturate their work in prayer. In the newsletter, it talks about how they pray for EVERYTHING.
The missionaries have so much and are fully equipped – emotionally, mentally and spiritually because they pray. Now, the Bible clearly says In James 4:2 that you don’t have because you don’t ask.
How many Christians are lacking what they need physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually because they don’t ask God? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve encountered an obstacle – or something that I needed emotional or spiritual strength to fight through, and I forget to pray. Instead, I tried to fix things myself, which is insulting to God, who wants to supply all of my needs.
God cares about the details in our life and we need to go to Him for EVERYTHING. I once heard a woman teach a congregation about the spirit of poverty. She explained to the crowd that one of the reasons the spirit of poverty plagues people is because they are under a curse of self-sufficiency. A curse of trying to do everything in their own power and leaving God out of the equation.
Christians walk by faith and not by sight. We must lean in, trust, and depend on God. We are to let God direct our paths and fully surrender everything to Him. He supplies all our needs when we are fully dependent on Him. This doesn’t mean we sit there and do nothing – but it does mean that we don’t leave God out of our daily lives and decisions. Never leave God out of your problems – that is exactly where you need Him.
Saturate your life in prayer. Saturate every move and choice you make with prayer. We need to pray about everything and worry about nothing.
BOHO + THEO 